On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.

It was an extraordinary news story.

The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,

mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.

One of the great mysteries in English criminal history. We're still looking for

Lucan. It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime. I'm Alex Fontunzelman. This is

the Lucan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Today I'm talking to a controversial giant of American literature.

Brett Easton Ellis is the author of books you almost certainly heard of, even if you haven't read them.

He published less than zero when he was just 21, but it's American Psycho for which he became infamous,

a book that was withdrawn by its original publisher for what they

called its questionable taste. It went on to become a sensation, and is perhaps the most brilliant

portrait of the capitalist excess and amorality of 1980s New York. In The Shards, his first novel

in more than a decade, Brett Easton Ellis is both the author and the main character.

The book takes us back to 1981 Los Angeles and the high school the real Brett attended,

a world of privilege, drugs and sex that's torn apart when he and his friends fall into

the orbit of a serial killer known as the trawler. Fear, distrust and ritualized murder ensue. But what's real

and what's fantasy? But working that out is all part of the fun. When I spoke to him, we began with

that thorny question of where the truth lies when you make yourself the lead character in a work of

quote unquote fiction.

Brett East Nellis, welcome to Open Book.

Thank you for having me.

So the shah didn't your first foray into auto fiction or twisted auto fiction perhaps.

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