Recorded live at Capital Crime Book Festival, Philippa talks to C.J. Merritt about his whiplash international spy thriller Octagon — but first, a public service announcement: three brilliant books you should absolutely not read on an actual flight.
3 Books You Should NOT Take on Holiday (If You're Flying)
Hostage – Clare Mackintosh
A flight attendant receives a note threatening her daughter's life mid-flight from London to Sydney. Gripping, claustrophobic, and definitely not in-flight reading.
Drowning – T.J. Newman
A plane crashes into the Pacific, trapping passengers underwater on a sinking fuselage. Written by a former flight attendant who knows exactly how to make this terrifyingly real.
Airframe – Michael Crichton
A catastrophic mid-air disaster sparks a tense investigation into what really went wrong. Brilliant, realistic, and best read firmly on the ground.
Philippa talks to C.J. Merritt about Octagon
A former MI6 officer and an ex-SAS soldier, both out in the cold, are pulled back in when a coded warning leads to a trail of danger across Europe. Described as a page-turning action thriller in the vein of I Am Pilgrim.
Chris and Philippa discuss:
- His dream holiday: New Zealand, or a few days alone on a writing retreat (a luxury when you have a small child)
- Travelling solo through Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in his twenties — and the cardigan with zip pockets built for smuggling books through customs
- His nightmare holiday: a 25-mile jungle trek through 35°C heat in Central Africa, hired porters who got drunk on the money he paid them, and arriving to find the gorillas they'd come to see had all died of Ebola a year earlier
- Why he wanted to write a spy thriller with a huge geographic canvas after several more localised books
- Writing 500–1,000 words a day in a café, fuelled by multiple coffees, and losing track of time during action sequences
- The two-book deal already underway, plus a slower, more psychological spy thriller drawing on his past life as a psychologist
- Why the title Octagon came early and never changed
Ice cream order: Salted caramel, pistachio, and chocolate cookie dough — in a dish, with a cone on the side just in case.
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