The Book Club: Lynda La Plante

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The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam's guest this week is crime queen Lynda La Plante - talking about her new novel Judas Horse, and three decades of her most famous creation, Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison. She tells Sam how she wrote her way out of acting, why so much crime drama now turns her off, why she thinks it's so important to get police work right and let baddies be baddies - and why she's haunted by Rentaghost.

Transcript

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0:21.5	GERr.
0:26.5	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.
0:33.2	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,
0:35.4	and this week it's my great pleasure to be joined by Linda LaPlante, one of our greatest living crime writers.
0:42.2	Linda's latest book is Judas Horse.
0:45.0	And Linda, tell me a bit to start with about Judas Horse, because in a way it sort of goes back or harks back to the very beginning of your career, doesn't it?
0:54.6	Not really.
0:55.5	Oh.
0:56.3	Why do you say that?
0:57.4	Well, because it's the dynasty of widows.
1:00.5	No, that's buried.
1:01.8	Doesn't this...
1:02.3	Well, in a way, the lead character, the detective,
1:06.0	has discovered that the father he never knew was the notorious criminal Harry Rawlins. But I keep that
1:17.0	quite distant in the book. It's not relevant, only relevant, because he has shadows of his father
1:26.0	inside him.
	...

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