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 von

Tunselman. This is The Lucan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Hello on today's program. we're looking at conclusions.

They're important, they're unavoidable, but how do you do them well?

Some of the stories by the American writer Lydia Davis are so short they can barely be said to start, let alone conclude.

She joins us later to discuss her new collection, Our Strangers.

But we begin with the ending. Freeman's, the literary journal launched by John Freeman in 2015,

has featured writing by everyone from Dave Eggers and Edwidge Dantyat,

to Kamala Shamsi, Vietan Wen and Haruki Murakami.

Now though it's bowing out with its tenth issue, the theme of which is

conclusions, which prompts the question, what do literary endings mean and how do they work? To help

answer that, I'm joined by John Freeman down the line from New York City and in the studio by the

Professor of English at University College London, John Mullen. Welcome to you both.

John, to start with you, what did you see as Freeman's purpose when you launched it and why is now

the right time to bring it to a close? I always wanted literary journals to feel like the best

dinner party that you could ever go to, that you could sit at the table and listen to people talk

and that one

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