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Hello and welcome to Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator, and my guest this week is a novelist Guy Kennaway, who's recently won the Bollinger Everyman

P.G. Woodhouse Prize for comic fiction. And his new book is the very, very funny, good scammer,

which tells of the dealings of a Jamaican con artist and the sort of slightly hapless Englishman

who becomes his literary amanuensis.

Guy, welcome.

Thank you so much for inviting me on to it.

I listened to this a podcast and it means a lot to be on it.

Well, it's an absolute pleasure to have you.

I've enjoyed your book enormously.

But as I was saying just before the podcast, I was slightly primed to expect a nonfiction book because when I first

heard from you, you said, you know, there was this scammer who more or less made me write his

story at gunpoint, and yet it's a novel. Tell me how this book came about. Well, you know,

I always find it a bit hard to make a big division between nonfiction and fiction because I just

see it as narrative. It obviously has to have a name for marketing purposes,

but this book is somewhere in that grey area between the two.

And the reason that it is fiction is that it needed to be shaped.

And also, I felt it was like putting myself into a very dangerous position.

For instance, if we use real names and all that sort of stuff.

...