The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts

English screenwriter and novelist Robert Thorogood chats with Writer's Voices to discuss the fifth book in his *Marlow Murder Club* series, *The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts*. Set in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, England, the story follows Judith, Suzie, and Becks, the Marlow Murder Club trio, as they work to solve the mysterious deaths of two celebrities - a famous footballer and a bestselling writer. This time around, they don't have the assistance of their police connection DI Tanika Malik, so they must try to crack the case on their own. At the same time, Judith is trying to uncover another mystery, a case involving her own past. With regard to the TV adaptation of this book series, Thorogood, who also serves as an executive producer for the show, explains that there are limitations to what can be portrayed on the screen compared with what can be written in a novel. "You have a lot of control over a book... with a television episode, you are limited in the sense that it's sort of 45 minutes long, isn't it, if it's an hour. You're limited by the number of actors that you can hire. Because it's only 45 minutes, you generally don't have a second murder because they always take up time so there is constraints."

As for why he chose to center the *Marlow Murder Club* series around female protagonists, Thorogood noted that his own upbringing was shaped by the important women in his life, including his mother, aunts, and grandmothers, who had a significant influence on him. "I thought, none of them really were center stage in their own story... it still felt, politically, a choice to go, 'Why don't I take a group of women who are not normally allowed to be the leads in a murder mystery story, and I'm going to have them solve crime?' So that was the rule when I was setting up the book. I thought, I'll only have women involved in solving this, and the only suspects... are going to be male, and I was very keen that the women would get no help from any man to solve the murders. Those were the rules, that's what I knew."