Summary
Death of a Murderer (Knopf)
A factual series of murders provides the background for this novel: the
Moor Murders that haunted the British imagination in the 1960's.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation. |
| 0:07.2 | You are a human animal. |
| 0:11.4 | You are a very special breed. |
| 0:15.1 | Or you are the only animal. |
| 0:18.5 | Who can think, who can reason, who can read. |
| 0:22.4 | From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. |
| 0:27.4 | Today I'm very happy to have as my guest, Rupert Thompson. |
| 0:30.9 | I've been wanting to talk to him for some time, and this is the first time he's been |
| 0:35.5 | on Bookworm. |
| 0:36.7 | He's the author in order of eight novels, Dreams of Leaving, The Five Gates of Hell, Air and Fire, |
| 0:46.7 | the Insult, Soft, the Book of Revelation, and Divided Kingdom. |
| 0:52.8 | Now, it would seem from these books that you take questions of good and evil fairly seriously, yes? |
| 1:05.6 | I don't exactly think about it in terms of good and evil. |
| 1:08.9 | I think what I'm interested in is lives that have been |
| 1:12.8 | derailed, lives which have been disturbed in some fundamental way. And what happens when that happens, |
| 1:22.3 | well, I always think of Django Reinhardt, particularly in that way. I mean, it happens to everybody, I think, |
| 1:28.1 | in their lives. But with Django Reinhardt, I believe there was a fur in his caravan, and he lost |
| 1:34.5 | the use of one hand. He already had these very large hands, but then two of the, two of the fretboard |
| 1:40.4 | fingers, I think, became deformed. And as a result of this accident in the caravan, |
| 1:46.9 | he, that's where he gets these unique melodic lines from, the deformity, the trauma that happened |
| 1:53.8 | to him. And I think, you know, to extend that analogy, I think my characters are very much |
| 2:00.8 | the same. They sort of end up playing |
... |
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