Description
In this episode, Red is joined by Graeme Macrae Burnet who, in his four novels to date, has created a cryptic and compelling sub-genre: false true crime. His second book, His Bloody Project, was a runaway hit, shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize and translated into more than 20 languages.
Now, his fourth, Case Study, which has recently been published in Canada, seems destined to equal, if not outperform, it. In its pages, he entwines the fictional biography of Collins Braithwaite, a radical 1960s psychiatrist, with the journal of a young woman who becomes a patient of Braithwaite’s in the belief that he drove her sister to suicide.
"Suicide makes Miss Marples of us all," claims the young woman, who has adopted the name, Rebecca, in a nod to Daphne du Maurier. But as fans of Graeme Macrae Burnet will know, his protagonists are never reliable narrators, and like psychotherapists, it is up to his readers to tease out the truth contained in the stories he presents to us.
Join Graeme and Red as they discuss unreliable witnesses, French Existentialism, and the joy of creating puzzles.