Robert Murphy, author of 'To Hunt a Killer ' - News reporter talks about co-writing, telling stories from real-crime, and hitting deadlines
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2022
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Robert Murphy has worked as a news reporter for many years. Over the last decade or so, Robert followed the tragic story of Melanie Road. Melanie was murdered in Bath in 1984, after a year long enquiry with 94 arrests being made, no-one was charged. Then in 2009, Detective Superintendent Julie MacKay found something that changed everything.
Julie has co-written the story with Robert. We talk about how that worked, how he discovered every facet of the story, and moved that into a plot. You can hear how much thought they gave to the standards of genre fiction, when dealing with true crime and peoples lives - how much can you manipulate the story to be gripping and thrilling, when you're talking about such a tragic tale?
We discuss how he organises a full-time creative job, with a creative hobby, and what his home life is like with a partner who also writes... and works in TV news.
You can support the show at patreon.com/writersroutine
@writerspod
writersroutine.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome along to writer's routine. This is the show where we take a look through an author's |
| 0:12.9 | working day to see how they get stuff done. This week, we are chatting to a news reporter on the |
| 0:18.6 | telly and now writer Robert Murphy. His book is a true crime |
| 0:23.6 | story. It was one that he covered extensively as a TV reporter. He made a very successful podcast |
| 0:30.6 | with it too. And now he's written the book. It's called to hunt a killer. It's co-written with the |
| 0:35.6 | superintendent who worked on the case, Julie McKay. |
| 0:39.8 | We talk about how working on the TV has made him good at hitting deadlines. Also, how he made |
| 0:45.3 | sure he got the strong female voices of the story right, and how, because it's true crime, |
| 0:52.0 | and he's quite close to the case, he had to make sure he did it justice. |
| 0:56.9 | It's a matter of life and death here. It's Julie's life and it's Melanie's death. And I've got to get it right, really. |
| 1:03.5 | For all kinds of reasons. There's lots of red herrings in the book. There's lots of dead ends. |
| 1:08.2 | There's lots of things that Julie's trying to do that don't |
| 1:11.0 | quite work out. And for us to tell those parts of the story, we had to change events slightly, |
| 1:17.7 | so we weren't saying the name of the company that she was going to do a DNA swabbing. Or we'd |
| 1:24.3 | have to change the names of suspects or some people as well just to be able to tell the |
| 1:30.2 | story. |
| 1:30.5 | There is more on the way with Robert Murphy in this week's writer's routine. |
| 1:42.3 | Yes, welcome along. |
| 1:43.3 | My name's Dan Simpson. This is writer's routine. Thank you so much for being there. |
| 1:46.9 | Thank you so much for following, for listening, for sharing. It's where we take a look inside an author's working day to see how they get stuff done, how they take an idea, how they plan their day to move it from their head onto the page. |
| 1:59.9 | Now, this week we are with Robert Murphy. His new book is out now. |
| 2:03.3 | It's called To Hunt a Killer. He works in TV News and he's been covering this story for quite a while now. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dan Simpson, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Dan Simpson and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.