In today’s episode, Brook and Sarah discuss modern great and award winning author Lynda La Plante.
Discussed and mentioned
Widows (TV series 1983 and 1985) ITV
Prime Suspect (TV series 1991 to 2006) ITV
Above Suspicion (2004) Lynda La Plante
The Red Dahlia (2006) Lynda La Plante
Listening to the Dead (podcast 2020 to 2026)
The Circular Staircase (1908) Mary Roberts Reinhardt
For more information
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Transcript
This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.
| Sarah | Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah. |
| Brook | And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery. |
| Sarah | Hi, Brook. |
| Brook | Hi, Sarah. I am so looking forward to this conversation today about another modern great. |
| Sarah | Me too. we will be speaking about Lynda La Plante. And i I think there’s so much to say about her. |
| Sarah | Born as Lynda Titchmarsh in Liverpool in 1943, she is the second of three children from a working-class household. As a young girl, she started writing plays and pursued acting as she grew up, ultimately attending the Royal Academy for Dramatic Arts and then joining the Royal Shakespeare Company. She appeared in several TV productions in the 1970s, and during the same decade, her first screenplay was produced. Her breakout, Widows, appeared on UK screens in the early 1980s and was very popular. The premise is that widows of a criminal gang finished the job in which their husbands failed and died. |
| Sarah | Several other productions followed through the 1980s and early 1990s, and she is perhaps best known for Prime Suspect, a series starring Helen Mirren that aired in six, two-or-three episode installments between 1993 and 2006. |
| Sarah | While she was writing for television, she was also writing crime novels and has authored several series, including a series that are based on Prime Suspect and Widows. In total, she has written over 150 hours of television and over 30 novels, earning her the moniker of the Queen of Crime Drama. |
| Sarah | Her work has received several awards, including recognition from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, or BAFTA, an Emmy, a British Broadcasting Award, the Royal Television Society Writers Award, an Edgar Award, and a Women in Films Award. |
| Sarah | She was named a member of the Order of the British Empire, inducted as a Fellow of the Forensic Science Society, which acknowledged the accuracy of the forensic detail in her writing, and she is a recipient of the Crime Artists Association Diamond Dagger. So as I said, Brook, I think there is a lot to say about Lynda La Plante and her contribution to mystery. |
| Brook | There sure is. And um you and I were texting as we were reading to prepare. And I said to you, where has Lynda La Plante been my whole life? Because I definitely had that feeling of why have I not been reading her books? They are fantastic. |
| Sarah | They are so good. I’ve read from a couple of her series, one featuring Detective Chief Inspector Anna Travis. And a couple of books from her ah series that’s based on Prime Suspect. And she’s got a series actually that is before Prime Suspect as well. And those feature Jane Tennison. |
| Brook | So far, I’ve only read from the Anna Travis series. I started at the beginning because that’s what I like to do. And I read Above Suspicion and immediately started in on book two, The Red Dahlia. |
| Brook | Immediately from page one, I was just hooked and just drawn in. And I think it says a lot about the way she writes when you take into account her experience in her acting career and her training as a professional actor. Because I think that her stories are just so vivid and dramatic. i Those two things just have to go hand in hand for the reason that you’re just immediately drawn in, just like you’re watching a television show. |
| Sarah | I agree, Brook. I think she works very closely with experts. So not just forensic experts where, you know, I mentioned that she’d been recognized because I think she’s very careful about making sure that she’s accurate in terms of the way that that she talks about science. And so in Prime Suspect, that was that first aired when DNA was really emerging as a tool for police. And so, if you watch that first series or early series um of of Prime Suspect, there’s explanation of how DNA works and and how how the police can use it. |
| Sarah | But she’s continued that as she’s continued writing. So you know, using digital forensics, for example. um I listened to an interview with her where she talks about um that she makes it a point to go and speak to people who are similar to the people that she’s writing about. So she’s writing about a prisoner. She she tries and and speaks to someone who has experience in the prison system. If she’s, you know, if a character is a prostitute, she she speaks to prostitutes to really understand what it is that um that that makes them work. and And as you say, you really see that reflected in her writing. |
| Brook | It’s so neat Sarah because she recognizes how important it is for writers to get that firsthand information that she’s actually now doing a podcast called Talking to the Dead and she said that it’s a way for writers to be informed or more informed about crime investigation. Maybe you’re not as brave of ah of an author as she is to go to the prison or meet with the murderer, but she brings on cops and scientists and, you know, arms specialists and different ah people to help inform other writers. And I just thought that was such a neat idea for her to do because it is something, it’s kind of a specialty of hers. |
| Sarah | Yeah, I agree. I think that that is a way for her to kind of give back to the writing community. um And also, I wonder if it isn’t born a little bit of frustration out of frustration with people who take some liberties with those facts. And I personally don’t have an issue with people doing that because i think it’s fiction and, you know, you’ve, you’ve got a lot of creative license, but I, I certainly can appreciate when someone has taken the time to do a lot of research and it’s reflected in their work. And I will say, um she does a great job of not overburdening the reader with that research, right? Because I have read where someone clearly has spent hours and hours meticulously researching how something um might might work in terms of a crime. And then they pour that into their book, but it’s pages and pages and pages. And you kind of get lost in the in this story. And she doesn’t do that at all. |
| Brook | Yeah, she finds such a great balance in providing the information, making it factual and realistic, but not not overburdening the reader. |
| Sarah | No, she keeps it very accessible. |
| Brook | Mm-hmm. That’s right. I also listened to an interview with her where she speaks on on her research. And I found it interesting because another part of the discussion, she was explaining that she really only started writing because she was really tired of being pigeonholed. And speaking of prostitutes, she said she thinks she’s had like 150 parts as the, you know, five seconds on screen television prostitute a role. It was really cute the way she explained that she was having these throwaway roles and she was tired of it and so she thought well let me try and write something and this was her first stab at Widows so i’m thinking like when you have uh ah When you have this change from being an actor into a writer, you might not expect this person who’s really just trying to get some better roles for women on television to take it so seriously and become this very careful researcher. She didn’t take the job lightly. She sort of turned into a journalist in a way, or the the skills of a journalist, I should say. |
| Sarah | Yeah, I think that’s ah that’s a fair assessment. And I think, you know, you mentioned, you know, she wanted to create roles for women. And Helen Mirren credits her career to Prime Suspect, right? um And i think that’s often, you know, when you hear Helen Mirren’s name, that’s often what what people associate her with. ah But she had… um several Several actors were cast early in their careers in productions or or in in productions that she had written. So Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, Paul Bettany, Ralph Fiennes, Idris Elba, all of them have had roles in in her productions. And there’s there’s probably others as well. |
| Brook | Yeah, definitely kicked off some careers. And, you know, I learned she’s very particular about who got cast. and And then she ends up, you know, creating her own production company so that she can retain that control. But, you know, she, in the same interview I listened to, she was laughing because they said, we found this great actor to play such and such character. And when she got there, she’s like, |
| Brook | if he can carry me over his shoulder down the stairs, then he can play this guy. But because they were just like, you know, he’s, he’s handsome. He looks good on screen. He’ll be great for this role. And she was wanted to make sure that in this particular story, the man would have been capable to do what the character actually does in the story. And I thought that was really interesting. But speaking of realism, Sarah, um It can be uncomfortable at times, right? These are not cozy mysteries. |
| Sarah | Not at all. I don’t know if I would say they’re gritty, yeah but they’re certainly not, they’re not light. And um I don’t know if you’ve watched any of of Prime Suspect, but um even the way that it’s filmed, it’s dark. |
| Sarah | right? The, the, the lighting, um, treatment is so that it’s, it’s darker. You know, if you think about something that is part of me, if you think about something that is a, uh, lighter, cozy, mystery on television, the colors are a little bit more vibrant. You don’t get that in Prime Suspect. It’s dark. |
| Brook | Exactly. So to kind of portray that feeling of this very realistic storytelling, her books don’t minimize the brutality of murder. She’s going to write about crime scenes and autopsies.As we’ve mentioned, very specific forensic details. So I think that’s important for readers to know. like These stories are fantastic, but they are much more realistic. |
| Brook | I don’t think she does this for any shock value, though, because she’s really talking about the cost and the emotional weight that these crimes create, not just for the victim and the victim’s family, but you know you see it in the police officers of what they have to go through. |
| Sarah | I agree, Brook. It’s not gratuitous, right? Like there is ah ah a place and a purpose for all of the detail that she provides. And as you say, there’s a lot of time spent on what is the what is the impact on all of the people around the crime? |
| Sarah | When I was researching her, um I drew a parallel to Mary Roberts Reinhardt and the way that Reinhardt had you know used and reused her IP. I think ah Lynda La Plante has done the same thing because you know she’s the books the first book in the Prime Suspect series came out the same time as the film or sorry the same time as the the television production. |
| Sarah | um And I think, I don’t know if she wrote Widows first and then started writing books in that world. ah And for Widows, there’s an American version that was produced in the early 2000s and there was a film 2018. So she’s so she’s reimagining some of that work and with Prime Suspect there’s a series that takes place before ah she becomes DCI you get the to see the early parts of Jane Tennyson’s career um and I just think it’s really interesting that she hasn’t limited herself to the the first story that she’s thought of in um in the various characters that she’s created. |
| Brook | Oh, that’s such a cool parallel with a Golden Age author who did something really, really similar, Sarah. That’s, that’s a great point that I hadn’t thought of. um But I think that it, but it does tie in to this idea that I’ve been thinking about that she really takes writing as her job, right? |
| Brook | She talks about discipline and structure and deadlines. She really looks at it as a job and a business. And so there she uses her IP, as you say, and She uses her IP in great ways to generate income. i mean She even says the reason she started writing crime was because that’s what she was commissioned to do. It paid the bills. And so um she doesn’t shirk away from that at all, even though I feel like it also doesn’t detract, that attitude doesn’t detract from the fact that these become very um artistic stories. |
| Sarah | Yeah, she she has struck a balance between that commercial success, but also craft, right? that the The stories are very, very good. um You know, I think there are people who are commercially successful, but they just churn out, you know, |
| Sarah | we talk about kind of reusing IP. I do feel like there are people who really don’t make that much of a variation from one story to the next. And I would say that that’s not the case with Lynda Laplante. Like her, i i haven’t read all of her works, but I also haven’t read something and thought, this is very, very similar to the last book that I read. Whereas with Mary Roberts Reinhardt, there was that element, right? She wrote the the Circular Staircase and then The Bat and then there was ah something else with the bat. |
| Brook | This is true. |
| Sarah | They were all very, very similar. um So she was reusing but also not reinterpreting her her IP where I think what what Lynda LaPlante is doing is building her IP. |
| Brook | Yeah, there’s with the prequels and the spinoffs, there’s this large world of, of that she’s created. |
| Brook | And I think that it’s fantastic that she’s still going strong into her and she’s in her eighties now, I believe. And the, the, uh, interview that I listened to, she was in her late seventies and, um, she was still publishing a book a year. And she mentioned how, um by the time one book comes out, she’s basically got the next one ready. |
| Brook | So she definitely has, there’s that disciplined system and structure to her production. And, you know, I am someone who didn’t start publishing until my forties. And so this gives me a lot of hope. Like there is a lot of time to continue writing. |
| Sarah | Yeah absolutely she has a book that came out this year so it’s 2026 uh i she’s got another book that’s already on pre-order for 2027 so yeah she is still working very hard as you say she’s in her 80s and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. um In the interview that I listened to she talks about that she spends a lot of time working out the plot. |
| Sarah | So I think she’s a plotter rather than a a discovery writer. ah But she also said, and I think this speaks to the discipline that that you were mentioning, Brook, she will write for hours, like sit in her chair for 10 hours writing. So I think once she gets started, she like the story just pours out of her, ah which is you know pretty impressive. |
| Brook | That’s fascinating. |
| Brook | We have also covered two other modern greats, Sue Grafton and Ruth Rendell. And I was thinking about how LaPlante, along with those two women, were growing their author careers at about the same time, but in different parts of the world. And how during that time period of mystery fiction, they really helped reshape the role of women because, um, Oh, let me take that. |
| Brook | And it was during this time in the history of mystery fiction that modern crime fiction became more realistic. you know, we’d had come out of the Golden Age and, and things were a little more sanitized, but so they were helping make this change. There’s more realism, a lot more emotional complexity, I think. |
| Brook | And then we have these fully realized female investigators. They, they, the the women in their stories aren’t like a quirky side character or the beautiful femme fatale. They are the drivers of the stories. And i I just think it’s so neat that this was happening. You know, you see like a movement and that that’s kind of what was going on in the eighties and nineties in mystery fiction, that these female authors were then like ah making, help make these change in the, in the genre. Yeah. |
| Sarah | Yeah, I think that’s a great observation, Brook, and a great connection to draw between those authors. And they’ve all heavily influenced the genre, as you say, with these strong female characters that they wrote about. |
| Brook | Even though their fiction is very different, like they, they ah all had their own spin, clearly, and their own brand. But I think it all three of them kind of took mystery fiction in that direction. |
| Sarah | Well, Brook, it has been so much fun to learn a little bit more about Lynda La Plante and her incredible career and the legacy that she continues to be leaving for this genre. |
| Brook | It has been great. And i look forward to reading many more of her books. But before we go, here’s your question of the week, listeners. Do you enjoy learning about real investigative techniques and forensic work in crime fiction such as Lynda La Plante’s books? |
| Brook | We’d love to hear your thoughts. Send us an email or come find us on Instagram and Facebook. But until next time, thank you for joining us on Clued in Mystery. |
| Brook | I’m Brook. |
| Sarah | And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery. |
