Jeremy Vine reveals why he wants Harry Potter legend to play his new murder mystery hero

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

“I remember exactly where I was,” says Jeremy Vine of his childhood introduction to the Queen of Crime. “I was having a Saturday morning lie-in and my mum came in. I was 11 years old. She said, ‘You might enjoy this,’ and handed me a copy of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie.”

His mother’s educated guess would turn out to be an understatement on a grand scale. “[The book has a] brilliant set-up. Millionaire brings his family to celebrate Christmas, tells them he’s changing his will but, before he can do that, he’s killed in an otherwise empty room and the only clue is a small piece of rubber. And that’s it. I was hooked.”

Vine spent his teenage years devouring all 66 Christie detective stories and thrillers and so it’s hardly surprising that, with books about his professional life and a novel, The Diver and the Lover, already behind him, he was tempted to gravitate towards the genre he knows best. His first detective novel, Murder on Line One, was published in 2022 and his second, Turn the Dial for Death, is released this month. The hero of both is Edward Temmis, a 43-year-old radio talkshow presenter. Sound familiar?

“I met a publisher who works at HarperCollins and she said, ‘If you want to do crime, you want to set it somewhere where you really understand the mechanics,’” he says of the mise-en-scène for his series of books – he is now working on the third, part of a book deal that was struck after Murder on Line One became a Sunday Times bestseller.

“My wife is from Devon and we used to go to Sidmouth every summer on holiday with our two girls – if it had a radio station it would be exactly like the one I describe. You’ve got this tussle between the old DJs and the young DJs, a constant battle to keep the audience, ward off the competition and deal with all the presenters’ insecurities.”

What makes this particular occupation of the chief protagonist ideal for a whodunnit? “Edward has got quite a good connection with his listeners and their stories, which is really useful,” explains Vine. “He can find himself confronted with a mystery or whatever, or having to solve something or help somebody, so he’s got that supply the whole time.”

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On this occasion, the listener with the problem is the prime suspect in the crossbow murder of her doctor husband, despite being in possession of a cast-iron alibi. Meanwhile, the presenter/sleuth also has personal issues to deal with as the radio station finds itself in crisis and there is a mysterious motorbike crash on the Sidmouth seafront, a stretch of real estate that Vine describes as “beautiful and elegant, with these 1930s Georgian shop fronts on the hotels and grilled balustrades”. It all sounds impeccably Agatha. And it is, right down to the plot structure.

“I don’t want to give too much away,” he teases, “but one of Agatha Christie’s golden rules is that you’ve got to play fair. You can’t suddenly have the killer appearing in chapter 19 for two pages before he disappears, only to be revealed in chapter 27. You have to give the reader enough clues to solve it, but hopefully they won’t.

“I’m looking for about 30–40 per cent to say, ‘Yes, I got it.’ That will be about the right strike rate. If it were less than that, I’d wonder if I’d been playing fair. Another thing she says is, ‘Never underestimate the power of the false witness.’ So if somebody tells a story about a friend of theirs called Peter in chapter one, and how he died in the fog and he had a wooden leg, you will believe it completely, but it might be possible that none of it’s true.”

Reports that Murder on Line One has been optioned by the BBC mean that viewers may soon be able to join readers in solving a modern rendering of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. Turn the Dial for Death will surely follow.

Vine wants Jason Isaacs to play Temmis (“He was brilliant in The White Lotus and would be perfect for this”) but has he thought about what the residents of Sidmouth might make of their “picturesque and cinematic” seaside town being turned into the murder capital of the UK?

“There was a tangle where the owners of the Clock Tower Café thought I was saying there had been a murder on the premises,” he reveals. “But we ended up having a little launch there… and nobody has complained yet. I think if the body count went above 40, like Midsomer Murders, they might have something to say, but we’re still in the low half-dozen.”

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Turn the Dial for Death is released on 23 April and is available for pre-order now.

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