Kemper Donovan’s Agatha Christie Podcast and The Busy Body

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

Sarah Harrison  00:54
I’m really excited about our episode today. Before we jump in to our exciting episode, we have an even more exciting sponsor. It’s Carolyn daughters. Carolyn runs game changing corporate brand therapy workshops, teaches Online Marketing Boot Camp courses and leads persuasive writing workshops, Carolyn empowers startups, small businesses, enterprise organizations and government agencies to win hearts, minds, deals and dollars. You can learn more at carolyndaughters.com.

Carolyn Daughters  01:38
We’re in Wyoming for another episode.

Sarah Harrison  01:40
The beautiful Ucross Foundation.

Carolyn Daughters  01:42
It’s incredible. It’s incredible. We’re here today to talk with Kemper Donovan about his book The Busy Body and also all things Agatha Christie and Kemper’s Agatha Christie podcast, All About Agatha.

Sarah Harrison  01:53
All right, go back to the previous episode if you want to hear Kemper Donovan’s take on The A.B.C. Murders.

Carolyn Daughters  02:05
Our listener of the episode is an entire organization. It’s incredible. It’s the Ucross Foundation, ucrossfoundation.org. The vast spaciousness of their Wyoming location has a powerful and life changing impact on artists, writers, composers, choreographers and collaborative groups situated in northeast Wyoming at the foothills of the Big Horn mountains. Ucross was established by Raymond plank in 1981 the artist residency program opened in 1983 for more than 40 years, Ucross has been giving space and time to artists who come from all disciplines, including literature, visual arts, music, choreography, film, performance and multidisciplinary art in their complex of private studios And residencies visiting artists build a small, intense community, hard at work in the midst of 20,000 acres of Wyoming ranch land, we are in a town called Ucross. Wyoming, population, 26 home of an author we’re going to interview later today, Craig Johnson of the Longmire series of Western mysteries.

Sarah Harrison  03:21
Yeah, we’re recording from the Raymond Plank Center, which is beautiful. We’re going to be putting some clips up on our YouTube channel, so if you want to see just how pretty this property is.

Carolyn Daughters  03:29
It’s stunning. So thank you to Ucross Foundation for allowing us to use this space for podcasting so we could talk with Kemper Donovan here.

Sarah Harrison  03:40
thank you to Kemper for being on the show. I get to read a summary of his latest book. It is the latest right?

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  03:49
That’s right, it is the latest book. Another one coming up, but we’ll talk all about that in a sec.

Sarah Harrison  03:54
Excellent. So former senator Dorothy Gibson, aka that woman, is the most talked about person in the country. Dorothy had been the independent candidate for president, and after her very public defeat, she has retreated to her home in rural Maine. She invites a ghostwriter to join her so they can work on her memoir. A ghostwriter tells other people’s stories for a living, and this is a dream assignment. The ghostwriter is impressed by Dorothy’s work ethic and steel trap mind, not to mention the lovely surroundings and one particularly gorgeous bodyguard. But when a neighbor dies under suspicious circumstances, Dorothy is determined to find the killer, and she and the ghostwriter team up to launch their own murder investigation. The best ghostwriters are adept at asking questions and spinning stories, two talents, it turns out, that also come in handy for sleuths. Dorothy’s political career, meanwhile, has made her an expert at recognizing lies and double dealing working together. The two women are soon untangling motives and whittling down suspects to. The exasperation of local police, but this investigation, much like the election, may not unfold the way anyone expects. Welcome back, Kemper.

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  05:12
Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here again.

Sarah Harrison  05:15
I’m gonna hold it up here. The Busy Body.

Carolyn Daughters  05:22
So Kemper, let me introduce you to our audience, who I’m sure has already listened to the last episode. But as a reminder, Kemper Donovan is a full-time writer who’s currently publishing an ongoing mystery series, series via Kensington books, The Busy Body is the first in the ghostwriter series. Previously, he published the standalone novel The decent proposal by Harper through Harper Collins, he is the host of the Agatha Christie podcast All About Agatha, dedicated to all things Agatha Christie. He has appeared on BBC TV and Radio New Zealand and written for the official Agatha Christie website, agathachristie.com Kemper attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, and now lives in Southern California with his husband and two daughters. Learn more at Kemper donovan.com at all, about the dame on Twitter, at all, about Agatha on Instagram and Kemper Donovan books on Facebook. Kemper, we’re hoping you’re going to read a little bit from your book. We were thinking maybe chapter one from a busy body.

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  06:25
I would be honored to. Yes, I’m going to read from the very start of the book. Now here is how The Busy Body opens up. Got that nice page turning? Audio there? All right. Here we go. Chapter One. I tell other people’s stories for a living. You can call me a ghostwriter, though, usually I just say I freelance, which is vague and boring enough to put an end to strangers, polite inquiries among friends. I call myself a lady Cyrano, which is meant to be self-deprecating. I have an unusually large nose. That’s a lie actually, not about my unusually large nose, but about my supposed friends. I have lots of acquaintances and colleagues and associates, an assortment of people who pepper my existence so that if you saw me from the outside, you’d think my life was perfectly full. There are times it seems full even to me, but the truth is, I don’t have any friends, not the kind I always pictured having friends so close their family. Oh, I don’t have a family either. We decided years ago it would be best if we stopped talking. I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me. I’m telling you because I want I have to be honest. It’s the only way this is going to work. Ghostwriting is not about honesty. It’s about strategy. A good ghostwriter will manipulate a story for purposes of maximum engagement. And I am a very good ghostwriter. My specialty is memoir. I tell the inspirational life stories of outrageously successful people, actors, athletes, politicians, assholes. In other words, though, I guess that’s just one word. I make the assholes likable and interesting. Like a sculptor, I carve out something beautiful from the roughhewn block of their existence, and then polish it till it sparkles. You may think of me as a professional bullshit artist, but I love what I do. Ghostwriting has been around since there were stories to tell. I’ve always been a snoop where other people are concerned, and I discovered in my late 20s I have a knack for spinning tales about them and for making these tales sing. But I refuse to strategize or manipulate here. This isn’t about some celebrity overcoming the odds, and there’s no need for me to sell you anything, because somehow I managed to get myself wrapped up in an honest to goodness murder mystery, and for once, the story’s all mine.

Carolyn Daughters  08:50
So Kemper recognizing that we’re recording today from Ucross Foundation, population 26, an artist residency here in Wyoming. There’s a quote from chapter four I want to start with and use that as a segue into this narrator, this character. So it’s a first person narration the book, and this is what she writes, I love killing time in public spaces. Love everything about traveling because it affords me the opportunity observe, of observing others, but never at the expense of having to interact with them. Sometimes, I think if there’s a heaven, it looks exactly like an airport terminal, a vast room in which everyone gets to exist together alone, always on the brink of something new, forever, luxuriating and a blissful state of anticipation. Now, I’ve done artist residencies before, and that’s actually how they feel to me. As you’re together, alone, you’re alone together,

Carolyn Daughters  09:49
You’re all working on something big, and it makes your heart race. It’s all the anticipation. So when I read this book and was introduced to the. Character, the narrator. I was thinking, I think I understand a lot of things about this character. And I thought, Okay, I want to hear what you have to say about her. Like, how did you come up with this character, these character traits, the things that that she loves, the things that she does, she doesn’t like fake people. She doesn’t want people who aren’t her people. And she’s very reserved, and doesn’t settle. And you know a little bit about yourself and what you bring to the character. So can you just those? Are a lot of ideas there, but talk about this character a little bit.

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  10:39
Well, and I love comparing that passage to like an artist residency, because I think it’s true I and I love that. I mean, I don’t, I actually do a lot of my writing from home, but I always have to remind myself to go out into the world and write on a regular basis, like usually at least once a week, because I in a weird way, I find it kind of rejuvenating, even though I’m not I’m usually not interacting with anyone other than like the person who I talk to when I pay for my coffee or my lunch or something like that. But I love being around people and not having to make conversation with them, because it’s important. I think we honestly all learned that during the pandemic, like those, those little incidental moments of connection that you can have with people, sometimes, just like smiling at someone or listening to a conversation that two other people are having or whatever, but just like, feeling like you’re a person, existing in the world among other people is really important. And I’ve actually never done an artist residency program, but have to imagine, it’s like times 1,000 right? Because, like, you’re all coming together to do something creative, and there’s so there’s this joint purpose, but then you’re all working alone also. And I’m sure there’s some level of collaboration that’s happening on some level, but like, that togetherness alone must be really powerful. And I think, I think the ghostwriter has definitely done some artist residency programs in the past. I feel like that would be really up her alley. And I mean, I guess I’ll start with the fact that we might as well just get this out there. I’m referring to her as the ghostwriter because she’s never named in the story, so my narrator is nameless, and I was partly inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. That is a novel that I think many of your listeners will be familiar with. It’s, it was one of my favorite novels growing up, just as formative as Agatha Christie was to me, actually. And Daphne du Maurier talks about how she just relished the challenge of having a first person narrator who was never named. And I relished the challenge as well, but I did not set out to have a nameless narrator. It’s just that the name never came to me. And I think at some point during the writing process, I was like, I think that I am not going to have a name for this person, because I almost feel like and I and it’s so funny, because when I would listen to people doing exactly what I’m doing right now, like speaking on a podcast episode or being interviewed on the radio or something like that, and they’d start talking about, well, the character made me do this, and the character told me I’d always be like, Oh, come on. Like, you’re the creator of the character, but in a certain way, it’s almost like there is a push pull that happens as and like, of course, I could have forced the issue and given her a name, but it never felt right. And she is, of course, also a ghostwriter. I mean, I’d like to think that that too went into the calculus, because it makes sense, if I’m going to have a first person narrator who’s a ghostwriter, that she might be reticent about supplying her name, since ghostwriters usually don’t have their names in their books, that actually didn’t occur to me until I finished the book and was actually on tour for the book, and someone in an audience said, Oh, well, clearly you did this because she’s a ghostwriter. And I was like, Oh yeah, you would, you would think, right? But that never, that never occurred to me. So, that’s how she came about. She really did come about very gradually. I think that she’s also the sidekick character, and it’s funny. In our previous episode that we recorded, we talked a lot about how Hastings is the first-person narrator of The A.B.C. Murders, and a first person narrator who Christie used a lot. And I love Hastings, and I love the convention of telling a mystery from the first person point of view, because I think it gives you really great opportunities for misdirection. In addition to, just like, establishing a character, in such a, I think, powerful and intrinsic ways you can convey who a person is when you can speak in her voice, when you can write, really write in her voice. So I knew that I wanted to have a sidekick character who was my first person narrator, a la Hastings. But the ghostwriter is a very different person from Hastings. Yes, and I really also started though with my detective character. So the detective in this book is this, this woman who had been a senator from Maine and had run for president, and is now retreated into her house and is working on this memoir, and she hires the ghostwriter to work on a memoir, at which point, a couple days in to their collaboration, a neighbor of hers mysteriously dies, and the murder investigation ensues from there, and the plot continues to thicken until it gets solved at the end, very much like one of these fair play or classic puzzle mysteries of back of the Christies, which I’m very much writing in homage to and it really started, I think, with both of them. So in a way, if there was one of those two characters who existed before the plot, it was my detective. And I think this the narrator character, my sidekick, really came about more organically, if that makes sense.

Sarah Harrison  15:58
Interesting. I was asking myself that same question that you just answered as I was reading. So if this is a like, if this is similar to Agatha Christie, which? Which one is the detective? I guess it’s not the narrator, although, we meet her first, so she seems like my mind she would be. Until, as we go along, the senator starts to say, maybe some Poirot type things, she’ll be like, Oh, you think that, huh? It just never reveals what she’s thinking in her mind. So it’s like, okay, well, if it’s if the senator is the detective, right, and the ghostwriter is Hastings, do we keep meeting the senator in further books, or is the ghostwriter going to be like the sidekick for different people?

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  16:49
I precipitated your question, and you have precipitated what I was actually going to make a point of saying at some point during this interview, which is that it is 100% a sidekick series. So that was my little innovation. I wanted to really write within this traditional framework of a sidekick and an amateur detective, and to do multiple books. So this was sold as a three book series. But rather than stick with the same detective sidekick pair as Agatha Christie did and as many other authors traditionally did. I like the idea of sticking with my sidekick and then pairing her up with completely different detectives in different settings, which isn’t to say that there aren’t some characters who might travel from book to book with the ghostwriter. Not many, but some. Because I also like the idea of being able to just have a fresh setting and a fresh cast of characters and new intrigue in each book. The second book in the series has already been written, and it’s coming out exactly one year after the first one, so it’ll be out in January of 2025 at the end of January. It’s called loose lips, and it is set entirely on a boat. So this is a little bit ships, loose lips, sink ships. Exactly. Yes, there’s, there’s a little, a little picture of a sinking ship on the cover, just in case. Just to make that reference a little more obvious, and that’s such a classic mystery trope to put a closed circle cast of suspects on a mode of transportation, because you can’t get on or off a boat while it’s in the ocean. And if murder happens, you’re going to have a very classic sort of an investigation. And that one was a lot of fun to write, and I’m actually now writing the third one, which is in a, again, a completely different setting with a different detective. And yeah, I really like being able to start fresh in that way with each book.

Carolyn Daughters  18:44
And we have a little bit of a closed circle as well in The Busy Body where this house, this crystal palace, is out in the middle of nowhere. There’s cameras on the main road, in large part because Senator Dorothy Gibson had been a presidential candidate, so we know that she’s going to have some sort of protective detail. And so what that means is we don’t have the option for a random person to somehow make it onto the grounds. And so we know that if murders are committed on this property, that it was probably one of the characters to whom we’re introduced

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  19:22
Exactly, yeah, the Crystal Palace where the murder happens is technically next door to where Dorothy Gibson lives. So given that she has a certain amount of surveillance on her property and the properties abut each other, I was able to use that to construct that kind of a closed circle feeling so that the reader can feel confident, okay, yes, this has to be someone among this cast of characters.

Sarah Harrison  19:49
And you anticipated another one of my questions already, but maybe you can say more about this. Has been compared a lot to an Agatha Christie-style mystery. You’ve already mentioned several of the tropes that you’ve introduced, and it sounds like that was by intention. So you Is that correct? You did this on purpose. It wasn’t just your love of Agatha seeping through.

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  20:14
Actually, it was me. It was very intentional. And in fact, there are certain tropes that my Agatha Christie podcast partner, Catherine Brobeck and I, when we were doing our review of Agatha Christie’s novels, and we were ranking all of them in this vast ranking project that formed the backbone of the Agatha Christie podcast, there are certain tropes that we would come back to again and again. I’m not going to name them right now, because then that would be extremely spoilery for my novel. But if you’ve listened to the podcast for years, the ones that we that we delighted in emphasizing, often almost like lovingly ribbing Agatha Christie for going back to the well over and over again when it came to certain tropes, and I very deliberately used those tropes from my book, knowing that the mystery would be more easily solvable by an all about Agatha. Listener, it was kind of like they’re like Easter eggs, but I I’m very clear about the fact that I only did that once, and this is a three book series, so everyone should be on a level playing field for book two. My hope is that book two will be just as hard for a listener to solve as a non-listener.

Sarah Harrison  21:19
What made you want to, other than loving Christie, to create a Christie-esque type setting or series?

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  21:29
Yeah. I mean, those are the novels that I love. You mentioned that I published another novel before The Busy Body, which is the decent proposal via Harper Collins and I had published, it’s not a mystery, although it does have some elements of suspense in it. And now, looking back, it almost feels like I was trying to write a mystery, but I wouldn’t allow myself to. And after I wrote that book, I did the very cliched thing for a writer, of having a really hard time with my second novel, like with my sophomore attempt. And I worked on this manuscript for years, and it never really got anywhere. It’s still a manuscript that I have in my back pocket. I haven’t given up on it, but it hasn’t seen the light of day beyond my house, and it was very frustrating sort of experience, and I was several years into doing the Agatha Christie podcast with my friend Catherine, and I realized to myself, if I’m not sick of Agatha Christie and of mysteries, given the 10s of hours that I’m spending on this podcast every week, why am I why am I beating my head against my laptop on this book? Why am I not writing a mystery? And what I next wrote eventually became The Busy Body, and I won’t say that it flowed out of me, and it was just a spontaneously appearing book or anything. It wasn’t that magical, but it was a lot easier. It was a much easier process than the process had been for that second book. And I realized, okay, something about this feels right, and I really should be writing mysteries, because that’s where my passion is so and then once, once I had made that connection, I was like, well, and I and my favorite mysteries are classic puzzle mysteries that can be solved by the reader, the Fair Play mystery. So I definitely want to do that. And then at that point, of course, your biggest and best inspiration is going to be Agatha Christie, even if you haven’t hosted years’ worth of an Agatha Christie podcast.

Carolyn Daughters  23:29
I’m really interested in Dorothy Gibson as the detective in this story. So from out of the gate, it’s clear that that the narrator has immense respect for Senator Gibson, and she’s presented as a character who is full of generosity and grace. She reminds me very much in her depiction with headbands and pantsuits and instead of upstate New York, she’s in Sakabago, I think this bedroom community. I think of Portland, Maine, something like that. She’s got this, like punchy laugh that, I think it’s called a cackle, but it’s lovingly, lovingly called a cackle. And then she has this assistant, Layla Mansour. I think it’s Layla who reminds me of Huma Abedin and so like talk about inspiration here about like, did, did you have inspiration based on these real life people, and then produce this book. Or did you start producing the book? And you’re like, Oh, I wonder if I made the detective, a presidential candidate who didn’t quite win her election, like, how did that? How did that work?

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  24:57
Yeah, so the germ of this book wasn’t exactly Hillary Clinton, but it was the moment right after the election in 2016 when Hillary Clinton went back to her house in Chappaqua. And I know it was Chappaqua because I happened to have grown up one town over from her, and she retreated into her house, and there was this, this weird, frozen moment in time where people were taking photos of her on long walks in the woods like and whenever I reference this on every single event, everyone always nods their head.

Carolyn Daughters  25:31
I remember. And day after the election, there’s this photo of her with this woman and her daughter.

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  25:37
Her baby, yeah, carrying the baby. And it was just, and it was just, and I think everyone, like, regardless of political affiliation, you remember the moment, because it was such a punctuated moment in our national consciousness, because however you were feeling after that election took place, it was a big moment. I think it was a surprise, pretty much for everyone. And it was, and I think there was something happening, nationally, on this national scale that everyone remembers and can respond to. And I had, for the longest time in my head, in my mystery addled brain, the idea that that would be a great backdrop for a murder mystery. And I sat on it for so long because that was a lot, I started the Agatha Christie podcast with Katherine in September of 2016 so that happened three months later, like two months later, in November of 2016 and I sat on this idea for so long that I thought that I had I had missed it, that I had missed my opportunity. And then I was like, You know what? This is still with me. I’m just gonna do it. And I think, fortunately, it was such a big moment that people still know exactly what I’m talking about even though that was eight years ago, but believe it or not, that was eight years ago, and so that was really the starting point. So of course, Hillary Clinton herself was always going to be a big inspiration for this character of Dorothy Gibson, but I was very conscientious in using other inspirations as well, because I didn’t just want to make a carbon copy of Hillary Clinton, especially because she’s someone who I think people have a lot of preconceived notions about, and I wanted people to be able to approach this Dorothy Gibson character on her own terms, and that’s one of the reasons that I chose to put her in Maine and to make her from Maine, because Maine, I think, is a state that prides itself on independence, whether or not that always happens in practice, but it’s a state where, I think someone like this character, who is an independent and who tried to cross the aisle and be a candidate for both sides. It makes sense that that, that that’s where she would be from. It’s also that too is a great place to set a murder mystery in the woods of Maine. You know when it’s snowing and whatnot. So, so there is a lot of Hillary Clinton in her but the other person, there is a ton of and people from Maine always know who this is, but she’s not as well-known nowadays. There was a senator from the 20th century named Margaret Chase Smith, who was a Republican, actually, and she was a big, big figure in the Senate, but she also was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Before she became a Senator, she delivered a denunciation of McCarthyism on the Senate floor. She was a huge inspiration to a lot of people, not just men, women, everyone, and just had a great, a wonderful career. And there’s a ton of Margaret Chase Smith and Dorothy. I gave her the middle name Chase. That’s like my little easter egg for that. And there I very intentionally make other little references to some other well-known female politicians. There’s a Sarah Palin reference thrown in there. There’s an Amy Klobuchar reference thrown in there. So it’s a little bit of an amalgamation. I think of us a politician who’s been through the ringer.

Sarah Harrison  28:49
I love that. I love it’s like a mosaic of all of these female politicians and yeah, as someone that doesn’t always pay attention, I was oblivious to all of them, actually, until I saw your notes, and I was like, Oh, is this Hillary Clinton?

Kemper Donovan  29:05
I love that. That is wonderful. Hearing some that someone read this book and did not think of Hillary that’s great. Like that. That’s fantastic. That makes me very happy.

Sarah Harrison  29:15
I love the mosaic idea that they were all inspired by real people. But she stands alone, I felt like as her own character, yeah,

Kemper Donovan  29:24
I mean, and to be clear, I mean, I think it’s come as no surprise. I’m a, I’m a huge fan of Hillary Clinton. I think that comes through. But I like that. I like the fact that I think the character can, can be her own character as well, even with all of that inspiration, yeah, definitely.

Carolyn Daughters  29:41
I was stunned that So Dorothy Gibson, who is the sort of detective character in The Busy Body. She marches around this crystal palace. She goes into various rooms, hey, knocks on the door, starts interviewing people, and she’s got that confidence that comes. Being a national public figure, I would still be standing outside the front door. Should I knock? Right? She’s marching through the house. She’s talking to everybody, and they’re all talking to her.

Sarah Harrison  30:12
They just are like, Okay, I’ll answer your questions.

Carolyn Daughters  30:15
I loved that, because I kept thinking she’s gonna go knock on this random woman’s door, not random woman that sister or the whatever character. She’s gonna knock on their door, and they’re gonna not open it, or they’re gonna slam it in her face, and nope, every time they’re like, come on in. And they Bucha her in, and then they just share tons of information. I mean, yeah, she’s, I loved this character as a detective because she was a sort of person people wanted to open up to,

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  30:48
Yeah, and I think in a certain way, the book is preoccupied with celebrity. The ghostwriter is a celebrity memoirist, so she’s used to dealing with celebrities. She talks a lot about that. And I think Dorothy Gibson, one of her superpowers as an amateur sleuth is the fact that she’s someone people know. And people enjoy being around famous people and interacting with them, so she’s able to get a lot of information that I think someone else wouldn’t necessarily have been able to get. And she’s even able to wield that celebrity and that power, in ways, over government functionaries that are very key to the plot. I won’t get more specific than that, and also over the police, even though the police want nothing to do with her. And there’s a fairly antagonistic relationship between these two female sluice and the two male policemen who are officially on the case, but she is able to use her celebrity and her power to get that grand denouement at the end of the book, which, of course, you want in a mystery. You want everyone assembled and for the detective character to tell you what happened.

Sarah Harrison  31:58
It almost reminds me of a Peter Wimsey, going back to Sarah’s again, and how does an amateur get things done? Well, they have a lot of power. They have a lot of celebrity. Now, he works with the police very well, and like you said, she has a more antagonistic they don’t want her butting in on the investigation, but she’s able to make phone calls and get things done with her celebrity and her status, which is interesting.

Carolyn Daughters  32:24
Absolutely in Dorothy’s case, and also in Lord Peter Wimsey case, in Dorothy Sayers, different Dorothy, like, there’s this, there’s this. I realize that as I was saying it, but there’s this sense that they belong in any room. So it’s this big personality. It’s maybe born and bred into them, or maybe just, yeah, because of the roles they’ve adopted throughout their lives, and Dorothy Givens case, but it never occurs to them they don’t belong in the room where they are. And if there are questions they want to ask, there’s it never occurred to them not to ask them. Whereas, as I say for myself, I’m more like the ghostwriter in the sense that I’d be hanging out, like hey, listening very well and easy, maybe for people to open up to, but I wouldn’t be knocking on all the doors the way Dorothy Givens is able to do, with zero fear, zero hesitation, and that really helps her collect the evidence she needs in order to have the denouement.

Kemper Donovan  33:32
No. I mean the ghostwriter is shy, retiring, and, dare I say, even misanthropic, which, I think, are qualities that many writers share, I am guilty of probably all three of them.

Carolyn Daughters  33:45
Is he writing about me?

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  33:49
So she really, I mean, she really needs Dorothy. I think if she were investigating on her own, she, she would have been a good observer, and she’s she, and she has a keen, I think, intelligence and intellect, which helps her in certain ways, but also hinders her. And that was the other thing that I enjoy doing. We talked a little bit about Hastings, how, in that he’s dim witted to a certain extent, and a little Dippy he’s a good narrator for a mystery, because then that allows Christie to misdirect the reader, because he misinterprets a lot of what he sees. And I think the ghostwriter, I make mention of this at the end of The Busy Body, the ghostwriter, is one of those people who’s, like, too smart for her own good, so she doesn’t see the forest for the trees always, and she’s not really able to make those deductions that a good detective needs to make, even though she has this keen intelligence. So I enjoyed creating a character who was still whip smart and quick witted, but also not very good at investigating.

Sarah Harrison  34:55
Awesome. I love the concept of, like, writing a sidekick. Series. I think that’s awesome. I want to know a little bit more. Carolyn, you said you’ve done some ghostwriting. Kemper, have you also done ghostwriting? Or how do you get this sense?

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  35:12
I haven’t done ghostwriting. But I think that ghostwriters, in general, seem to be having a little bit of a moment. I think that there is more of an awareness of ghostwriting as an art as a craft, than there has been before. And there have been a number of really high profile celebrity memoirs in the last couple of years. That definitely inspired me while I was writing the book. I think a lot of people will think of the Prince Harry memoir, also Britney Spears, the one for me that was probably the most formative, though, was the Demi Moore memoir, which was written by ghost, written by a writer from the New Yorker. And I think just really, really beautifully written and interestingly written, but also seems as though written by Demi Moore. I mean, it’s such a there. I think there are so many things that you have to do. There’s so many plates you have to spin when you’re ghostwriting, because you can’t just write as well as possible. You can’t write in your own voice. You have to write well, but you also have to write convincingly as someone else. And I think it really requires a lot of talent and intelligence. So I love being able to inhabit someone who spends, her career doing, a kind of writing that I think most people don’t necessarily set out to do, but which I think we’re realizing is due more respect than it has traditionally gotten.

Carolyn Daughters  36:39
Yeah, capturing someone else’s voice. It’s very challenging. And it’s not simply, they give you a one page writing sample here, and then you’re like, Oh, let me do that. Because sometimes capturing their voice isn’t actually capturing the way that they write. It’s capturing the essence of who they are. So exactly, I don’t know how Demi Moore writes, but it’s capturing the way she would tell her story, so that when she reads it, she says, Yes, like, yeah, that said this, yeah. It’s the essence of a person, even more than just simply capturing someone’s writing style.

Kemper Donovan  37:17
Yeah, and I don’t, I mean, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Like, I know that. I feel like I can barely capture my own voice. Did you say, Have you you’ve actually done some ghostwriting?

Carolyn Daughters  37:26
I’ve ghostwritten more than it does. Probably I’m gonna say 13 or 14 books.

Kemper Donovan  37:35
We need to have an off, offline conversation.

Carolyn Daughters  37:40
But most of the books that I’ve ghostwritten have been business books, or somebody has a niche and then they want to write a book. One I think, was not so much a memoir as it was a history of the person. But I’ve never, have never written somebody’s memoir for them, and doing something like what this ghostwriter is doing, where she’s working for a presidential candidate, famous senator. I mean, a ghostwriter would, at minimum, be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not a million or more, to do a book like what she’s doing for Dorothy. So it’s, like, a big deal the client. And I know she’s new at this, like, she’s just breaking big, I guess, yeah, but yeah, this is, this is a niche that the path that she’s taking with the people she’s ghostwriting for, like, that’s, yeah, that’s the gold star. Like, absolutely.

Sarah Harrison  38:51
I’m not gonna let it end without a couple of additional questions, which is, we’ve talked a little bit about the classical Agatha style tropes that you’ve incorporated. Where do you see your book as like really diverging consciously or unconsciously from that? How? How does it? How is it different?

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  39:14
I think one thing that I was always very careful about, or that I tried to be very careful about, was using Agatha Christie as inspiration, structurally, but not in terms of voice. I mean, because, as I just said, that’s why ghostwriting to me seems so impossibly difficult, because I don’t know how you go about capturing someone else’s voice. I have enough trouble bringing my own voice to the page, I think, in not just an authentic but an interesting, an entertaining way. And I think that some writers fall into the trap of being inspired by an author and then trying to imitate that author’s voice and writing style. And that’s never a good idea, because I think you do need to find your own voice if you’re going to a. Be an effective writer unless you’re a ghostwriter, and then you’re finding someone else’s voice and like, like I said, so you’re, like, one layer on top of that. So I was very deliberate about using those structural tropes when it came to delay the layering of clues and the solving of those clues that there’s a lot that’s coming directly from Christie. But then when it came to the voice, not just of the ghostwriter, but the way that I was bringing these other characters to life, and just my overall tone and pacing, also, that is very un-Christie, like, I think, and I wanted it to be that way because those were choices that I was making. Agatha Christie wrote enough books that you can, you can pull out an example of anything, if you want to. She’s like the Bible in that way. But I think that she tended to be pretty fast paced with the unfolding of her, of her murders, and it takes a really long time for a dead body to appear in The Busy Body, actually. Hopefully, it doesn’t feel that way, because the book is, is just rolling along, and you’re, you’re not bored or feeling mired down by the pages, but it is, it is a bit of a longer time until you get to the to the body, because there’s a lot that we need to set up, or a lot that I need to set up before we get there, in terms of the ghostwriter and Dorothy Gibson, and Dorothy Gibson’s world, and then the world of the Crystal Palace and all of that. So, so there’s that. And I think also, just like the interiority of this ghostwriter, even though Christie wrote in first person a lot. She didn’t always, but she has all those Hastings novels, and there are other novels, such as the murder at the vicarage, murder in Mesopotamia, the man in parts of the man in the brown suit, which are also written in the first person. I think they there’s a there’s a lightness to her first person that I don’t have. I think that this is like intense first person. It’s like very, very interior. And the ghostwriter is the kind of person who gets inside her own head a lot, and that too, I think just is very different from Agatha Christie. So my hope, and I have gotten this feedback from some people, is that when you once you finish the book, or you get to the solution, you’re like, Oh, wow. That feels very Christie like, but the actual reading of the book, it does not feel like an Agatha Christie book. It feels like something that’s written by me, as opposed to Agatha Christie.

Carolyn Daughters  42:35
I have one last question, Sarah. There’s a backstory to this ghostwriter, and it’s hinted at in a number of places in this book. Do we learn more about that backstory in the second and third books?

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  42:54
We do so there’s a little bit of personal intrigue as to who the ghostwriter is. Who this nameless person is and why? And, I mean, I lay it out right there on very on the first page. The passage that I read for this episode, she clearly, she’s estranged from her family. She’s someone who has a hard time making connections. Let’s just say she has intimacy issues that would, I think, be putting it mildly, and which is also a fairly universal thing. So this isn’t, it’s not that there’s something wildly outrageous, necessarily, that happened to her. But like everyone there, she has things that have happened in her past that affect who she is now and how she leads her life. And there’s a little bit of that character intrigue that’s going to pass over from this book into the next one and then the next one. And I like having a light serialized element, because I think it’s a reward to readers who are staying with the series, but never at the expense of dipping in and out of the series and reading the books out of order or anything like that. That, again, that too is something that Agatha Christie, I think does amazingly well, so she’s an inspiration there. I mean, you can read any of the Poirot books in whatever order you want, and it does not matter, however, as someone who has read every single one of her 66 full length novels now in publication order, if you do read in publication order, there are serialized elements and sometimes little throwaway jokes and just aspects to the relationships between Poirot and other characters and Miss Marple and other characters. Miss Marple ages, actually, as the books go on in interesting ways. So she did also layer in those light serialized elements, but never at the expense of the readability of the books individually. So that’s a little bit what I’m trying to do here.

Sarah Harrison  44:44
I love that. I love that aspect of authors too. Yeah, layer when you read them in order.

Kemper Donovan  44:50
For the ones who the ones who make the extra effort, right? We can’t end on a mystery.

Sarah Harrison  45:05
Well, as a person that isn’t playing rubrics on a frequent basis, I just wondered if you ran your own book through your Christie rubric, and is it even possible to self-score, or is it just like an impossible lens.

Kemper Donovan (Agatha Christie Podcast Host)  45:22
I don’t think I would ever try to score to score my own book. I think I’d probably be the worst person to do any sort of an objective and now, I mean, the fun thing about the that scoring system that Catherine and I came up with for all about Agatha, is that we’re pretending to bring objectivity to an exercise that’s inherently subjective, because everyone’s always going to have different opinions. To have different opinions about books, but that’s why it’s and then people will email us and be like, You’re wrong, and like you’re great for you. We are for me, I’m not. And it’s and it’s fun, it’s fun having those conversations, having to back up our opinions. But I definitely thought about those elements though, plot credibility and plot mechanics, and how are my characters three dimensional enough And interesting enough? Am I evoking the setting as well as I can and whatnot? So I definitely thought about it. I just think that if I were to actually do the exercise, I would force a friend to do it, not me.

Sarah Harrison  46:22
Well, Kemper, this has been a delight. Thank you so much for thank you for both episodes.

Kemper Donovan  46:28
This has been wonderful. I so enjoyed talking about The A.B.C. Murders, and I really appreciate this conversation. I can tell that you both really read the book and thought a lot about it, which is, which is fantastic and, like, it’s just really gratifying as an author, like to be able to talk about the book a little bit in the same way that I think about Agatha Christie and other authors. This was super, super fun.

Sarah Harrison  46:50
Yeah, it’s delightful for us. Thank you for the books and folks. We’re gonna put all the links to Kemper in the show notes. Check out his Agatha Christie podcast, All About Agatha.

Kemper Donovan  47:02
Thank you so much.

Sarah Harrison  1:00:27
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Carolyn Daughters
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Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.