The Hello and welcome to the Swinging Christies, the Christie Time podcast about Agatha Christie in the swinging 60s.

I'm Doctor Mark Aldridge and I've written and researched a lot about Agatha Christie, including in my most recent book, Agatha Christies Marple, Expert on Wickedness, which is out now.

I might have mentioned that once or twice.

Yes, and I'm Grey Robert Brown.

I'm a writer, I'm a Christie fan, I'm a Shirley Jackson fan.

Because this episode we're looking at them both, are we not?

So we did this fairly recently.

We did a A Mural Spark episode, an episode where we talked about situating Agatha Christie alongside her contemporary literary figures in a very deliberate way to remind everyone that Agatha is a profound writer in her own right, and this is the same sort of thing.

We're doing the same thing, but with the American author Shirley Jackson.

Yes, talking of American, we just so happen to be in New York.

And so when aren't we?

And so when else to record the endless episode?

Because we are actually recording this outside her house.

That sounds a bit stalky.

Now, I've said it like it sounds.

It sounds like outside where Shirley Jackson lives.

Yes, I mean, she's long gone, so it's it's not quite as creepy as it sounds.

She's only 48 into everything.

I know.

Yeah, Well, in the 60s, which is one of the the reasons we're looking at this.

But yeah, she has a particularly interesting intersection with 60s culture, as does Christie, which is one of the things that we're gonna move on to talk about later.

Yeah, absolutely.

We should probably just say a little about the atmosphere of this place because you can answer.

Obviously a lot has changed in the 80 years or so since she was, but you still know it's got a village type atmosphere, town.

You can feel this is a community within a community.

Very much so, yeah.

We're standing right opposite or right next to a community centre, which is specifically for LGBTQ plus BIPOC people, which is really nice to see.

And I don't know, given Jackson so commonly wrote about the underdog in society, I think it's fair to say it feels some somewhat appropriate that it's opposite her house.

But yeah, the architecture is very much intact, but everything has had a bit of a wash and brush.

Up I think it probably has yes.

Yeah.

And you could feel that there'd be an atmosphere that would cultivate you to be creative here Yeah, I think so.

I think more so than going to Bennington, to be honest.

You know, there's sort of more so than a small town maybe if you feel a bit more of a, you know, like there are lots of other creatives in the area can be stimulating.

But then also if you go summer quiet, you can concentrate on your own stuff.

So maybe a bit of both can be helpful depending on where you are in your career maybe.

Well, I think it was, it was fuel for Jackson's novels to be in Bennington because so much of her writing is about kind of small communities and the and the insidiousness of that and the and the sinister undertones of all that.

But yeah, in terms of being having access to the kind of New York literati, that's very much an advantage of living here, I suppose.

But yes, it's also, we were saying as we were walking around, it's kind of reminiscent of, you know, East London, like where I live, like sort of Shoreditch, that kind of place.

And it does feel very much like one of those places that maybe was a little bit more affordable and rundown.

And now is the opposite.

Now is fully gentrified and lovely coffee shops and galleries and things like that.

But yeah, it's, it's great to be here.

She lived in a couple of places in New York, but where where she lived in the early 1940s.

So that's 215 W 13th St She and her husband, Stanley Hyman, when they were first married, lived here.

And so before her career as a novelist really kicked off, Stanley had achieved his dream of writing for The New Yorker.

That's very fitting.

But Shirley was struggling a bit more creatively until she finally made it into The New Yorker with a short story, Come Danced With Me in Ireland in 1943.

Yes, and that was the year they left this house actually, and moved to 36 Grove St.

That was in October 1943.

We should say a lot of this we're getting from Ruth Franklin's excellent biography of Shirley Jackson subtitled A Rather Haunted Life.

That's another address in it's sitting Greenwich, isn't it?

Yes, it's not that far.

Not far from there and Franklin talks about how there they had all night parties and and rationing was kind of hitting hard at this point because the America was at that point had entered World War 2.

Ralph Ellison, who was a friend was a regular visitor to that flat.

Apparently he's another contemporary of both Jackson and Christie's.

He wrote or would go on to write Invisible Man.

And yeah, at this point then, Jackson's getting more stories in at The New Yorker.

She's feeling more productive.

She's starting to be better known in publishing circles in the kind of, you know, literati in Manhattan.

And then after this, Stanley gets a job at Bennington College towards the end of the war.

And this is when they moved to Bennington in Vermont.

And they are there for the rest of their lives.

And that is where Shirley would go on to publish her first novel.

And we're away.

That's Shirley Jackson's career off to a flying start, which is what we're going to go on to talk about.

Well, let's go and settle down so much, shall we, and have a conversation about our links between Agatha and Shirley Jackson.

Yeah, let's we've since been to the Library of Congress archives in Washington DC and we have spoken about our discoveries, our Christie related discoveries there in Part 2 of our America series, which is our most recently dropped episode.

Do check that out if you haven't already.

But despite Agatha Christie and Shirley Jacksons, very obvious.

Or at least it's obvious to us, Mark.

But then, who knows?

In our brains we have.

In our magical little brains.

Logic in our brains that sort of works together.

Yeah, we know what we're doing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think this is a a multi part project to try and bring people around to our way of thinking and so that everyone.

I'm going to replace the podcast blurb with that, actually.

That makes a lot of sense.

But yeah, it seems obvious to us that there's a lot of points of convergence between Agatha Christie and Shirley Jackson.

But it does seem it does feel like it's not one that's been made overly often in the past.

And I wonder if partly that's because we've talked about this many times, but because and and indeed in the mural Spark or so that we did, is it because Christie gets kind of pigeon holders as a particular type of genre?

And and in a way, Shirley Jackson gets pigeon holders, a slightly different kind of genre, although is allowed, I think a bit more authority.

She's she's kind of rubber stamped with a bit more literary quality than maybe Christie is by critics.

But yeah, there's actually not much when you kind of research the two of them together.

Except I did find actually when I did a sort of cursory Google at the very start of this, there's a book that comes up from 1967, so perfect for us, a collection and it's called Danger Colon.

Great stories of mystery and suspense from the SAS Day Evening Post.

Regular outlets?

Oh yes, for many, many years.

Well, there you go.

And yes, there are stories from both of them included in that.

And it's got a very striking yellow cover that we'll we'll post on socials.

But but yellow covers are something of a theme with us.

We'll go on to talk about that again.

At least that was the only time in our research that brought up both Shirley Jackson and Agatha Christie together until at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Oh, got it.

Or the research keeps going, doesn't it?

Goodness me, we've never got a definitive answer for anything.

Every time we think we've cracked.

Something Oh absolutely, but so in 1968 there was a there was a little clipping of best sellers based upon the sales from mid August to mid-september of 1968 of the Baker and Taylor company.

So this is of current trade books and at six was Come Along with Me by Shirley Jackson, but at #2 was Spies Among Us by Agatha Christie and if you Scroll down it says second on the fiction list, but 4th on a combined list is Spies Among Us, the three novels in one book published in July.

The book includes They Came to Baghdad, NRM and Murder in Mesopotamia, a bit of a motley crew who published some years ago.

It does acknowledge, but to thousands of readers, these stories are new, and Agatha Christie seems to be enjoying her greatest popularity in some years.

Wow.

I mean, pick a year from the last 50 years and you say Agatha Christie seems more successful than ever.

Yeah, it's it's the ongoing story.

Yeah, that's neat.

In terms of their lives.

Yes, so, so there's there's there's some points of comparison, but some real differences as well.

So Shirley Jackson unfortunately died quite young.

She was only 48 when she died.

She was born in 1916 and died in 1965.

And you'll know because you've been to my talks and done talks with me, that one of the things I always say about Agatha Christie is it's amazing how her life sort of covered so much history.

To be born in 181991976, to go through two world wars, to be, you know, at the point where obviously Queen Victoria is on the throne all the way through to people know what computers are in Star Wars.

It's going to come out the next year, the year after you die.

There's, there's a huge amount that goes on.

But with Shirley Jackson, it's a bit different, isn't it?

Yeah, is it?

Definitely.

Jackson had AI think it's fair to say a shorter, more modest kind of burst of fame and productivity than Christie.

And arguably, of course, very few people have the prominence or longevity or legacy that Christie had.

So this is no slight on Jackson, but but it's definitely less prominent culturally now.

But we will return to this sort of question of her legacy at the end.

When we were looking at comparisons, there are some obvious ones like so Shirley Jackson is an American with English Heritage and Agatha Christie we think are very much as English.

But of course her father was American.

Both families were formerly monied but lost that money.

But I think there's also some some sort of differences because both obviously really loved literature, but in different ways.

Agatha Christie was almost proud of the fact that she never went to school, whereas Shirley Jackson is very much part of the sort of university elite.

Her husband, Stanley Hyman, worked as a university, for example, and perhaps a more traditional role of of a writer actually to be part of that elite in those.

Yeah, well, I can't remember.

Is it Julius or did you say to me?

I can't remember who said that Christie Chrissie doesn't really socialise with the kind of literati, but she instead socialises with the kind of theatre scene.

Oh yes, I think that's very true.

That may well have been Julius.

Yeah, but Jackson is squarely in the kind of writing for The New Yorker.

And yeah, and actually, interestingly so.

We were looking at the Shirley Jackson papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

And if if you haven't already, do check out our previous episode about our journeying to Washington, DC, which was part of our America two-part series.

But one things I one of the things I noticed in those folders is that Shirley and Stanley often did lectures and both of them were included in the line up, shall we say?

Oh, that's interesting, I didn't see that.

Whereas famously on Max and Agatha's 1966 Kind of America tour, she refused to, to lecture because it was about Max's work, not that she couldn't have, but she she, we think sort of, you know, wouldn't have liked the limelight.

Yeah, yeah, she did.

She turned down several opportunities to talk and lots of times that she travelled.

Both Shirley Jackson and Christie were pressed shy, but in in quite different ways because I guess Christie generally was quite shy anyway, were very shy, although she did enjoy socialising with people she knew well.

And she was very, you know, she would invite people to her house and, you know, if she knew them well or started to get to know them well, or if they were involved in publishing or, or her stage plays or whatever.

But wouldn't enjoy going to the parties that I think Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman would often go to where you wouldn't be expected to network and socialise and meet lots of new people.

And you know, the sort of thing that's my idea of hell as well, to be honest.

So I, I have absolute sympathy here, but significantly for for us, I think neither of them likes to overanalyze their work, at least certainly not in public.

And so they're very much not keen on being interviewed that they wanted their work to speak for itself and they didn't really see their their job as being someone who has to promote things.

Neither of them particularly got on with the press, but both of them were obviously very loved in their in their time received a lot of correspondence.

Yes, which was lovely because it's only that the archives, when we looked at them in DC, they were in some ways quite similar to ones I've looked at for Agatha Christie, but different in others because I don't think many people had looked at them because some of the stuff looked completely pristine.

All of it looked pristine, really.

But so do go and take a look if you're ever in watching DC and you're a Shirley Jackson fan.

But is is 1 sided correspondence.

Shirley Jackson didn't keep copies like Agatha Christie and certainly her agents and everyone did.

So you, you get this sense of all these people writing to her and often because they just said, you know, how much they've enjoyed their books.

But one recurring thing was school children.

Yeah, school children writing to her all the way through her career, often saying how scared they've been by The Haunting of Hill House or indeed by the lottery.

But what was quite sweet and and a little bit odd the first time I saw one, is that people were writing to her after she died.

So she died in 1965 and almost the 1st letter I saw was dated in 1967.

It was saying, you know, from a school child who was saying that they were doing a report, I think on the Haunting of Hill House and wanted to ask some questions or something.

And I think that that's, that's a bit of a reminder of how used we are.

We're very used to having immediate information.

Oh yeah.

But also that even at that point, her legacy was still going.

You know, there were still people discovering her at that point before she became a sort of, you know, a legacy writer a little bit, you know, classics.

So.

So I thought that was quite interesting.

How many people wrote to her.

Women and children seem to be the people I saw writing to her the most to say how much they'd enjoyed her work.

Yeah.

I wonder too if, and this was part of the point of the project, but I wonder if the publication the year after that in 1968 of come along with me and are kind of mopping up of various collected writing.

That's her last book.

Is it come?

Along Come Along With Me is her final unfinished novel, Yes, which we'll talk about in a bit.

But that and various other bits were published the year after you were talking about, and I wonder if that helps.

Yeah, almost mislead people that she's still around, perhaps, or, or certainly keep her in the public eye, which was part of the intention.

So we're going to have a short discussion in terms of genre.

Like I say, I think that is one way in which both writers are are lauded but also arguably restricted.

So in terms of Shirley Jackson.

Yeah, so, so Gothic tradition I think would be fair to say definitely, but not always.

But that seems to be the thing that she gravitates back to, which of course then means that that's the thing that people associate with her emotion.

Of course, Agatha Christie, it's whodunnit, although they they borrow from other genres, even within books we might say who done it?

You might have the bits and gothic and so on.

So quite difficult if you really know their sort of Canon.

Both of these authors, I think as reader you go or they do loads of different things.

But as a casual reader, someone who doesn't perhaps has only read a couple of the most famous ones, you would think, oh, that's the sort of thing that this person always writes.

Yeah, and I think we've got to be careful not to because I think it would be very easy to appoint at superficial similarities between their works and read them as the two writers sharing DNA directly, when actually it's that the two disciplines that they're writing in share a lot of DNA.

So things like the unity of time and place, you know, isolating a group of characters, be it in And Then There Were None or The Haunting of Hill House.

Well, and Then There Were None is pretty gothic and horror anyway, but as in, but that's kind of the point.

Do you know what I mean?

It's it's a feature of both genres rather than, you know, we're not positing that, that Shirley Jackson was in part inspired by something like And Then There Were None when writing Haunting of Hill House, because they're just writing in similar traditions.

Yes, yes.

And we'd said in the horror episode, I think when we discussed Shirley Jackson briefly then, that you can really see in the 1960s, which of course, what we're most concerned with, that Agatha Christie is really looking to the dark side.

You know, the darker side of her writing is coming out slightly more ruthless, almost sort of more sadistic characters.

I think that you see in it where people seem to take pleasure in being unpleasant.

And more consistently as well.

You've got The Pale Horse, You've got Endless Night, You've got Pricking of My Thumbs, You've got Halloween Party.

That's a good chunk of the novels that we look at between 59 and 71 that are on that end of the scale.

And we've said many times before and we'll say it again, that Christie is quite horrific in her writings before that point and indeed after that point.

But there is some, there is a particular saturation around our period, isn't there?

Yeah.

Because they're, they're both really funny writers, Jackson and Christie.

But I wonder if the way I characterise it is that Jackson's humour is sort of darker, more cynical, yes.

Whereas Christies is almost, well, it's kind of woodhousing, isn't it?

Which is, as we know, PG Woodhouse, A big inspiration for her.

Yes, more satirical and whimsical perhaps.

Yes, yes.

And often, certainly by the time we get to the 60's, the comedy is often about, it's almost a little sort of stand up.

Can you believe that they've done this?

Isn't it crazy observation how it works?

Yeah, very observation.

Yeah, that is true.

I also thought, I mean, it's part and parcel, I'd guess, of being big kind of cultural figures, and they're not alone in this.

But I think there is a predilection both in terms of Shirley and Agatha, for situating them within stories that resemble their own making.

So for Christie, I'm thinking things like Murder by the book, the telefilm where Poirot comes back from the dead, confront Agatha Christie.

Or something like the Shirley film with Elizabeth Moss, where it's putting Shirley Jackson inside a sort of creepy Horror Story of the ilk that she would have written.

And there's something about the way that we digest cultural figures like them both that that it almost needs to put put them in that arena that fits best for them somehow.

Yeah, I noticed how often Shirley Jackson, when we're going through press cuttings in DC in the in the files, how often she's referred to as a witch or even like the the literary witch being put up as a headline in one of the articles which claimed that she was a practising witch, which excited to.

Is that right?

You said?

No, I think that might be a bit of a yeah, an extrapolation, shall we say, from from that.

OK, so should we go through Shirley's works then?

Casual now.

Okay, so shall we go through Shirley Jacksons work?

Very casual.

I didn't.

I didn't realise you've been introduced.

To earlier look, I am British, we or very British, unbelievably British, whatever the our server said yesterday.

Just so.

British.

So British how she didn't realise I was following behind her.

Anyway, yeah, so let's run through Ms Jackson's works and draw out some Agatha Christie comparisons.

Especially, of course, only swinging Christie ones put ourselves back into our era.

So first up, her first published novel, The Road to the Wall from 1948, didn't actually just say.

It yeah, yeah, I thought it'd be nice to do the little one liners like we do for the.

I see.

OK for the Christie books, so yes.

OK, So for The Road Through the Wall, The Road Through the Wall is a 1948 novel about the dark side of an upper middle class neighbourhood.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I use it twice.

I don't know.

I think you do, don't you?

Yes, I do in and.

Out God, I should know by now.

Anyway, so Ruth Franklin, I I shouted her out in the intro, but she's the most recent and and phenomenal literary bug for of Shirley Jackson's, and she calls The Road Through the Wall the least spooky of all her books, which I think is probably true.

Yeah, you read it recently.

I did.

So when we started to talk about doing this, I was like, yeah, I love Shirley Jackson.

And then I realised I'm one of those people.

Like when you meet someone said I love Agatha Christie.

Like what have you read?

Oh, I don't know one or two.

And I've only read The Haunting of Hill House.

We've always lived in the castle and the lottery and a few short stories in the lottery collection as well.

And both the novels I read years ago as well.

So I was like, oh, I've got to go back and actually read some of these.

So there's a couple of these I haven't got around to yet, but I did read this one very, very recently.

And I, I really noted how this thing about the fear of the outside is something that we often get in Agatha Christie novels, obviously, where it's about, has someone come in and broken, you know, our country house, our village, our island, wherever we are, that sort of closed circle.

But of course, usually in Agatha Christie, it's someone in the closed circle who actually is the, the, the person you should be fearful of.

And it's the same here really, that actually the fear is about, well, what's beyond this, the wall that is keeping a neighbourhood together or away from, from other people.

But actually that ends up being what the, the issue is.

And that's much more troublesome.

That's much more difficult for people to deal with than the idea that a madman has come, you know, an axe murderer has wandered in and doesn't terrible things in in your sort of village or town or city.

So there's a wall, a literal wall, but it isn't keeping people safe in this community.

But the big difference with Christie is that there is a murder, but it's not really properly investigated here.

And it's actually about the sort of impact and the way that people immediately try to find a way to say, oh, it must be that person, must be this few.

Now we don't have to think about it anymore.

So it's about societal reactions.

Yeah, although that is quite Christie, because many people observe and we may well have done so on the podcast as well.

I'm we're at the point now we're on episode like 20 something.

So I'm losing track of what we've said and what we haven't and what we've said, you and I, I just over dinner one day and then what, what we said when the mics are on.

But many people observe that that Christie's concern is with preserving the lives of the innocent rather than you know, and and the question of guilt hanging over the innocent parties that are left behind.

And ordeal by innocence, we.

Might well quite, which is, which is sort of what you're saying here about this title.

It reminded me a bit of picnic, a hanging rock.

I don't know if you've.

Yes, I saw that in the notes you put down.

I have not read it, but I do want to.

Yeah, so it's a book, a famous film as well.

But the whole point, and the reason why some people find it a bit frustrating is that you don't really get an answer to the disappearance of these girls, Right, Right.

Because it's not really about that.

Well, that's what the whole thing that happens right at the beginning, then the whole of the book is well, what happened to them.

But there's also a way the community turns on each other, and the one who who comes back from the nick is treated very poorly because it's like, why did you come back?

And so there was that.

It's all about the after effects.

And I think some people, probably including me, if I didn't know about it, might read Picnic a Hanging Rock and initially play a bit frustrated because you want an answer.

But the author was actually very much recommended to not give an answer that made it less interesting as a novel.

So yeah, that that that struck me.

Shirley Jackson said that people's first novels are about getting back at their parents.

I don't think that's true of Agatha Christie, by the way, although we might say that of some of our Westmacott's.

But there is definitely this insularity and closed mindedness, which Shirley Jackson noted in her parents, but very much was not a Shirley Jackson trait.

So I think that's quite interesting, the fact that she's using this as a little pedestal to say God, isn't this abhorrent the way that people just treat others?

Yeah.

Are there no grounds to say that snow upon the desert is getting back at her parents at all?

Are there any?

Parents.

No, no, that's far too whimsical.

And besides, she's probably a bit too young.

Maybe.

I don't know if you're 17 and 18 to get back at your parents.

Oh, no.

Loads of 17 and 18.

I want to get back.

True.

Maybe not so much for her.

No, she's no that.

That's that.

But there's not much there.

Not unless she's ever been stopped going out with, you know, a redheaded young man who didn't seem.

Quite possible, yeah.

In terms of our swinging titles, what the The obvious comparison that sort of jumped out of me was between The Road Through the Wall and The Clocks.

The Clocks is a Poirot novel about espionage and an unidentified body from 1963.

Specifically, I'm thinking about the that brilliant opening, very lengthy descriptions where Jackson is introducing every family in every house and, and the kind of epic scale of that and scanning through all these different lives really is very much, I think, writing in the same mode that Christie was writing in when introducing the the Wilbraham Crescent in the clocks.

Which you've always really liked that sort of introduction to in the present.

And she doesn't always do.

Sometimes we meet people as they crop up in the story and sometimes Christie's are very much setting the scene at an important point at the moment.

But then, but my big thing about the clocks is that, you know, it is, it is a radical revision of the traditional circle of suspects because instead, usually, traditionally they would all be in one house.

And now they're all in a dozen houses on a, on a more sort of work a day basis.

Because this is, of course, the decade that gives us Coronation Street and Crossroads and the rest of it.

So basically back to Cross.

I was going to say, yeah, basically, who would have thought that I could draw a Direct Line from Shirley Jackson to Crossroads?

But there I did it.

I did it and I'm proud of it.

All you need is a British Gay and it'll find the way to a soap opera for everything.

So let's talk about her short stories a little bit, in particular the lottery, because that's was at the time, I think the correspondence we looked at in DC and remains such a high point of her career.

Yeah, and she she starts to get a bit annoyed by people talking about it so much that it didn't give her other works room to to be discussed or to breathe or to be acknowledged on their own terms.

Yeah, definitely mentioned several times in the interviews we read today.

Weren't.

There, Yeah, are there Does does Chrissy have this a similar gripe about always being known as the mouse trap person or I?

I I don't think so.

No, I don't think so.

She I know that she was always a bit nonplussed about how much people adored murder of Roger Ackroyd and obviously she got fed up with Poirot.

I guess is the closest equivalent.

Well, and she often when she writes those little lists of her own favourite titles, she'll pick out titles that aren't really the critics favourites or the fans favourites.

But she's so I guess inadvertently she's sort of going, I don't know what all the fuss about there, but what about the moving finger?

I thought that was a really good one, you know, OK, in terms of one liner for The Lottery.

The Lottery is a 1948 short story about a community's shocking annual tradition.

So the lottery is really widely read in US schools.

I noticed when I was I I didn't really know this until we were researching this episode, but when you Google it, it's almost the 1st result of sort of study guides to it and stuff.

And I noted how often people say I read this in school and apparently it is widely read in American schools.

I don't know if it still is.

Tell me readers, by all means if it still is.

And it reminded me of, I remember reading in school, The Landlady, which is a Roald Dahl short story which I'm not going to summarise now other than to say it's got a similarly very dark conclusion.

And it struck me that that's exactly the sort of reading you do give a group of 13 or 14 year olds is something that feels really adults.

There was a short colour film made of it, an educational film really, that you could hire out to schools that we watched the other night.

And I noted in the YouTube comments people saying I'm still traumatised by the time Mr.

Smith showed this to me and not surprised it is.

I mean, the story, the original, the source material is incredibly traumatising, but the way that was shot, it was quite, quite bleak as well.

Yeah, very bleak.

Very bleak.

I recommend if you haven't seen it, it's easily findable on YouTube.

So, so yes, clearly it's still something that still traumatises students today.

Yeah, yeah.

And we won't give away the the shock ending of The Lottery because I do think it it has to be read to be believed.

And it's funny, when we were watching that film version, I did say I'm one of those people that thinks that the wind is taken out of Roger Ackroyd's sail slightly when you know the conclusion in a way that I don't feel about Endless Night, for example.

But I do feel that about the Lottery as well.

I do think it's you can't.

And it's a compliment really.

I'm saying you, you can't bottle that feeling of reading it for the first time and experiencing that twist for the first time.

But it is, it's very much, I mean, Christie dabbles in shocking de Newmons too, but it's very much not a gathering in the drawing room kind of de Newmont.

It's it's something a lot more vicious.

Yeah, well, it reminds me of some of Christie's early short stories in particular, which so we're not in this era, but she didn't really write short stories in the 60s.

But but they have this short sharp shock and they're actually they're not just, you know what, this could be a novel length story shrunk down into miniature.

But the whole structure of it is about leaving you gasping at the end going and then that's it.

And I thought the witness for the prosecution short story in particular is one that that does this leaves you to really fill in a lot of the blanks.

And of course, the place fantastic a bit better if anything.

But that, as a short story really is, is fantastic.

I think I, I, I strongly believe that the best short stories are those ones that, and it is a very common mode of writing for short stories.

I've sifted for many years for the National Short Story Awards and done it for a couple of years actually, because I've been busy podcasting.

Oh, such a drain on your time.

Sorry, NSSA, but but yeah, the ones that always really appeal to me were those ones that that that managed to to really leave that impression on you at the end.

Read the whole short story collection with the lottery at the end of it and we won't go through all the others because it'll be an extra long episode if we did that.

But the, the one thing that struck me generally was this thing about and the way that the stories were sold to magazines.

So it's, it's the same as Agatha Christie, same as Shirley Jackson, is that different magazines would have slightly different specialisms.

They might say, oh, this isn't right for us because we don't think our female readers are like this or there's not enough interest for our male readers or whatever.

But the idea that Shirley Jackson's stories, which are quite sort of oblique in lots of ways, they really require interpretation.

They're not very plot heavy the way that they could be just be sold in these magazines.

So I'm sure The New Yorker was selling millions of copies at this point because it was really at its peak.

The idea that you would distribute these stories that are really requiring you to think just blows my mind because it's so different to the way that literature is packaged now.

Yeah, That you just wouldn't take that sort of chance.

I guess, I guess there isn't the the emphasis on it being plot driven because like you to to quote you back at you, because there's this emphasis on it being a short sharp shock.

So there isn't, there's the same need to sustain a reader through, you know, for example, multiple installments in a serialisation or or if it's a longer novel, to keep the reader all the way through to the end, because it is.

Her stories are very much about small towns and small mines, so reminiscent of her first novel.

Lots of petty squabbles, lots of 1 upmanship.

More than one story is really just about women in particular actually trying to to sort of show off to another woman.

That, that, that sense of competition and, and being, I mean, that's the lottery again though, isn't it?

But everyone being kind of against each other.

Well, before we just say goodbye to the lottery for now, I did notice that she was asked in one of the newspaper articles right at the beginning.

They said the Lottery's perhaps the most famous US short story of the past 15 years.

This is from 1962.

This interview, you've been identified with it to the exclusion of your other work.

Do you ever wish you hadn't written it?

And Shirley Jackson says yes, although I'm proud of it, of course.

So you think, yeah, that's fair enough.

You know, I can understand that.

I've got to say, well, I just think if you've got one hit, gosh, what an amazing thing.

But I can imagine that frustration, especially at the beginning of your career.

Yeah, so many articles that we read did refer to her age.

It is.

It did struck me that if you're being charitable, you'd say she is trying to align her as some sort of enten you.

But then if you're being uncharitable, you'd say that it's that thing of women, women's age being of particular in a way that no, I couldn't tell you how old Stanley Hyman, her husband is.

And indeed nothing made reference to that.

I had a similar clipping from the New York Post in 64.

Shelly was asked an event about the lottery and she said I hate it.

I've lived with that thing 15 years.

Nobody will ever let me forget it.

It is tagged along after me most of my professional life.

People keep asking what it means.

OK, on to hangs a man.

Which I haven't read, I'm just starting to read now.

So you're going to have to take the lead, although I do know a bit about it.

OK, but you're going to take the lead here.

So Hangs a Man is a 1951 novel about a young woman's coming of age and descend into madness at an American College.

So we have talked about this in in our research, but it's it's quite well known that Hangs a Man is inspired by a real life case.

So, you know, Agatha Christie did this from time to time as well, taking inspiration from in your life cases, I guess, most famously Murder on the Orient Express.

But in this case, Shirley Jackson was inspired by the real life disappearance of Paula Jean Weldon.

Who who I I did know this case before, actually before.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

That she went for a hike one full day and never returned.

It says here.

So that's sort of the whole of the mystery, which is what makes it again, it's a bit of a picnic hanging rock thing, like, because that's the whole of the mystery.

It's it's, you can fill in a lot of blanks there and really imagine what that story was.

Yeah, so there was actually a clipping about Paula's disappearance in the OH.

Yes, there was.

Yeah, in the folders that we looked at, I'm looking at now.

So the obvious draw for Shirley, apart from the fact that it was a mystery to be solved, was that she had gone missing from Bennington College, which is where Stanley and Shirley lived by this point.

So it's a really awful story and one that that very directly influences and very Jackson was open about the fact that that was her influence for this novel as well.

I think for our purposes, for our project, the most interesting thing about Hangs a Man is that it's almost a Christie nursery rhyme type title.

The the hangs a Man of the title as depicted on many of the covers.

Covers that could easily be covers for the pair, horse, or maybe even cards on the table.

So Next up 1954 is The Bird's Nest.

The Bird's Nest is a 1954 novel about the fractured life of a young woman with multiple personality disorder.

I don't know why you went quieter.

No, Well, I I was trying to be more intimate.

You see, 'cause you're like whispering.

Someone did say to me that when they someone who listens said when they come up, they feel like I've like come up to their shoulder.

Did you?

Know.

Yeah, The clocks.

So The Bird's Nest is another brilliant novel by I mean, I actually don't think she has a bad novel in her, Shirley Jackson.

But what I want to draw out here in particular is in The Bird's Nest at the end of Chapter 1, we've been introduced to Doctor Ryan, who knows the protagonist, Elizabeth's aunt, and he's a bit creepy.

I mean, he's not addressing stuff directly to Elizabeth, even though they're talking about Elizabeth, which is very much the misogyny of medical practises at the time.

But it still reads as kind of disjointed.

But he is a known entity.

He's got this kind of stamp of recognition because the aunt already knows him.

Then you turn the page, you go straight into Chapter 2, and it's from the perspective of somebody called Doctor Wright and his patient Miss R And then you're going, so is this Elizabeth, because Elizabeth is Elizabeth Richmond?

We're kind of immediately on the back foot as readers.

And then a few paragraphs or a couple of pages in, maybe we're told that Doctor Ryan referred her to Doctor Wright and it's clarified that this is Elizabeth, but he's calling her Miss R and her behaviour is different.

She reads like a different character.

And, you know, maybe if you're not so familiar with Jackson's work, you're given to thinking, is this a bit of a mistake in the kind of continuity of her characterization?

And, and the doctor keeps saying to her things like, are you afraid of me, Miss R?

And we from then on throughout the rest of the novel, we jump from personality to personality as different factions of Elizabeth's life really is presented as different characters.

It's really startling stuff.

It's brilliant.

But it reminded me so vividly of the Doctor Stillingfleet section in 3rd Girl.

3rd Girl is a Poirot novel set in swinging London about a young woman who thinks she may have committed a murder from 1966.

So in that book we have Norma Restorick, who's one of the main characters, one of the titular girls.

And it's I go back on about this all the.

In fact, I think we've spoken about this on the previous episode, but specifically it's that disorientation you feel after she's so she's been run down by a Jaguar, I think it is specified as and she comes to this abrupt return of to consciousness after the accident, her brain fog clearing start of a new chapter and she doesn't have a clue what's happened to her.

And it's like, is she on drugs?

Is she imagining this?

And Doctor Stinningfleet feels maybe a bit distant and and and in some ways a bit creepy.

Although similarly with the Doctor Ryan situation, I think a dedicated reader, a long time reader might be given to trusting him more because he is actually a returning character in Christie, right?

He's had a couple of appearances before, yes.

It says there's a moving finger, isn't there?

Because a big part of this book, Birds Nest is about letters being written to, you know, our protagonist to Miss R or Elizabeth.

And it's revealed pretty obviously, if you know, it's multiple personality disorder, that she's writing them to herself.

Or indeed other other, yeah, other factions of herself.

Absolutely, yeah.

Which I it's A twist that I've seen a few times and things since actually in like I think TV murder mysteries and stuff like that.

Or maybe if there's an if there's a famous book that I forgot and let me know because I feel there is another one that does this.

But of course in the moving finger, that is one of the things that is considered quite rightly too, is that if you're writing letters that especially horrible, then sometimes people do do it for attention and write themselves.

And that again does have precedence in history.

I think, in that our sleuths catch on, that it would be a good way to obscure you as the culprit.

No to to write 1 to.

Yourself, because then it doesn't rule, you know, and it doesn't rule you out at all to the fact that you've received a letter, I guess.

But if you hadn't received a letter, it might look very obvious that you were the one that had written them.

It's funny you should say that actually, because I was thinking about the moving finger in terms of the way it describes that that community when we were just talking about the road through the wall.

And actually that's only what that's 43 and then the road through the wall is 48.

So it it they feel of a piece in that way.

In the business there is a film of it which we've got a copy of and we haven't got around to watching yet.

So it's on our to watch list of things to do if Greg can stay awake till the end because he's one of those people that struggles.

Jet lag?

How many more times?

How long can be jet lagged for?

So our next novel is the Sundial from 1958, which I've read nothing of and I know nothing of and other than how you described it to me the other day, yes, which is pregame.

Give me a one liner then so that I can learn about the.

Sundial So the Sundial is a dystopian novel about the Halloran family locking themselves up in their big house for the impending apocalypse from 1958 or.

Can we join them now?

Are they still there?

It's a big house.

I'll have a.

Wing Yeah, you, you, you will love this book.

It's probably, I'd say the most Christie Ish.

Actually, yeah, well, it sounds premise wise.

Yeah, absolutely.

So Shirley Jackson obviously writing about the apocalypse, This is at a time, this is after the the first testing of a hydrogen bomb that's 54.

We've just, it was finished just before the launch of Sputnik, which happens in 1957.

And we talked about these kind of looking to the skies and these these Cold War fears extensively, particularly in our Armageddon episode.

But that's the world that Christie is writing in in the 50s and 60s.

And it's very much the same world that Shirley Jackson's writing in.

In fact, maybe Jackson would even have been more acutely aware of those things as, as we say, someone who not only was in the kind of intelligentsia circles more, but also in America more, which obviously was a sort of more, not that Britain wasn't engaged in the Cold War, but America was more central.

So should we say, in terms of the power blocks?

But yeah, very much like responding to the Cold War, as Christie does in books like The Clocks or Passengers of Frankfurt.

And Stanley Hyman, Shirley Jackson's husband, insisted that the dark visions found in Jackson's work were not, as some critics claimed, the product of personal or even neurotic fantasies, but rather comprised a sense.

I'm quoting out a sensitive and faithful anatomy of the Cold War era in which she lived, fitting symbols for a distressing world of the concentration camp and the bomb.

And that's, I mean, that's very much what we've been arguing for Christie for for episodes on end, which is these people are incredibly bugged into the world.

It's very easy for some people to say that genre exists in a vacuum and it's just not true.

That's where the anxieties that get funnelled into genre conception and creation come from.

So I want to talk a little bit about the titular sundial.

So it's in the Halloran House grounds and it's inscribed.

What is this world?

Hilarious Because as you very well know, my catch phrases, what a world, what a world.

There's several people who know me are listening to that and rolling their eyes.

We're told that Mister Halloran, who is the patriarch, I should say, who, who dies before the book's opening, and I believe the book opens with them all coming back from his wake to the house.

We're told that he would have preferred the inscription to be the moving finger.

Writes and having writs.

Ding Ding, Ding, moving finger again, how funny.

But that is a quote from the The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is of course where Christie gets the quote.

Moving finger as well.

Snow.

Upon the desert.

And now upon the desert and.

Several other things too, yeah.

And you spoke about the arguable influence of the Somerton man.

Oh yes.

On the clocks and he was said to have.

A copy of it, wasn't it?

Absolutely, yes.

Abstract from it, yes.

Yes.

And again, I think we spoke about that in.

An earlier episode, Yeah, it's been a while.

Yeah, I was going to say I'm again, but I don't think it was.

I think it was.

Early it might have been because it was Cold War and Spy I.

Know, but I thought it was earlier on in the run I.

Thought it feels like it was early.

Isn't that money?

Or we'll find out.

Anyway, an earlier episode.

Now listen to them all again.

Yeah, listen to all of them.

Looking for this reference Gems Food Star Listenership.

That would be great.

As you may have already garnered, it's set almost entirely within this old house, this mansion.

And it hasn't escaped critics notice that starting with the sundial, each of Jackson's final three completed novels begin and end with a house.

In fact, all have a house as their as their locus sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, famously.

And then we have always lived in the castle, both of which we're going to go and speak about.

But yeah, it struck me that so we've we've got the wall around the Halloran estate.

We've got that wall through the estate as you just spoke to us about.

We've got the rural remoteness of Hill House.

We've got that fence around the Blackwood mansion in Castle.

You know, the feeling of that, the kind of pull of the house and the fact that the house is hard to escape.

And, and it being the centre of our action.

Again, it's it's not something that's unique to Christy and Jackson, but it's very much a Christie esque trick.

Yes, Endless Night, among others spring to mind.

Yes.

So then we move on to.

Speaking of haunted houses.

Yes, The Haunting of Hill House.

The Haunting of Hill House is a quintessential haunted house novel published in 1959.

It's very much left open at the end, I feel.

As to what?

Yes, which which what was going on, I'll say in a minute because I think this is influential for the film.

But yeah, so I completely agree, OK.

So like all good ghost stories, there's very much that that sense of yeah, whether goes real where there some sort of refraction or projection of Eleanor's kind of adult mind.

And I think this might be a really compelling point of divergent between the two of them.

And we've kind of talked about this just between us before, which is that stories like the Pale Horse and Halloween Party, and even by the pricking of my thumbs and endless night, they they dabble in these quasi supernatural things, particularly the pale horse.

But we're not really left to wonder if there was some truth in that after all.

No, because Christie being Christie, she does tend to like to resolve those threads and give a rational explanation.

Not always, but certainly in those swinging examples I've just given.

Yeah.

So that's that's possibly a a major point of convergence in terms of the film you.

Yes.

So I was really intrigued to read that Shirley Jackson told the film's writer and director that that it was definitely a supernatural story because actually the initial draught, initial ideas were much more about the ideas that one possibility was that Eleanor was actually in a mental institution and that the supernatural events were her warped perception of the treatment she was receiving.

And this partially explains why it's perhaps called The Haunting rather than Haunting of Hill House the movie.

That is because the Haunting might be of Eleanor, not of.

That yes.

Yeah, but apparently Shirley Jackson told no.

It's definitely haunted.

Yeah.

And I think in a way that's kind of maybe she felt like she'd already been there, done that, because that's kind of what the bird's nest is.

Yes, that's true, but I think this idea of it being warped perception and you're right is bird's nest, but it's also quite 3rd girl, isn't it?

Very much so all the.

Roads lead back to 3rd girl.

So this was a critical and financial success, a lot more so than the first 3 novels of Shirley Jackson's, which didn't earn out their advances.

And the movie rights were also sold.

And that's always a big source of income for any any writer.

Yeah, so the Haunting was released in 1963.

There's there's bits of it that's still very swinging.

It feels very 60s in some ways.

Claire blooms in it and she's dressed by Mary Quant.

So that's yes, swinging as you can get.

And also I noted when I looked up the location said it was filmed in the UK, specifically Borehamwood, which is where the Margaret Rutherford, Miss Marvel films were being made at the same sort of time.

And I'd forgotten until you said, oh, I wonder if they shared any sets.

I was like, oh, my God, they do because I didn't spot this.

This was someone on Twitter.

There are a couple of sets in it that are right at the beginning of Murder at the Gallop.

Yeah, same here.

Murder at the Gallop is a loose film adaptation of After the Funeral with Margaret Rutherford's Miss Marple from 1963.

Right at the beginning when Miss Marple and Mr Stringer make a make a call that obviously results in a dead body.

That staircase and the and also some of the doors are from the Haunting.

Yeah.

So there we go.

That's that's a big old crossover with us with.

Our world, I noticed, Ruth Franklin says By the time The Haunting opened on September 18th, 1963, Jackson could barely make it to New York for the premiere.

She had been housebound for more than a year, suffering from a debilitating combination of agoraphobia and colitis.

And it struck me, this is a quite a sad comparison, really.

But it kind of reminded me of the fact that that Christie kind of making it out to see the premiere of Murder on the Orient Express is, is one of her last, if not her last trip to London, isn't it?

And she's quite frail by that point and indeed dies not long after.

It's funny that that this point, the point at which their careers lead to these great cinematic successes, also being a point at which, you know, near the point at which they they bow out.

But this period in Shirley's career, as I say, we're sort of coming towards the end already, sadly.

But there is another point of interest here, which is so it's published in October 1959, which is so close to the publication, the UK publication of Cam on the Pigeons.

So right at the start of our timeline.

But also of interest to me, because it's one of the areas I've been looking at for a few other potential projects, is we said Jackson has a lot of correspondence.

There's pretty much only one fan that she really, really engages with and writes back and forth with for for quite some time, and that's a woman called Jean Beattie.

And that correspondence between this of them starts two weeks before Christmas 1959.

And then yes, we're heading into the 60s and, and sadly, Jackson won't see all of it, but we did see the BT letters at Washington, DC.

So I was very, very thrilled about that.

And I'm sure information from those will surface in.

Future project.

Yeah, exciting.

There's quite a lot of correspondence about the haunting, like I said earlier about the lottery and stuff that people writing to say that it was scary.

But the one that really noticed, I really noticed was somebody very politely just writing to say, oh, I found this book and I found it really interesting, but it wasn't marked as either fiction or non fiction.

And can you tell me if it's real or not?

Which I thought, you know, it's really testament, I guess to how, how well she wrote it.

Yeah, I like to think she replied with very short shrift though, like of course it's fictional or something like that.

Or indeed maybe didn't reply at all.

I mean, I think that's one of the reasons why June BT was so remarkable is that she she didn't often reply.

I similarly I had AI found a brilliant letter dated June 1960 from a reader called Jessica Silsby saying that they'd recently read The Haunting of Hill House and I feel an impulse to write to you re some very unusual supernatural happenings in my own life over some 20 years.

I feel I am by now quite an authority on the genuineness of such psychic phenomena.

And she goes on to elaborate on the epiphanies of eternal truth and her mother's passing and violent and destructive elements and the forces of life and death and whether or not the invisible world has been seen or heard.

It's quite a read, but it just goes to show that Jackson had her followers, and they were very much intrigued by the sort of supernatural worlds that she was inventing.

Just one final point, really, which was that there's a tiny, There's a bit of correspondence between Jackson and Carol Brandt, her agent in the late 50s, and where she's talking about how well her writing is going, which was unusual for Jackson, bless her.

And she chose just the perfect adjective for us, which is that she said, yes, Hill House is really swinging.

Oh.

Fantastic.

So we're now up to 1962 and we have always lived in the castle.

Yes, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the final published novel by Shirley Jackson, is the story of the Blackwood family who are mysteriously isolated from their local village.

From 1962.

This is called her masterpiece, although I contend Hill House and Lottery also variously get called that as well, albeit reviewers cited what they called a quote.

Usual confusion as to whether it's a whodunit or a horror.

Again, they just don't like it when they can't fit you neatly into a into a genre they.

Really don't.

I guess the great tragedy of Jackson is that this title, which is called her masterpiece by many contemporary reviews, is her last published complete book, as she died three years later.

In terms of our comparisons with Alex Christie, some are quite clear because this thing about, well, some of it's a whodunit sort of because the background to the story is that the sugar was poisoned at the family dinner.

And when the culprit is unmasked, which is not a final big revelation, by the way, It's not like you sit round and say, well, it happens or midway through through the book is actually, I think, confirmation rather than a revelation.

I think if you're a reader who's reading it properly, you can probably guess who actually was poisoning the sugar.

Well, not even guess.

When I was reading it, I had assumed that this was the way it was going to.

Happen.

Really.

Yeah.

See, I don't think I had guessed when I first.

Read it.

Oh, that's interesting.

But it's it is heavily implied or I think of an astute reader or certainly one that's used to that kind of mode of writing would be on notice.

Yeah.

I mean, maybe though it's because I'm thinking also sisterly relations we know from 5 Little Pigs and I don't want to give away too much about either of these books, but this whole thing about that, perhaps, you know, you want to do anything to protect your sister and at whatever cost, that sort of close bond and relationship.

That's really important to to both of those novels.

Yeah, I think Christie uses that a few times, doesn't she?

The idea that that you could poison a food stuff or a a drink or something in the in the knowledge that certain people that you want to target like that thing or will take that thing and certain people that you maybe don't want to target will not.

I think there are a couple of examples.

Yeah, there are.

But again, I'm not going to ruin it by saying no.

I thought when I was reading it that it's got this, I'm going to say timeless quality, which often means that that you can read at any point you like it, but the actual period in which it was sex, it's it's meant to be contemporary for the 60s isn't.

It.

I think so, yeah.

But it really feels to me like it could be 19th century.

Like in my head I was literally, you know, picturing the the girls in Victorian dresses and everything.

But for me, well imagine them being in the same world that a mini dress or a mini skirt.

Exists, but as we said that there was very much an aesthetic revival in terms of that kind of Victorian, Victorian garb.

So maybe that's what you're picking up.

I mean, I think there is you're supposed to believe that the family is kind of or that what's left of that family has kind of been frozen in aspect because of the traumatic events that have befallen.

And so, yeah, maybe that's also what you're picking up on.

It's sad.

So.

So after this, Jackson spends a couple of years struggling to write and struggling with her ill health.

She started writing a novel called Come Along With Me, which I keep wanting to say, come tell me how you live.

And I mean, maybe there's maybe there's grounds for for a thesis for comparison there.

But yeah, that's that's her unfinished novel, which is set contemporaneously.

So in the 60s.

It's a bit more comic.

It's a bit more in the style of her kind of living biography, memoir typewriting, like life among the savages and raising demons.

And it's concerns the protagonist who runs away after the death of her husband, which I can't help but wonder might have been a little bit of wish fulfilment for for Shirley Jackson.

But I'll part that that comment there.

But yeah, she died with just 75 pages of it written in August 1965, which is just between the publications in terms of Christie of Star over Bethlehem and at Bertram's Hotel and around the time of the Alphabet Murders coming out.

Oh.

Goodness, imagine if she'd gone to see that in the cinema.

It was the last thing you'd ever seen.

It's.

Probably for the best that she died having presumably not seen it.

Yeah.

And as I said, Stanley Hyman and her husband collected that and some other pieces of published and unpublished work in a volume Call, Come Along with Me, Which published in 68 and that we we read clippings from in the wake of that publication.

That was really well received and really, oh, was it and really and sold really well as well.

So there was clearly a lot of appetite for her writing still there, but she did not not live to see it, sadly.

Yeah, we, we spent a lot of time at this point thinking about Agatha Christie's legacy, really assessing it and and trying to understand it, I guess.

But what do we think Shirley Jackson's legacy is now?

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

So Elaine Showalter, apologies if I'm mispronouncing that.

It wrote a review of the Ruth Franklin biography, and she said Jackson's work is the single most important mid 20th century body of literary output yet to have its value reevaluated by critics.

And I do think there's something in that.

I remember many years ago my politics teacher said saying to me, I think I was probably bemoaning mural sparks lack of No, it wasn't.

I was talking to him about Dennis Potter because he he was a big Dennis Potter fan and and how it seemed like when Dennis Potter died, he was everywhere.

And and now people don't really talk about his work.

And I think there's political, sociopolitical problems with a lot of his work, which is maybe part of the reason.

But certainly at that point, what Mr Browning said to me was there is this period, often after an author dies, where the immediate reason for, you know, there's no new publications.

Obviously the immediate impetus for re evaluation or to have them at the at the forefront of the conversation has gone.

But it's too quick for a revival.

And I, and I wonder if we're in that period with Shirley Jackson slightly and, and hopefully she'll be rediscovered by a new generation very soon and come to even greater prominence.

This is not to say that she's unknown, but she's certainly not as well known as Christie.

And Christie's, by the way, the complete exception to the rule, isn't she, when it comes to, oh, someone usually dips in prominence a little bit after their death.

I mean, Christie just continued to get and has and still continues to get more and more and more popular.

So basically we're saying everyone's got to go and read Charlie Jackson.

Yeah, it's just not too much of a task.

No, there aren't as many novels as there are.

Christie's.

Or indeed Muriel Sparks.

And and that was really nice about the Muriel Sparks dark episode was that lots of people got in touch and said, Oh, I'm going to I'm going to pick that one up or, oh, I'm going to reread her or so yes, that's that's our encouragement.

And Christie fans will find a lot to love in the pages of Shirley Jackson for sure next time we're heading to Belfast.

Ah, very exciting, super exciting meeting up with Jan Carson, the writer, who's also a huge Agnes Christie fan.

That's why I'm going to Belfast, because I went last year to speak about my books and it was lovely.

It was such a nice event.

So I'm really pleased they've invited me back and I was like, well, while I'm there, I think that we've got something we might want to talk about.

So we're both going to meet Jan and have a chat.

And please do remember to rate and review us wherever you are listening to this.

It really, really does help us out to spread the word.

And your regular reminder that we do this for the love of it and just want to continue the conversation.

So please do, yeah.

And if there are any other writers you think should get the swinging bonus comparison treatment, let us know.

I think Lecari has been raised a couple of times and and I've been reading Lecari for the first time.

We were quite impressed.

Yeah, because I generally don't read books by men hang out really during Lecari.

But do let us know if you've got any other suggestions.

We've got a long list of things to do, but occasionally we like to to branch out something else.

If you want to follow us on Instagram, we're at Christie underscore time blue sky.

We are Christie time dot B sky dot social.

You can e-mail us at christietimeprod@gmail.com.

That's prod for productions.

Our website ischristietime.com.

Grey's website is Grey robertbrown.wicsite.com/grey Rob Brown and I'm also on Instagram at Doctor Mark Aldridge and on Blue Sky at markaldridge.info, which is also my website address.

And of course my books are out now, which you're very welcome to seek out or put on your Christmas lists if you're really early.

Why not?

Christmas list.

I think this is dropping in July.

Well, exactly, I did say if you're really early, you know you are good to be prepared.

Yes, be prepared and indeed keep swinging.

Thanks for listening.

In the words of another famous Jackson, Janet, it's all for you.

The Zoroo Christies is a Christie time project by Doctor Mark Aldridge and Grey Robert Brown.

This episode was recorded between the 21st and 24th of May 2025.

Our artwork was designed by Bartlett Studio and our music is by Dark Golan.

So The Haunting was released in 1963 and I was telling Grey that this is the only film that I can ever remember scaring me.

Which, given you're something of a horror specialist and must have seen a lot of creepy films in your time that that is.

That does surprise me, actually.

Yeah, it's, it's just, I remember watching it on ABBC 2-TV transmission and having to go downstairs at like midnight 14, I think, and just just finding that really, really creepy in a way that I'd never felt really scared after watching something before, but so there's.

My praise, I guess.

Well, I guess I think so.

It's a great film.