On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.

It was an extraordinary news story.

The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,

mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.

One of the great mysteries in English criminal history. We're still looking for

Lucan. It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime. I'm Alex Fontunzelman.

This is The Lucan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Hello and welcome to our open book Christmas feast, where we,

like Dickens' most seasonal creation, Ebenezer Scrooge, will be pulled into both past and future,

not by the spirit of Christmas, but by the writers with whom we enjoyed some of the year's

best literary conversations. One of my personal highlights was meeting the American

novelist Brett Easton Ellis, who way back in January published his first new novel in a decade, The Shards.

Set in the LA of the early 1980s, it's crammed full of the sense memories of his own teenage life.

I asked him if he was nostalgic for that time and place.

Very much so, and that's why I wrote the book. I hadn't been for a long time, but I think

there comes a point in an artist's life where that period becomes important to you, and you

want to go back, and you to um find out what it was

all about how it really existed compared to your memories of how it existed i was talking to quentin

tarentino about uh once upon a time in hollywood and he and tarentino is a big fan of the Shards. And he, he said to me,

you did what I did. You went back into the past at this point in your life, Quentin and I are the

same age, just like I did. I mean, part of it was like, would I rather live in 1981 or 2023?

1981 in a second?

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