The Book Club: Luke Jennings

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The Spectator

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Leith's guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Luke Jennings, the veteran reporter and novelist whose Codename Villanelle trilogy gave rise to the hit TV series Killing Eve. As his new thriller #PANIC is published he tells Sam how he found its inspiration after being drawn into the online fandom for Killing Eve, where he clashed with Phoebe Waller-Bridge... and why he's never going to write a novel about media types in North London having affairs.

Produced by Cindy Yu and Joe Bedell-Brill.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:27.9	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of the
0:32.8	Spectator, and my guest this week is the reporter and novelist Luke Jennings,
0:37.9	who's probably best known for having written the original novels
0:41.2	on which the series Killing Eve was based,
0:44.3	but whose new novel is called Panic or possibly hashtag panic,
0:48.3	which is a new thriller very different from the Killing Eve books.
0:50.9	Luke, welcome.
0:52.2	Thank you.
0:53.3	Is it hashtag panic or panic?
0:55.5	Hashtag panic, yeah.
0:57.0	Hashtag panic.
0:58.6	Now, this book is set very much in a kind of, or at least it starts out in this sort of world of online fandom of these kind of groups of people all over the world who stand a TV program.
1:12.8	What was it that caught your imagination about that particular world?
1:17.1	Well, before Killing Eve, I really knew almost nothing about online TV fandom.
1:25.6	But when the TV program started going out, I began to be contacted by fans online.
1:32.1	And I got drawn into that world.
1:35.0	A lot of writers don't concern themselves with fans.
1:38.7	And a lot of TV people, again, don't really concern themselves with fans.
1:44.1	But it struck me as being a very, again, don't really concern themselves with fans, but it struck me as being a very,
1:48.4	very interesting world. The people involved were from all over the world living in often
1:53.9	very obscure places, and many of them leading difficult lives for one reason or another.
	...

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