Scala Radio Book Club: One Puzzling Afternoon by Emily Critchley
The Indie Fiction Book of the Month for June
Penny Smith welcomed the author Emily Critchley to talk about her novel One Puzzling Afternoon which has been chosen by Independent Booksellers as the Indie Fiction Book of the Month.
It is 1951, and at number six Sycamore Street fifteen-year-old Edie Green is lonely. Living alone with her eccentric mother - who conducts seances for the local Ludthorpe community - she is desperate for something to shake her from her dull, isolated life. When the popular, pretty Lucy Theddle befriends Edie, she thinks all her troubles are over. But Lucy has a secret, one Edie is not certain she should keep...
Then Lucy goes missing. 2018. Edie is eighty-two and still living in Ludthorpe. When one day she glimpses Lucy Theddle, still looking the same as she did at fifteen, her family write it off as one of her many mix-ups. There's a lot Edie gets confused about these days. A lot she finds difficult to remember. But what she does know is this: she must find out what happened to Lucy, all those years ago...
Penny Smith opened the interview by asking Emily Critchley to outline the premise of her novel: ‘Now this is a whodunit, but your main sleuth is also battling other issues at the same time as trying to find out what happened. Just briefly outline what's going on.’
One puzzling afternoon is a mystery novel and it has a dual timeline. The novel begins when 82-year-old Edie Green goes to the post office one day to buy some stamps, and she sees standing outside the post office, her best friend from childhood, Lucy Theddle. Only Lucy looks exactly the same as she did in 1951. She's wearing her school uniform, she's carrying her violin case, and this confuses Edie and Edie gets quite confused a lot of the time nowadays. And this sets Edie off on this journey of tracking down various people from the past and trying to find out what happened to Lucy Theddle who disappeared in 1951. And I don't think I'm giving too much away because we learned fairly early on in the book that Edie is in the early stages of dementia. So, she wants to track down these people and find out what happened to Lucy before her own memories are a loss forever.
Penny Smith followed this with: ‘And along the way we learn all sorts of things that are going on and leading up to this disappearance. It's also an amazing evocation of what went on in the fifties, because of course things changed so much between the fifties and now.’
‘I was lucky actually, that I got to speak to a lady in her eighties who is a member of my book club, and I took some small details from her life. I learned from her about the education for women at that time, this lovely lady, her name was Ina, she wanted to go and study to become a teacher, but her father said: “no, I’m not having you doing that”. And in the end, he relented, with some persuasion from her mother and a teacher at school. And they let her go to study domestic science, and I use this for Edie in the book. So Edie’s stepfather is very against her furthering her education at all, he thinks the local factory will be perfectly good for her until she gets a ring on her finger. But Edie is actually inspired by Lucy's dream of studying to become a teacher.’
Penny Smith asked Emily Critchley about how she researched dementia for her novel: ‘Did you talk to people with dementia, or have you got a bit more experience closer to home on that?’
‘I didn't have any close-to-home experience, and when I first began writing the novel, I didn't know that Edie had dementia, but when I was a couple of chapters in, I thought, she's getting very confused here. And I realized, I thought, “Oh gosh, she has dementia”. And then I felt a responsibility to get it right. So I read what I could online. Accounts of people living with relatives with dementia. And then I read a couple of memoirs. I read a wonderful memoir called Somebody I Used To Know by Wendy Mitchell about a woman who was working for the NHS and found that she had early-onset dementia. That memoir I found particularly helpful. And I also read the memoir of the writer, Iris Murdoch, written by her husband John Bailey, which is a lovely book, not just about dementia, but a lovely portrait of marriage.’
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