The British actor’s I’m Not the Only Murderer in My Retirement Home finds a geriatric serial killer accused of a fresh slaying.
You’ve said that you began this novel as a joke but came to truly love its characters. Did that shift in perspective affect the development of the plot?
It did. As I got to know the characters, I realized that there were more interesting places that they could go. The fundamental murder plot didn’t change much, but I found new avenues to walk down in the B and C subplots. I wrote two parody crime novels before this, and the people who love those books really love them, but they’re kind of niche—almost every sentence is a joke. So it was quite exciting to delve a little bit deeper into imagining the lives of real people.
How has your experience writing for film and TV influenced your approach to writing novels?
I always wrote comedy for TV and film, and when you’re doing comedy, you get very nervous when the audience isn’t laughing. More than many other genres, you’re especially conscious of the audience all the time: you want, above all, to entertain them. It’s true of stand-up, too, which I’ve done a bit of. When I’m writing a book, I don’t necessarily want there to be a laugh every paragraph, but I do get very nervous if I feel like the reader might be getting bored.
Do you see this expanding into a potential series?
Well, if I was working on the next installment, then I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you. But I’d love to explore these characters further. That’s the fun of a cozy: because of these characters’ ages and because of the things that they did in their careers—professional or criminal—there’s a lot of history there to for an author to explore.
If you could be cast as any fictional detective, what kind of detective would he be?
In recent years I’ve moved toward stage acting, where I tend to play the older butler or whatever in period dramas. A couple of years ago, I did a role in the Disney+ series A Thousand Blows, where I played a very sinister butler, and I just filmed a part in a Jane Austen spin-off called The Other Bennet Sister, which is an adaptation of the book by Janice Hadlow. I played a bumbling old man called Mr. Hurst. So it’s been these older, ridiculous British gentlemen from the Georgian or the Victorian era. I would love to play a detective like that.
