I'm Molly Wansall and I'm Geoffrey Wonsall and for the last 16 years or thereabouts we have been having lunch every Saturday and often our conversation turns to murder and that's what's prompted us to launch this true crime podcast called blood ties.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Blood Tice podcast.

Very special podcast today because we're coming live from CrimeCon UK.

And I am Molly Wonsall, as you know, and I'm here with my father, Jeffrey, Wansel, and our special guest who I'll let Jeffrey introduce.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back. It's a delight you're there. We're so thrilled. We have some wonderful listeners. I mean, all sorts of places. They do, they're just so kind. And we've been meeting some of them today. And it's genuinely thrilling. But it's a different sort of podcast today because we've got a special guest

we've got Alan Johnson

once the Labour Home Secretary

among other cabinet posts

who's taken a little trip into crime

or shall we say thriller crime

fiction

with his book

The Late Train to Gypsy Hill

which I reviewed in the Daily Mail yesterday.

Favorably, I'm pleased to say.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have been here.

Otherwise, you'd have gone, no.

But it's a delight.

It's really very wonderfully idiosyncratic.

It's charming.

Well, Alan won about what, three prizes for memoirs? I mean, four, oh, okay, we're not bragging, no. A lot of prizes, and you really, I mean, you were great talent as a writer. Did you always know you had? Not really, no, I knew I could string a sentence together when the books won the Royal Society of Literature Prize and all that.

But it wasn't, you know, it wasn't fiction. It wasn't an act of imagination. It was an act of memory. Yeah, yeah. As my memoirs. Sure. So, you know, I couldn't, I, I, I, to me, you're not really a writer until you've developed plot and character. so which is why fiction was the kind of rock face that was facing me that I wanted to

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