is actually based on a couple of cases. The case that it’s most similar to is the Shanda Sharer murder, which happened in the mid-1990s in the states. It also draws some points of similarity from the Suzanne Capper murder, which was also a mid-90s thing in the UK. But once I realised I was going to be drawing from those cases, I decided not to do any additional research. I was just using the rough bullet points that I remembered, rather than doing a direct fictionalisation.
TW: Do you think true crime is, to some extent, more palatable when establishment media reports on it, rather than Netflix or podcasters?For me, the most considered and interesting sort of true crime reporting has been in longform books that spend a lot of time with the victim and the broader sociopolitical context of the murder, which is something that a book gives you space to do, rather than just an hour of documentary, where you’ve got to get people to go on to the next episode, or an...
“Seaside towns feel like a place that is universal in the British psyche, and the way those spaces shifted in the last half a century felt like very fertile ground” – Eliza Clark Seaside towns are just very interesting and universal places. Everybody has been to one; if they haven’t personally lived in one, they might have had one that they visited when they were a kid. It feels like a place that is universal in the British psyche, and the way those spaces shifted in the last half a century felt like very fertile ground to pick apart and embellish. It did take years to work out properly. It felt like world building, almost a speculative fiction kind of exercise.