SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
OK, here's the pitch to Netflix for a true crime doc from a producer, Dominic Eastwood. His aunt and uncle, Sue and Mal, run a country pub called The Case is Altered that offers a Monday night trivia quiz. But a new team calling themselves the Shadow Knights become so successful, eyebrows are raised, egos are hurt. Then a body is found in the river. Emails, WhatsApp and text messages fly. Who would cheat, much less murder, for a prize that's barely $25? "The Killer Question" is the new mystery novel by Janice Hallett, a former journalist and government speechwriter, who joins us now from London. Thanks so much for being with us.
JANICE HALLETT: Well, thank you for having me, Scott. It's delightful to be here.
SIMON: You enjoy a pub quiz yourself, I gather.
HALLETT: Yep. I'm a member of a pub quiz team, and we win sometimes. We come bottom sometimes. And mostly, we're mid-table.
SIMON: They can be important to people.
HALLETT: Well, the quiz team can take on a level of importance that far outweighs its actual subjective importance in the world. Passions run high at the pub quiz. And it's not just about winning. It's about fairness and everyone being equal. And when people perceive that not happening, you know, tempers can run high. And I've seen quite a few altercations, shall we say, that almost end up getting physical.
SIMON: Over pub quizzes, eh?
HALLETT: Yeah, absolutely - over questions that are perceived as wrong. If the quizmaster says it's one answer, but a team thinks that the quizmaster is wrong, that can lead to a big row. If a team is considered to be cheating, that's another basis on which fights can break out. It's a lively, old world.
SIMON: Well, tell us about this new team that appears - the Shadow Knights - and their mysterious leader known only as the General.
HALLETT: The General or General Knowledge. The Shadow Knights are an enigma. They roll into the quiz unannounced one day, and well, they not only walk away with the top prize. They get almost top marks. And the next week, they do the same, except they do get top marks. They don't get a single question wrong. And out of several hundred questions, including the marathon, that's a feat that, you know, twitches the radar of Mal, the question setter. And it disgruntles all the other players. So nobody is happy with the Shadow Knights, and Mal determines to find out whether they really are that good or whether they've simply found a way to cheat without him knowing.
SIMON: Sue and Mal kind of have a secret of their own, don't they?
HALLETT: They do. They once had a past life. They - five years earlier, they were police officers in another part of the country, and they were part of a very serious police operation that might have gone catastrophically wrong. And if it did, something might have followed them into this life, because they don't want anyone to know that they used to be members of the police.
SIMON: You tell the story through emails and texts. If it's alright with you, I'll be police community support officer Arthur, and you be Mal.
HALLETT: OK.
SIMON: Let me begin. (Reading) Want to know the latest?
HALLETT: (Reading) You can never know too much, Arthur. Fire away.
SIMON: (Reading) Murdered male, pulled deceased from water by yours. Most likely died by single, blunt force trauma to the head.
HALLETT: (Reading) Thanks for keeping us in the loop.
SIMON: (Reading) Trained as an actor up north.
HALLETT: (Reading) Heard he was an actor, yeah.
SIMON: (Reading) Couldn't find work. Moved down here. Still couldn't find work but found drugs and alcohol instead. Got in with a rowdy lot.
HALLETT: (Reading) Shame.
SIMON: (Reading) Seen or heard anything from the others he was with?
HALLETT: (Reading) Thankfully not.
SIMON: (Reading) We've spoken to them now. All profess their innocence and seem quite plausible.
HALLETT: (Reading) Plausible. That's the sign of a good criminal, Arthur. They look you in the eye and lie without a flicker. Such commitment to the facade of innocence, they believe it themselves.
SIMON: Oh, my word.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: I must say, as an old crime reporter, I thought, you know, there's something to that.
HALLETT: (Laughter) I think it's true. I mean, the best liars are the people who convince themselves they're telling the truth.
SIMON: Yeah. Why did you choose to tell the story in this form? What are the challenges of writing in emails and text messages and WhatsApp messages?
HALLETT: I've written all my novels like this, one way or another, and it comes from my past life, actually, as a screenwriter. And if you're a screenwriter, you deliver everything via dialogue. That's character, place, atmosphere, pace. And I've simply adapted that for the page in my novels, and now it comes completely naturally. As for the challenges, occasionally, I do need to communicate to the reader where people are and what people look like. That tends not to be something that we would naturally text about, so I have to find clever ways to get around it. But otherwise, you know, I have a ball writing in that way.
SIMON: Don't a lot of people use text messages not to reveal, but to conceal and misdirect?
HALLETT: I think when we're reading the text messages here, we're reading between the lines all the time. And that's true of life, I think. We're all portraying ourselves in a particular way, whether it's social media, whether it's the short-form communications we're using. We want to come across in a particular way to different people, and that's what I want the reader to unpick in this novel. What do people really mean? In the bit we read, now, Mal doesn't always respond very loquaciously to Arthur when he's chatting about the chap who was pulled out of the river, and maybe there's a reason for that, or maybe there isn't.
SIMON: (Laughter) Maybe there is. Maybe there isn't.
HALLETT: (Laughter).
SIMON: As a working, highly successful novelist, do you have any concerns about readers of the future just subsisting on text messages and social media posts and, you know, what we now call literature disappearing?
HALLETT: Well, that's very interesting. Will literature ever disappear? And what is literature in these days, and how - where is it going? Now, I don't think books are going anywhere, you know, anytime soon, but looking further to the future, who on earth knows? Because we're already getting very, very short formats of communication in our everyday lives. I'm reliably told by young people that nobody emails much anymore. I wrote my first novel, "The Appeal," in almost all emails, and that was a piece of feedback I got from my younger readers. Everybody texts now. Emails are for old people. And whereas, maybe 40 years ago, we'd have been bemoaning the decline of letter writing, we're now bemoaning the decline of emails. But for the moment, I don't think books or literature are going anywhere. But I think literature might change, and more books might be written in the way that I'm writing them now.
SIMON: "The Killer Question" - the new novel by Janice Hallett. Thank you so much for being with us.
HALLETT: Well, thank you, Scott. It's been delightful speaking to you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
