Denise Mina and Simon Brett
A Good Read
BBC
4.2 • 848 Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
ABSENT IN THE SPRING by Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott) (HarperCollins), chosen by Simon Brett IN THE GARDEN OF THE FUGITIVES by Ceridwen Dovey (Penguin), chosen by Denise Mina HIDE MY EYES by Margery Allingham (Penguin), chosen by Harriett Gilbert
Crime writers Denise Mina and Simon Brett join Harriett Gilbert to read each other's favourite books.
Simon Brett (Charles Paris, Fethering and Mrs Pargeter detective series) chooses Agatha Christie under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, with Absent In The Spring. It’s a story without any detective and one that, perhaps, reveals a more personal side to Christie's writing.
Denise Mina (most recently: Three Fires, The Second Murderer) picks In the Garden of the Fugitives by South African-Australian author Ceridwen Dovey, an epistolary novel which begins with a letter that breaks seventeen years of silence between a rich, elderly man with a broken heart and his former protegee, a young South African filmmaker.
And for the occasion of having two crime authors, Harriett Gilbert picks a golden age crime book, Hide My Eyes by Margery Allingham, where private detective Albert Campion finds himself hunting down a serial killer.
Producer: Eliza Lomas for BBC Audio in Bristol Join the conversation @agoodreadbbc Instagram
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Things just swirling around my head. |
| 0:03.6 | Am I really the product of this? |
| 0:06.1 | Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests. |
| 0:11.0 | Little did I know what more was to come. |
| 0:13.4 | I'm Jenny Clemen and in the new series of The Gift, |
| 0:17.5 | we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database. |
| 0:22.8 | They did know that I was different. |
| 0:25.7 | You had kids together. |
| 0:27.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:27.5 | Then you met. |
| 0:28.3 | Then we met. |
| 0:29.2 | The Gift. |
| 0:30.1 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.4 | BBC Sounds, music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:38.7 | Hello, I'm Harriet Gilbert. |
| 0:40.5 | Thank you for downloading a good read, the podcasts, |
| 0:43.6 | where two guests and I recommend books we love and describe why we love them. |
| 0:48.3 | Today we've kidnapped a couple of writers from Crime Fest, |
| 0:51.6 | Bristol's annual crime fiction convention and persuaded them to share |
| 0:55.4 | with us books they love as readers. Denise Minor is the multi-award-winning author of 19 crime novels, |
| 1:01.9 | most recently three fires, and the second murderer, a continuation Philip Marlowe mystery. |
| 1:08.2 | Both books are just out in paperback. With Denise is Simon Brett, |
... |
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