The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 12: His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

His Bloody Project tells the story of a fictional 19th-century triple murder in a remote crofting community, through the memoir of the accused and documents such as court transcripts, medical reports, police statements and newspaper articles. The book was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize – and while Paul Beatty’s The Sellout took home the award that year, His Bloody Project remained the bestseller of the bunch until the winner was announced. This week, its author Graeme Macrae Burnet joins us in the studio to tell us about the inspirations behind His Bloody Project, what it was like to be nominated for the prize again with Case Study in 2022 and what we can expect from him next.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

I, Pierre Riviére, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother edited by Michel Foucault

Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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Graeme Macrae Burnet:

When I got the call to say I’ve been long-listed back in 2016, I was painting a ladies toilet in an accountant’s office. Half an hour later, I’m talking to the literary editor of The Guardian, which was quite an unusual thing for me at the time.

Jo Hamya:

Welcome to The Booker Prize Podcast with me, Jo Hamya.

James Walton:

And me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:

And today, we have for you, because book of the month for September, His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet, shortlisted in 2016 when the winner was a book James and I have actually discussed a few episodes ago, The Sellout by Paul Beatty. The other shortlisted books were Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, All That Man Is by David Szalay, and Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. And that year, the judging panel was particularly fantastic, it was chaired by historian, Amanda Foreman, and another member was now Nobel Prize winning author, Abdulrazak Gurnah.

James Walton:

But His Bloody Project, in fact, sold more than any of them and has remained extremely popular ever since, so we’re delighted to be talking about it today and even more delighted to say that we’re joined by its author. So it’s a big Booker Prize Podcast welcome to Graeme Macrae Burnet. Thanks so much for doing this, Graeme. Great to have you with us.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

My great pleasure, James. Great to be with you both, James and Jo. Looking forward to chatting.

Jo Hamya:

Where are you joining us from?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

I’m from Glasgow, and I don’t think any of your listeners will believe this. It’s Glasgow in September and it’s actually too hot. I have never done an interview in shorts before and I probably never will do again.

Jo Hamya:

So because His Bloody Project is our book of the month, even though it’s been a while since it came out, I was wondering if you could give us a summary of the novel.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Yeah, sure, absolutely. His Bloody Project is set in a very small village in the northwest Highlands of Scotland in 1869, and it tells the story of how a young crofter called Roddy Macrae, 17 years old, kills his neighbour, Lachlan Mackenzie, and two other people. And the book is told mainly in the form of Roddy Macrae’s memoir, which he writes in prison after his arrest, but also in the form of a number of other documents such as a psychiatric report and some newspaper reports and postmortems and so on, so it’s a kind of almost a dossier, and I really wanted the reader to read these various accounts of what has occurred and be able to make up his or her own mind about what’s actually gone on.

Jo Hamya:

For the benefit of the listener, could you explain to us what a crofter is?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Yes. A crofter was basically a kind of peasant farmer who worked the land that they didn’t own, and they were subsistence farmers in the 19th century or 18th and 19th century in Scotland.

James Walton:

And then of course the climax is in the trial as well, which you recreate from newspaper reports and so on.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

James Walton:

Now, I believe that novel had its genesis quite a long time before when you came across a book called I, Pierre Riviere. Would that be fair? And do you want to tell us about that book because it might not be familiar to everybody?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Yeah, and the book did have its origins many, many years ago when I was a student here in Glasgow University. I was a student of literature and I came across a book edited by Michel Foucault called I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my brother, and sister. This was a book which was actually a dossier of documents about a case in France in 1835 of a young peasant called Pierre Riviere who killed three members of his own family and then remarkably wrote a memoir about it. And this was a book that fascinated me from the moment I ever came across it because it was really the contrast between the great violence of the acts committed by this young man and then the relative eloquence in the way he wrote about them. As I said, His Bloody Project consists about two-thirds of the book is my murderer, Roderick Macrae’s memoir, so I really took the sort of template of the I, Pierre Riviere book and tried to recreate it in the Highlands of Scotland in the 19th century.

James Walton:

And it was quite a long time before you read that book and before you wrote yours, which was published in your mid 40s, I think.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

That’s right, yeah.

James Walton:

What happened in between, Graeme?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

A lot of procrastination. I think like many writers, I’m a terrible procrastinator. As I say, I was studying. I did film studies and English literature at Glasgow University back in the ’80s, and then I spent about 10 years travelling around as English as a Foreign Language teacher. I worked in Prague, in Portugal, in France, in London. And then I fell into working in television for about 10 years mostly as a researcher on documentaries and so on.

James Walton:

What kind of documentaries? Any we may know?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Well they were mostly arts documentaries, mostly for BBC Scotland, Scottish literature documentaries. But yeah, I lost my job about when I was about 40 and what I’d always wanted to do, I’d always been writing and I’d always wanted… My ambition in life was to publish a novel so I got reached the age of 40 and thought, “Okay, Graeme, come on, now’s the time.” I had a wee bit of money from the work in TV and I was able to fund myself for about a year and I wrote… Well, it actually took me about three years, but I wrote a book called The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, which was then picked up by still my publisher, Saraband Books. And a lot of people thought that His Bloody Project was my first novel, which is perfectly reasonable because The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau was not a bestseller, I mean it did okay for a first novel, but I was by no means making a living as a writer before the nice old Booker Prize came along.

James Walton:

Yeah, I heard you were doing sort of painting and decorating when the news came through that you’d been long-listed.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

I was working as a painter and decorator to fund myself as a writer, and it’s absolutely true that when I got the call to say I’ve been long-listed back in 2016, I was painting a ladies toilet in an accountant’s office in Kilmarnock, my hometown, and my publisher said, “You really need to get back up the road.” I came back up to Glasgow, and half an hour later, I’m talking to the literary editor of The Guardian, which was quite an unusual thing for me at the time. So yeah, I don’t know how many copies His Bloody Project had sold at that point, but certainly less than 100.

And it was completely transformative for the fortunes of that book to be first long-listed. That gave it an enormous boost because, as you’ll know, publishers abroad are looking at the long-list, and if you’re a writer, an unknown writer as I was at that point, you know, you’re going to get some offers and I immediately had offers of publication from various countries in Europe and Australia, and that in itself was transformative, but then when you get on the shortlist, of course, that’s all ramped up to another level and the book’s gone on to sell, I’m not really sure, maybe close to 200,000 copies in the UK, which for a book of that nature, I think, is pretty amazing.

Jo Hamya:

And you say that Saraband is still your publisher. I think they published Case Study as well, and I’m so fascinated by that because I think a lot of authors will go for indies with their first novel, their first two novels, and then they make it big and they sell their backlist to someone like Penguin or Orion. I’d love to know why you stayed with a small independent press like Saraband.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Yeah so it was incredibly difficult decision for me to stay with Saraband because, of course, as an author, you always wonder what it’s like on the other side of the fence, so the glamorous London publishers, I imagine they’re drinking champagne from half past 10 in the morning and eating canapes, you know.

James Walton:

Lunching at The Ivy, yeah.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Yeah, and having garden parties. But I also know a lot of authors who maybe started off with a two-book deal with a big publisher, and then if the first book doesn’t go so well, then the publisher doesn’t get behind the second book, and those authors are maybe then, later on in their career, struggling to find a publisher and I think I’m a kind of indie author and I think it suits me to be with indie publishers.

James Walton:

Are there any countries you were particularly surprised that they took to the book?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

His Bloody Project’s being translated into about 20 languages. And you know, as I said at the outset, it’s a book about a village in Scotland in 1869, so to me, that book travelling around the world has been absolutely an amazing, remarkable thing and what I’ve found, I’ve been to China, I’ve been to Russia, I’ve been to India, I’ve been to Australia and the USA, and people, in the book, find parallels with situations in their own country, whether that’s a treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia, whether it’s treatment of serfs in Russia, whether it was the treatment of sharecroppers in the USA, they find some way to latch onto the story, which is I wrote about a Scottish crofter, and that to me is remarkable. Could the people find something in a book that is so ostensibly alien to them? And it’s an amazing thing that literature can do, I think, when we read work from countries that we’ve never visited and so on.

James Walton:

And meanwhile, back in Scotland, is it true there’s a tourist trail at the village?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

It would be an exaggeration to say there’s a tourist trail, but as you probably know, my mother’s from the Wester Ross, where the book is set, and I grew up there very frequently and there’s a very beautiful village called Applecross, which is mentioned frequently in the book. And Applecross has always been quite a tourist destination. It’s a stunning, stunning place. Culduie is at a backwater well away from Applecross, but when I’m up there now, there is almost always one or two people who are up there and they’ve been brought, and they’re visiting the area because of the book, and they go to Culduie, and they walk from one village to the other to replicate the walk of Roderick Macrae as he goes off to kill Lachlan Mackenzie, and it may be slightly annoying to some of the locals there. I mean it’s a tiny, tiny village at the end of a dead end, so it’s not a place that people normally pass through. But I’m not sure how popular I am in Culduie.

Jo Hamya:

I think there’s a great chance to segue into talking about the book itself and if we’re talking about travel, I think we should… a nice place to start would be with J.B. Thompson whose travels in the borderlines of lunacy is excerpted as one of the documents in the book. And his testimony of course also appears in the trial. I think he’s quite a central figure to the book in a way, because he’s a man who makes a lot of pronouncements, whether in his own writing or at the trial which are liable to change the reader’s mind or alter their perceptions of characters. He has many theories on kind of the inbred nature of criminality, of low people who are born to be criminals inherently. He has many theories or one big kind theory that shakes the book about what happened in the Mackenzie household the day that Roderick went to kill Lachlan and some of his family.

And to me, Thompson actually seems really close to the figure of a true crime podcaster or super fan who is sort of utterly convinced that their conspiracies are fact. And I find that really interesting because your novel took off around a kind of true crime boom as well. I was wondering if you could talk to us about how you view the ethics of a figure like Jay Bruce Thompson or indeed the sort of true crime podcaster who may be inherently drawn to your novel to what actually happened, trying to piece it together?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Well, first of all on James Bruce Thompson, he was a real person, as you may know, and he was a great discovery. I love research and as I said, I worked in television as a researcher, so I had a reasonably good skillset as a researcher. I went to the archives in Edinburgh and I read the case notes for 19th century murder cases, and I came across an excerpt from some of James Bruce Thompson’s own writing in an anthology of early criminology. And James Bruce Thompson was the surgeon general at Perth Prison in Scotland at the time. And this was where Scotland’s criminally insane were held. And so he had this kind of laboratory to study, in his eyes, the causes of criminality. And the theory that you mentioned, I would call degenerationism, was a kind of theory that there was a sort of criminal breed whereby there was a group of people who were undergoing reverse evolution and becoming worse, and there were kind of inbred criminals.

And so I read James Bruce Thompson’s articles and this absolutely unshakeable certainty that he had that you mentioned, Jo, I mean that comes through absolutely in his article. He’s not a gentleman troubled by doubt. And I used those articles as a way of formulating his characters. And I think there’s still a lot of debate around the validity of theories of criminology, theories of psychiatric expert witnesses at trial. James Bruce Thompson himself is not troubled by any ethics in terms of what he does because he has this such great certainty in his own views. We don’t obviously want to go into exactly what he says at the trial but yeah, all I was really trying to do at this point was to take the prevalence series of the time. And it was a time when thinking about criminality was actually quite progressive in some ways, and there was a recognition that if somebody was acting under the, was deemed to be insane while they committed whatever act it was, they were therefore not responsible for their actions and that had come in the 1840s and that’s still the case now.

So there was actually, there are elements of progressive thinking in James Bruce Thompson so it’s a kind of weird mix and what I always want to achieve, I think in any of my books is a degree of ambiguity so that you’re not being presented with somebody who’s wholly bad or wholly wrong. You might agree with some aspects and the other aspects and I think that’s a point where people become much more engaged with a novel because at no point in this book do I, as the author, tell the reader what to think, and I never want to tell the reader what to think. And as a reader, I don’t want an author to tell me what to think. I like to make up my own mind. So James Bruce Thompson presents his view, but I’m not asking the reader to agree with that view. I’m asking the reader to make up his or her own mind whether they agree with that view. I’m just presenting the view.

James Walton:

And it’s slightly linked to that. I mean, it’s an incredibly fair trial, isn’t it? I mean, I was quite surprised by that. You think maybe it’s going to head up for this guy to be stitched up or something. So presumably you found, in documents at the time, that the Scottish legal system was good?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

The Scottish legal system was exemplary. I mean, we’d gone through the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th century, and I read trials were not routinely recorded, but they were incredibly… Reported in incredible detail in newspapers. And so I took the legal research, certain very high profile trials where published almost verbatim in book form and the procedures and so on were absolutely as are described in the book and really unchanged from until now. I would think the difference would be that trials in those days were much swifter. So a murder trial would take three or four or five days maybe, whereas probably today it would drag on for weeks but the actual structures and so on were absolutely as they’re today.

When I was looking into 19th century trials in Scotland, the holy grail for me was defined the trial that had a case that had gone to trial whereby the plea was not guilty on the grounds of insanity. Of course, I’m not an academic, I couldn’t say this definitively, but in my experience of looking through those case trial documents, most of the time when a plea of insanity was put forward, it was accepted by the judge or the prosecution, and the trial did not then go on to an actual trial. So it would’ve been unusual for that to come before the jury, but absolutely it was a valid plea as it is now.

Jo Hamya:

I want to go back a little bit because there’s something that you said about ambiguity. I think a lot of that arises from quite specifically the order in which documents are presented to you in the book.

Graeme Macrae Burne:

Mm-hmm.

Jo Hamya:

And I was wondering whether that was something you had thought of during writing. I think it would’ve made such a difference, for example, if the medical testimony had been given ahead of Roderick’s memoir or the fact that you had read Roderick’s memoir meant that when you read James Bruce Thompson’s article, you were much more inclined to think of him as a classist snob because you had this sort of outpouring of empathy for Roderick in the aftermath.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

No, the order in which the documents are presented is of course very important. I mean, when I started writing the book, I kind of imagined it almost being presented as a dossier and somebody could read the different parts. It almost could be presented in a box. You could take them out and read them in whatever order. And I still love that idea. I wanted, I wrote Roddy’s memoir, but I wanted that to be an immersive, novelistic experience. I mean, it’s probably run to about 50,000 words, I think, that part of the book. And I think at that point, the reader forgets about the rest of the structure of the book. And we see the world from the point of view of Roderick Macrae and the vast, vast majority of readers that I’ve encountered absolutely empathise with Roddy at this point of the book. And again, this goes to the point where, you know when we’re reading about the tribulations that Roddy and his family suffer, it’s quite morally simplistic.

Lachlan Mackenzie is bad and Roddy and his family are good. And when Roddy goes to take his vengeance against Lachlan Mackenzie, we’re kind of on his side. But that kind of moral simplicity doesn’t really interest me. It becomes, to me, a much more interesting novel when suddenly we realise that Roddy has not told us the whole truth, and perhaps he may even have misled us. And that places the reader in a much more ambivalent position about the character they’ve been reading, and I think leads them to question the validity or the truth of what they’ve been told. But to me, even now, it’s very important to block out, to try to second guess how readers will respond because not only do I think that impinges on the authenticity of what you’re writing, if you try to consider how people will respond to it, but also every reader responds differently to what they’re reading.

So it’s quite an interesting relationship between the kind of way people respond. But I just don’t think about the reader because I don’t believe in the reader. There’s no such thing as the reader. It’s a road to hell to second guess, I think.

James Walton:

I am quite surprised by that because I think one thing you do brilliantly in both this and Case Study is wrong foot the reader. And I’d imagine it’d be quite hard to wrong foot the reader without thinking about the reader.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

No. Yeah, but I don’t plan anything, you know? When I started writing His Bloody Project, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I knew that Roddy was going to commit a murder, and I knew from early on that he was going to kill Lachlan Mackenzie. That’s all I knew, and I didn’t know about incidents that lead up to that. So in a sense, I’m wrong footing myself.

James Walton:

Okay.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

And I feel that if I was every writer, you all have spoken to many, many writers just as I am, every writer goes about it in a different way, and there’s no right way or wrong way, but I don’t want to write towards an end point because I feel if I write towards an end point, I won’t encounter anything interesting on the way because I’ll be focused on that point in the distance. And I want to be focused on what’s happening. How is this character experiencing this scene at this moment? Does that colour of the sheet on the washing line remind him of his childhood when he looked out the window at it into the garden and so on? But of course, you want readers to feel engaged and you want them to be, there to be some change in view as the reader goes through the book but I don’t know how that happens. It’s a mystery to me.

James Walton:

But in the preface, which is written by this guy, Graeme Macrae Burnet.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Yeah.

James Walton:

It says he’s found these documents and it includes a sentence, “Naturally, I have come to my own view of the case, but I shall leave it to the reader to reach his or her own conclusion.” So three questions about that. Is that Graeme Macrae Burnet you?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Yeah.

James Walton:

Two, did you reach your own view of the case? And three, do you expect the reader to know for sure or think they know for sure what happened?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Well, first of all, G M B, absolutely it’s me. So what an egotist. I insert myself. I’ve inserted myself into all my own books. Terrible. Terrible behaviour. But yes, I would say that it’s me. Do I have my own view of the case? Again, it’s a question I’ve been asked so often, you know, you are the author, tell us the truth.

James Walton:

Yeah.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

My answer is always, here is the material. I have access to the same material as the reader, and we can interpret it and come to our own view. Basically the central narrative question at the end of the book, is Roddy insane or is he not? Do I have a view of that? I, honestly, I see both sides of the argument and one day I-

James Walton:

So when you say naturally, I’ve come to my own view of the case, you haven’t really?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Yeah. It’s very clever of you to pick up on that line, James. I feel like a politician who’s been, somebody’s found an old tweet.

James Walton:

[inaudible 00:24:13].

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Have I come to my own view? No, I haven’t really. So yeah, I probably should have been more equivocal. But what’s important to me is that the reader comes to their own view. And even if I did have my own view, I mean I have a compassionate view towards Roddy, but then I also have to remind myself of the things he’s done and that’s very troubling. It’s very troubling to have a compassionate view of somebody who has committed acts, which you would in no way condone.

Jo Hamya:

Can I ask a kind of adjacent question to that? Because I think one of the things that comes up in the book a lot is this idea of providence versus action or nature versus nurture. So for example, Roderick’s father, John Macrae, accepts a lot of the hardships which befall him quite passively and he believes that it’s not his, it’s not within his ability or sort of rights to alter the course of events, but Rodrick, to me, seems like the only character in the book who actually comes very close to governing his own destiny, even if this does lead him to a terrible, terrible conclusion. And when he’s writing his memoir, he keeps trying to pinpoint the bit at which it all went wrong. Was it when his mother died? Was it because he fell in love with Flora who is Lachlan’s daughter? Do you think that such a moment, a catalyst for all these events within the book exists? Or do you believe more in the idea of within the novel of predetermined events or destiny?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

I mean, honestly, it’s such a great question. I mean, the sort of extent to which we, as individuals, as humans, exert free will or agency over our own lives to me, is the most fascinating question. I’m basically an absolutely unreconstructed existentialist, and this is the question that fascinates me. In relation to the idea providence, the west of Scotland at that time, and even to some extent even now or until relatively recently, absolutely enthralled to the sort of Free Church of Scotland, the Church of Scotland teaching a Calvinist view that there is no free will, and there’s a great Scottish phrase, “Which for you won’t go by you.” What is intended for you will not pass you. Basically, you can have no, if something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen and there’s nothing you can do about it. And John Macrae, Roderick’s father, has drunk very deeply of this ideology, and it’s an ideology which was imposed on the people by the Church of Scotland and by the Free Church of Scotland.

And this is why, in earlier parts of Scottish [inaudible 00:27:24] was when the highland clearances were happening, the church stood by and said, this is the fruit of your sins and it’s sinful to resist. And this is what John Macrae represents. And yeah, this is where it’s a very interesting question. So Roddy is kind of, he’s beginning to kick against this philosophy, maybe I do not have to accept my lot in life. Maybe I do not have to accept my station as the lowest of the low. There’s a moment in the novel where he decides to leave the village and he goes off and he walks up, and I hope you’ll both visit Applecross and Culduie because the pass that he refers to is a very famous pass called the Bealach na Ba. And he walks to the top of that and he says something like, “I had reached the limits of my universe” and feels he is drawn back.

And this is the moment in the novel. He’s trying to exert sort existential free will, and he finds he’s not quite able to. So when he goes to kill Lachlan Mackenzie, his way of justifying it to himself, rather complicated, but he says, he tells his lawyer that he is going to Lachlan Mackenzie’s thus armed to see what will happen. And he’s kind of trusting, putting himself in Providence’s hands. If I take up these weapons and go there, if it’s meant to be that I kill Lachlan Mackenzie, then Lachlan Mackenzie will die by my hand. But perhaps in Roddy’s, Roddy is actually trying to justify to himself what he’s doing by utilising this sort of, I have no free will philosophy when actually he is exerting free will. So I don’t have a definitive answer to that question like all the others you’ve asked me, but I think it’s so central to the book and it’s central to everything I’ve written, I think.

James Walton:

But one thing that you seem to be very interested in is basically how do you know if someone’s mad?

And one of my little theories is, at the beginning of the 20th century, medicine set itself the quest of doing to the mind what it had already done to the body in the 19th century, which was identifying diseases, seeing how they worked and learning how to cure them. But when it came to the mind, they didn’t have the same success. Even now, psychiatrists can’t tell if someone’s mad and doctors can tell if someone’s got cancer. And the two books seem to be, so you’ve got one set at the dawn of this project, in a way, His Bloody Project, and you’ve got Case Study when faith in this project is beginning to disappear. The project being, can you tell if someone’s mad? Is that an abiding interest?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

It’s absolutely an abiding interest. I mean, my initial encounter with the ideas of what constitutes madness, I think, again, when I was back as a student in Glasgow University, I came across Foucault’s book, Madness and Civilization, as it’s called in English, Histoire de la folie, I believe, in French. And that was a book which made me, for the first time, question the idea of madness as a sort of fixed set of characteristics. And what Foucault shows in the book, and I’m not an expert, is that in different societies and cultures, our ideas of madness is completely changeable.

So if you live in a theocracy, somebody who doesn’t believe in the prevailing religion would be described as heretic or mad and deemed to be mad. If you live in a high capitalist society and you’re very poor, the poor can be deemed to be mad and so on. And so I’m very suspicious of designations of madness and as I remain so, and I think there’s still a lot of extremely relevant debates going on about how medical practitioners and psychiatrists diagnose people who may or may not, the word mad is probably not used very much anymore, but people, there can be a rush to diagnosis for so-called conditions that may actually just be part of the normal experience of life.

James Walton:

Indeed, and maybe we should say a little bit more about Case Study because we haven’t really explained it. This is set in the 1960s with, again, a brilliant blend of real people. And so the Beatles are in there. Joan Bakewell’s in there. The main character, who I’m sure loads of people must have Googled, Collins Braithwaite, seems to be a sort of trendy psychiatrist or psychiatrist of the day. Did you find that people were Googling Collins Braithwaite thinking he was real too?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

When I wrote Case Study, I was pretty sure that almost every reader would Google Collins Braithwaite and who, as you say, is a sort of charismatic psychotherapist and a charlatan and a very toxic individual, but really questioning the practises of mainstream psychiatry at the time. And he calls Braithwaite absolutely embraces the idea of that we’re a multiplicity of selves and that no one of these selves is more authentic than the other. And the book, running through the book Case Study, is this trope of adopting of persona. All the characters in the book really have two personae and the question, I suppose, that arises is which of these personas is the more real and which is more authentic?

James Walton:

When you find that people are Googling Collins Braithwaite or when you find that His Bloody Project is being filed by bookshops under true crime, do you think score one for me? Or do you think, oh, that’s a bit annoying that people don’t understand my work?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Well, the first review of His Bloody Project actually reviewed it as a true crime book and many, many readers over the years have come to me and asked me, “Did it really happen? Is this true?” And I just take it as a compliment to the writing of the book that I was able to write 50,000 words in the voice of a 17-year old crofter and to convince people that it was true. I think that’s kind of all you can ask as a novelist, is for people to buy so deeply into the world you’ve created that they think is real. So true crime, I just want my books to be on the shelf. I don’t really mind which one it is.

Jo Hamya:

I think that’s fair enough. Are you a true crime fan yourself?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

No. No, I’m not.

Jo Hamya:

[inaudible 00:34:12].

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

I mean I’m not, I used to, I had a phase many, many years ago reading about some of the, there’s some really salacious and unpleasant work written about murderers, but there’s a few really, really good books. I mean, the work of Gordon Burn’s books on Peter Sutcliffe and The Wests are absolutely tremendous examples of that but I don’t listen to true crime podcasts and so on, even although I quite often get thrown into that mix.

James Walton:

Sorry. Thanks, Graeme. Thanks very much. Are you one of these writers who will or won’t tell us what you’re working on now?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

Well, I’ve written two novels set in a small town in France featuring this detective called Gorski, and they’re kind of sort of crime novels, but not really, and I’m writing the final part of the trilogy at the moment.

James Walton:

Oh, okay. Well, good luck with that, Graeme. When will that be out?

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

I would love it to be out in 2024, but that depends on me getting my finger out.

James Walton:

Graeme, it’s been great to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us.

Jo Hamya:

Thank you.

Graeme Macrae Burnet:

It’s been a real pleasure to talk to both and thank you so much for featuring the book.

Jo Hamya:

That’s it for this week. If you haven’t already followed the show, please do and remember to leave a rating.

James Walton:

You can find out more about our September Book of the Month, His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnett at thebookerprizes.com. And remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack at the Booker Prizes.

Jo Hamya:

Thanks again to our special guest, Graeme Macrae Burnet, and do let us know what you thought of His Bloody Project.

James Walton:

Next week, we’ll be releasing the podcast on Friday, not Thursday, so that we can reveal to you all of this year’s Booker Prize shortlists.

Jo Hamya:

We’ll also be debating the best Booker shortlist ever with a rather unexpected surprise guest, I think, wouldn’t you say, James?

James Walton:

Yeah. A guy who’s not only read every book that’s ever been Booker shortlisted, but even more astonishing to me, he seems to have remembered them all. An amazing guy called Bob Jackson. So he’ll be joining us next week. Until then, goodbye.

Jo Hamya:

Bye.

James Walton:

The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Meolo, and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht Production for the Booker Prizes.