Kel Richards – Country House Mysteries

The Joys of Binge Reading

Acclaimed Australian broadcaster and wordsmith Kel Richards is passionate about classical mysteries, and the Golden Age of the 1930s when Agatha Christie and her fellow authors were writing them…

Kel is also an Anglican lay canon, deeply immersed in Narnia creator and theologian C.S. Lewis’ Oxford college world and his circle of friends, including Prof. J. R. Tolkien.

Bring all of them together and you have Kel’s Country House Mysteries, featuring Jack Lewis and friends solving brain teasing “closed door” mysteries in 1930’s Oxford.

Hi, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on the Binge Reading show Kel talks about his love for old fashioned clue puzzle mysteries – the sort that aren’t generally written any more – as well as his passion for Australian English – one of the richest vocabularies in the world, in his view.

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Before we get to Kel – a reminder You can help defray the costs of production by buying me a cup of coffee on buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx

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Links to things discussed in this episode

Dr Johnson mysteries, Lillian De La Torre,: https://www.amazon.com/The-Dr.-Sam-Johnson-Mysteries-4-book-series/dp/B07CQB6YKR#:

Charles Dickens Investigations, J. C. Briggs: https://www.amazon.com/Charles-Dickens-Investigations-11-book-series/dp/B07MPBQLL2

Teddy Roosevelt as detective, Lawrence Alexander: https://www.amazon.com/Speak-Softly-Theodore-Roosevelt-Mystery/dp/1561290327

Jane Austen as detective, Stephanie Barron: https://www.goodreads.com/series/40959-jane-austen-mysteries

Master of the Closed Door Mystery: John Dickson Carr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dickson_Carr#:~

Kel Richards’ G. K. Chesterton mystery: https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mummys-Tomb-Chesterton-Mystery/dp/1589199634

English humourist P.G. Wodehouse: https://www.wodehouse.co.uk/

Performing Flea, P.G. Wodehouse: https://www.amazon.com.au/Performing-Flea-P-G-Wodehouse/dp/1841591912

J R Tolkien, The Ents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ent#:

The Inklings: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Inklings

The Eagle and Child pub: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Eagle_and_Child

The Nazguls: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Nazg%C3%BBl

Bill Ponzini The Nameless Detctive:

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/p/bill-pronzini/nameless-detective

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe series: https://www.deadgoodbooks.co.uk/raymond-chandler-philip-marlowe-books-in-order/

The Aussie Bible: https://www.amazon.com.au/Aussie-Bible-Kel-Richards/dp/0647508486

SkyNews, Peta Credin, https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/peta-credlin

Austral English; E.E. Morris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_National_Dictionary

What Kel is reading

P.G Wodehouse Mr Mulliner Short Stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_Mr_Mulliner

Why Shoot A Butler, Georgette Heyer: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/311134.Why_Shoot_a_Butler_

Where To Find Kel online:

Website: https://ozwords.com.au/

But now, here’s Kel:

Introducing mystery author Kel Richards

Jenny Wheeler: , But now here’s Kel. Hello there, Kel, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have with us.

Kel Richards: C.S. Lewis Country House mysteries

Kel Richards: Nice to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: Now you’ve made a real name for yourself as a distinguished Australian journalist and broadcaster and an expert on language, and we’ll to get onto those aspects of your career later on in the show.

First of all, though, we want to talk to you about your mystery series, because this is a show for people who love popular fiction. So tell us, how did you get the idea to use an internationally recognized theologian as a mystery detective?

Kel Richards: It sprung out of the fact that I like reading really old fashioned clue puzzle murder mysteries from the Golden Age of English murder mysteries, which was between the wars and the twenties and thirties. That’s great stuff. I enjoy reading that because they’re not written and published anymore.

Now if you want to write something like that, you really need to write it as a historical detective novel.

For some reason it doesn’t work in the 21st century, but as a historical novel it does. And there’s a whole bunch of those being written. It’s become a whole class of crime writing that there are people who have written crime novels in using real historical figures, with people like Dr Johnson as the detective. Lillian de la Torre told a whole series of stories with Dr. Johnson as the detective.

Teddy R, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen – all sleuths

There have been stories with, people like Teddy Roosevelt when he was the police commissioner in New York as the detective. There’s been at least one, probably more than one with Charles Dickens as the detective.

There’ve been several with Jane Austen. There’s a whole series, in fact, I think with Jane Austen. So, I thought about, and I did write one novel years ago, in which GK Chesterton was the detective and I thought, oh, now who would I like to write about in the 1930s, because that’s the kind of book I’m doing.

And CS Lewis sprang to mind because I’d been reading Lewis with great pleasure for a great many years.

Jenny Wheeler: As you might expect when one of the central characters is a famous theologian, some readers dislike this and comment negatively on it, and others obviously positively like it. You are a declared lay canon in the Anglican Church, so it obviously is a topic close to your heart. How would you go about tackling that?

Kel Richards: Well, just by knowing Lewis. One of the things I did when I was starting the series was to read his letters.

His letters have been published in I think two or three volumes. And by reading the letters you get the voice of the person. And it was his voice I was interested in more than anything else because there’s stuff that just comes out of him in a particular way, there’s a particular lexicon, a particular vocabulary, a particular structure of sentences.

Researching the books in Oxford

I learned how that worked and I used that, and the kind of ideas that he kept springing to his mind would go to this. His mind would go to that. So it was from the letters, I got the flow of what the conversation might have been like, and that’s how I said about constructing the character in the books.

Jenny Wheeler: You do manage to make the Oxford of that time come alive. have you been to, Oxford, perhaps even study at Oxford yourself?

Kel Richards: I never studied at Oxford. It would’ve been nice but that was never possible. But we did go there for a week, six days, something like that. But it was a really busy time and I went there knowing that I was interested in writing the series about Oxford.

So we saw all the colleges. We saw Oxford We saw Lewis’s old college, and actually spent a lot of the time in Oxford following in the footsteps of Lewis.

So we went to the famous pub that he used to go to the Bird ‘N Baby, as he called it – the Eagle and Child. We met a bloke there.

We set this up before we went, who had, when he was a boy, had known Lewis’s son… He was a friend of one of Lewis’s sons, a friend of Douglas, his stepson.

He used to go to Lewis’s home, The Kilns. We spent time talking to him about Lewis, and looked at all of those places. When I sat down to write about that, we’d spent enough time there, visiting those places and thinking about that to really bring it vividly to mind.

Classic “locked room mysteries”

Jenny Wheeler: As we mentioned, they are brain teaser stories. So you set up situations which seem physically impossible. They defy the laws of physics and then you make it all happen.

Kel Richards: The master of the Impossible Crime was a man named John Dickson Carr. He was American, but he lived in England and the best of his crime novels were written in the 1930s. His chief detective was Dr. Gideon Fell, who was modeled on GK Chesterton.

He developed more than anyone else the idea of the “impossible crime.” The room which is locked on the inside and the keys missing from the door and all the windows are locked from the inside. And the person has been stabbed, not shot, and there’s no weapon in the room or whatever.

He does those impossible things and works out sound solutions for them really well. I’d spent a lot of time reading his stuff. I discovered when I set out to write them that the best way to do it was to do it backwards. You work out a really impossible situation that could never have happened, and then work out step by step how you would make that happen.

You work backwards. Carr himself said, with an impossible crime, with a locked room mystery, He said, it doesn’t have to be plausible, just possible.

The secret: Work it out backwards

All you need to do is to work out what might possibly lead up to this. Then of course, when you write the book, though you worked out the puzzle backwards, you write it frontwards, so you use what authors call plants.

You keep putting in those things, which are going to when you get to the resolution of the whole thing and the solution of the puzzle, people will say, ah, yes, I should have seen that. Because you were planting them there on through as little hints of who knew what and what this was about and who was where at what time.

Putting the plants all in so that you’ve got those and can refer back to them when you get to the solution is the secret to making it look possible, even if not plausible. To set it up. I start at the end. I start with something that looks impossible.

Can I tell you about the one that I wrote about G.K. Chesterton, set in Egypt in 1919 and in that one, there is the ultimate locked room mystery, because what happens is they discover an undisturbed, it’s an archeological dig in the south of Egypt near Thebes, near Luxor – and they discover an undisturbed tomb.

There’s this tomb dug straight into the cliff face. It’s been filled with limestone chips, which is what they used to do in those days. Then there’s a plaster wall, a ceiling off the tomb itself. They break down the wall and the senior archeologist and his assistant go in and there is a mummy’s sarcophagus.

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The mystery of the Mummy

They take the lid off and inside, instead of being a mummy is the dead body of one of their own the people they’d left on the surface. One of their own team members. You think, okay, that’s the result I want to get. How do I get to a result like that? That’s what you do. You start at the end and then work backwards to build up to it.

Jenny Wheeler: You have to then do a full outline of the stories before you start filling in any detail. In this debate writers have about whether they’re a Plotter or Pantser, you would definitely be at extreme end of the scale?

Kel Richards: No one but an idiot writes without a fairly well constructed outline. One of my favorite writers is P.G. Wodehouse. And Wodehouse used to write incredibly complex and detailed outlines before he wrote the first word of the story.

He needed to know what was happening, to whom and when and where in a lot of detail.

And he used to write outlines that just got longer and longer. He’d end up for a 60, or a 70,000 word book, with a 25,000 word outline.

There’s a really good book, which is actually called Performing Flea, which is an exchange of letters between P.G. Wodehouse and one of his friends, Bill Townend in which he talks about the craft of the writer.

And what you do as a writer if you are going to have a really well constructed book. And the joy of Wodehouse is that, not only are they some of the funniest books ever written, but they’re architecturally perfect and perfect because they’re set in detail ahead of time. It’s the only way to go.

C.S. Lewis was a “clubbable man”

Jenny Wheeler: And his friends, they were brilliant men, but do they hold a particular attraction or interest for you?

Kel Richards: He was a clubbable man. He belonged to clubs. He belonged to an undergraduate club called The Martinets, and then he started his own club called The Inklings, which included Tolkien and Neville Coghill and a whole bunch of really interesting and colorful people.

There’ve been a whole bunch of books which have been biographies of Lewis, which I’ve read obviously, but there’ve been quite a few books written about The Inklings, which is a clever name for a book of authors and would be authors. And they used to meet once a night, once a week, every Wednesday night in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen.

And then they’d read on meet also on Monday mornings at the Eagle and Child at that pub I mentioned. And they were collectively an interesting group of people. Charles Williams joined them during the Second World War. Their books are interesting and collectively they must have been a really interesting bunch.

In the last book in the series, I actually describe an Inklings meeting which obviously comes out of my imagination, but it’s on all the very detailed accounts of those Inklings meetings that exist. So yes, as a group, a really interesting group.

Inksters a very creative group of writers

Jenny Wheeler: Intellectually brilliant as well.

Kel Richards: Just very creative people. I think just with very rich imaginations. If you look at Lord of the Rings, the point about Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s imagination never stops. It goes on and on.

Just when you think he can’t possibly imagine anything new or anything inventive suddenly comes up with The Ents or something amazing like that. And the Nazgûls, the same. The richness of the imagination just goes on and on.

In fact, no one except J.K. Rowling has managed to, I think, equal that level of constant rich, imaginative invention and that’s just enjoyable.

Jenny Wheeler: Have you read the Harry Potter books?

Kel Riachards: Oh, yes. Yeah. I read all the Harry Potter books. They’re good fun.

Jenny Wheeler: I was intrigued by another of your series., the four books in the Ben Bartholomew series. Here you combine differing scenarios into another multi genre story – a kind of New Testament time travel series. One reader called it Biblical Noir. It’s First century New Testament stories set in contemporary Caesarea with pizza parlours and mobile phones. Where did this come from?

Kel Richards: It didn’t start as a series. It started as a single book. I was approached by Hodder and Stoughton for a book because I was on radio and I was well known and they asked me for a book. I don’t know what they expected. Maybe they expected me to write a book about being in the media or something.

First century Bible setting with Marlon Brando

I’ve got no idea. But I had this strange idea of writing a book about a private eye in Jerusalem in the first century. Which meant that you could use all the sort of slangy stuff from Los Angeles private eyes from Philip Marlow and the rest of them and have a lot of fun with it. But also tell a story from that period of time.

I imagined a situation where there was this private eye, this Ben Bartholomew, and after the crucifixion of Jesus, the high priest Caiaphas calls him in and speaking a bit like Marlon Brando in The Godfather says, ‘bring me the body of the Nazarene.’ Having pictured that I then had a story and a plot line.

The first book in the series was The Case Of The Vanishing Corpse and to be honest, if I was being really frank, I’d say in order to avoid having to do lots of detailed historical research, I decided to do the books full of deliberate anachronisms so it’s supposedly set in the first century, but a fun version of the first century where 20th century things happen.

When there are phone numbers, for example, they’re all in Roman numerals which just looks absurd when you look at it. There’s an advertising slogan for a beer called Achilles, and it says Achilles heels, H-E-A-L-S. I was having a lot of fun with that sort of concept, that I really enjoyed.

Jenny Wheeler: Many critics have commented on your humour and I loved some of the hilarious tongue in cheek names you gave people and places…I n Book #2 in the series for example, The Case of the Secret Assassin, cafes and bars are called things like Herod’s Leftovers or Ad Nauseum or Delirium Tremens. Did you have a lot of fun dreaming up these names?

Whimsical humour in Wodehouse style

Kel Richards: That’s probably the Wodehouse influence. Wodehouse was brilliant at playing with words, and of course he’s my favourite comic writer. There I was writing these books in this anachronistic version of the first century telling a story but having a lot of fun with it. That kind of whimsical humor. That’s the way to describe Wodehouse. Whimsical humor, I ended up writing it.

One of the reviewers, I have to say, actually said it was very Wodehousian, and that was the best praise I’ve ever had.

Jenny Wheeler: You bend genres in your fiction – something publishers generally don’t much like because they say readers won’t buy them so readily. Did you come up against that problem?

Kel Richards: Some genres are easy because they have really clear flags. The private eye genre I think is really easy. There’s a bloke named Bill Ponzini, who writes a series of private eye novels called the Nameless Series because his central character who narrates them, never has any name in the stories.

And they’re just classical examples of that particular genre. I discovered the private eye genre from radio, because I’m old enough to have grown up as a boy listening to radio serials. And there was a private eye called Larry Kent on radio. And he was the classic private eye. The genre and all its telltale signs was there in my head and I didn’t have to work at producing that kind of thing.

It was just fun to work with.

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Flash Jim, a biography of a remarkable Aussie

Jenny Wheeler: One thing I did notice, a lot of your books are not available in digital form. It would be simple to get them up online and expand your audience. But do you have any interest in doing that?

Kel Richards: The copyright belongs to the publishers. The formats they come out in are up to the publishers. Once the author hands over the manuscript, what happens to it is no longer our concern, our control, we lose them. The publisher owns all that.

Jenny Wheeler: Publisher’s rights do expire though don’t they? Maybe when that happens, you could put them into digital form.

Kel Richards: You are right. They would work like that. Then who knows? Maybe the publisher one day will do them like that. I just don’t know.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve also done a whole series of best selling non-fiction books – dealing mainly with all aspects of language, the origins of famous sayings and Aussie slang. Let’s start by talking about Flash Jim, your biography of a most remarkable early Australian. Tell us about Flash Jim, the author of the first Australian dictionary and a true crime memoir…

James Hardy Vaux – transported three times

Kel Richards: As you said, James Hardy Vaux, though how he pronounced his surname, we just don’t know. There are multiple possibilities. I call him Vaux (rhymes with Fox.)

So, James Hardy Vaux. He was transported to Australia, not once, not once, but three times. He obviously didn’t notice what he was doing wrong.

But he was well educated and he says in his autobiography – he’s written an autobiography, which covers the first 40 years or so of his life – he keeps saying, I needn’t have gone down this path. I could have had a proper middle class career and all that sort of thing.

But anyway, he ended up here as a convict.

And in 1812, while he was in Newcastle – Newcastle was the place of secondary punishment. If you were sent to Sydney to the convict colony of Sydney and you reoffended, you were sent to Newcastle to suffer even worse punishment.

And in Newcastle he had to work on the coal mines, which meant bending double and pushing carts down coal mines and pushing them out again.

And he wanted to get out of that. And so what he did, because he was a well-educated person, but he was mixing with professional criminals. He understood their language, whereas the magistrates and the people trying to manage them didn’t understand their language, the criminal slang of London.

The first Aussie dictionary of Flash Language

What he did was to sit down and write a dictionary, which he called A Dictionary Of The Flash Language. That’s what they called the language. They spoke the Flash language. And he wrote that and presented it to the commandant of the convent colony at Newcastle, hoping that would get him out of the mines and get him a soft job.

And it worked. He actually got a job as a clerk in the stores. It worked for him. But it was such an interesting document in and of its own that it ended up being published in London in 1819, so it was the first dictionary written in Australia and for Australians, That’s the really interesting thing about it.

A whole lot of the terms in Vaux’s Dictionary Of The Flash Language are still part of our language today. It’s really one of the foundation stones on which the distinctive Australian vocabulary is built, I think. It’s good to tell the story and his own personal story is very colorful and very interesting.

I tell that in the book. At the end of the book, I reprint the whole of his dictionary. For me, it was great fun because language, as you said, is my real interest and real passion.

Jenny Wheeler: He mainly carried out financial scams?.

Kel Richards: He was a thief. He was a pickpocket, he was a fraud. He was a conman. He was a thorough going criminal, one way or another. And I can’t off the top of my head remember which of those crimes he was sent here for the first time. The second time he came back here because he’d managed to get out of the colony illegally, he got himself onto a ship and smuggled overseas.

The third time he was actually involved in a massive fraud against the Bank of Ireland, and he should have been executed, because financial fraud of that scale was considered the worst possible thing in Victorian England. But he managed to persuade the people who were prosecuting him to commute his sentence to life in prison in the colonies.

Walked out of jail and out of history

So that’s how he came out here the third time. But he was a really serious crook. He keeps presenting himself as a reformed character, and I’ve learned my lessons from my life. He never did.

Jenny Wheeler: Did he die in Australia?

Kel Richards: We have no idea. There is no record of his death. We don’t know where he died, when he died, how he died or where he’s buried.

At the point where his autobiography ends, most of the information ends. There’s an Australian academic who’s done a lot of research and has dug up a little bit of information afterwards, but by the time he left jail for the last time he was 60, and at the point where he walks out of jail at the age of 60 he walks off the pages of history and he just vanishes. We have no idea what happened to him.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve also written the Aussie Bible, which was an effort to translate the Bible into language that the normal average Aussie would understand. I wondered if Aussie language is that far away from official English. And what was the most challenging thing about this project?

Kel Richards: I’ll tell you how it started. It started with the Cockney Bible. There was a bloke who was teaching scripture classes in London in the East End. And he tried retelling bible stories using cockney rhyming slain. And the kids that he was teaching finally took to it and understood the stories and thought they were great fun.

Some of the stories that he’d done for them were published as a little book called The Cockney Bible (in brackets ‘Well, Bits Of It Anyway,’) I got a review copy of it when I was working in radio. And I thought, oh, this is not bad. This is quite clever. But the Australian language is far better, far more colourful.

Aussie dialect ‘most distinctive and colourful’ in world

This is the most interesting dialect of the English language anywhere in the world. The most colourful, the most inventive. I thought; I can do the same thing for Australians.

I picked out the same kind of Bible stories that he chose, the best known and best loved Bible stories, and retold them in the Australian dialect in our distinctive vocabulary and accent and so on.

And it was published as a little book by the Bible Society called the Aussie Bible, (Bits Of It Anyway,) and it did exceptionally well. It sold about 120,000 copies and did so quite quickly. Then there was, I don’t know whether you know this happened, but there was a bloke in New Zealand who got in touch with me and he said, can I do it here?

And I said, give it a go. And he wrote the Kiwi Bible (in brackets bits of it anyway) setting out to retell the same bible stories using distinctive kiwi vocabulary. It was a very minor trend in publishing, but it was a little trend in publishing just after the year 2000.

Jenny Wheeler: I have not heard of either of those, but I love your comment about the Aussie colloquial language being particularly vibrant.

Kel Richards: It’s to do with the fact that people were gathered in the early convict colony from all over the place. If you look at Great Britain and you looked at it as a map of local dialects, it would be like a patchwork quilt.

You only need to go to the next valley, sometimes only to the next village to hear a different choice of words, a different vocabulary, a different accent, a different way of framing sentences.

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The secret of the ‘Methodist gate’

Now, those people didn’t travel. They normally didn’t speak to anyone who spoke any differently than they did, except when they were arrested for crimes and sent to the other side of the world.

The people who ended up being gathered in Sydney in the early days of the convict colony were from all over the British Isles, and suddenly they were working beside, were quite possibly chained to, people who spoke quite differently from themselves.

Now, it had a number of things grew out of that. One of them was the Australian accent, which is produced as a result of what is called leveling down.

They had to find a way to talk to each other so they understood each other, but it also started the generation of the distinctive Australian vocabulary because they discovered there were all these different names for things.

Now apart from anything else, apart from giving you a richer, larger vocabulary, it makes you very aware of language and they grew an inventiveness in language, which is still part of the Australian language today. If you go to Queensland and a farm’s got a really hard gate to open and close, it’s called a ‘Methodist gate’ because only a Methodist could open and close it without swearing.

It’s like leftovers. Leftovers are called YMCA. Yesterday’s Muck, Cooked Again. There’s a lot of this sort of stuff and it’s just inventiveness. And I think it grew right from the beginning.

By the 1830s, there’s evidence that the Australian language as we know it today already existed and was flourishing and spread across the east coast of Australia and I think it grew out of that initial convict experience.

Don’t try ‘hooning around’

Jenny Wheeler: That’s interesting because I grew up in the rural countryside on New Zealand and the fifties and sixties. And there were a lot of sayings that my parents said that I thought were Kiwi sayings.

And when I grew older and became more aware of language, I discovered they were actually Australian sayings that had been adopted here in New Zealand as well.

Kel Richards: You are right. There was a common body of language common to both Australia and New Zealand because we have so much shared language. An example of that is the word Hoon.

There was a bloke who was driving with an English visitor and someone cut in front of him. He said, “what a hoon.” The Englishman had no idea what he was talking about. Not the faintest idea, but hoon, for that kind of hooning behavior and hooning driving, that’s common in Australia and just as common in New Zealand.

And the very first proper dictionary, not Vaux’s dictionary, but proper Dictionary of The Australian language was done by a bloke named E. E. Morris at the University of Melbourne. And he called it the Austral Dictionary because he covered both Australian English and New Zealand English in the one book.

So there is a very close connection.

Kel Richards’ early Sydney life

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us a bit about your early life. Where did you grow up? And did you always know that you would be a writer?

Kel Richards: I’ve got no idea. I suppose I loved books from when I was a child. Always have done, I grew up in suburban Sydney. My father was a railway engineer. It was a fairly ordinary, middle class Australian Sydney upbringing. But I was always a bookish person and always interested in books.

And I think I was from the beginning keen to write books. I’ve written a lot of books now. If I add them all up, if I do a complete bibliography, if you include all the booklets and all the different editions of books, it comes up to about 64.

If you take out the booklets and the different editions, it’s about 54, one way or another with children’s books and with books about words and language and fiction and all the rest of it.

It’s a lot of books, so I just think I always was a bookish person. I wasn’t a football playing person. I was a bookish person. Again, I just wanted to do it from when I was young.

And the path to get into broadcasting in those days was you work at a small country radio station and work your way up to City Radio.

And I just did that. I just kept sending out applications. And eventually I got a job in country radio and then another job in country radio, and then another one, and eventually got to the city and worked for the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) with nationally networked programsat one stage

‘Aren’t we the lucky ones?’

In that sense, I’ve never had a proper job. I’ve been basically a journalist all my life, but I’ve been a radio and television journalist.

And I keep saying to people, there’s no point in working for a living. I was walking down the corridors of a Sydney radio station, 2GB one day, and one of my colleagues, a bloke named John, had been around for a long time.

“Kel,” he said, “I’ve just read that only 15% of Australians enjoy the work they’re doing.” Then he punched me on the shoulder and said, “Aren’t we the lucky ones?” It’s just fun to do. It’s just really enjoyable to do.

Jenny Wheeler: And you’re still doing it, aren’t you? Because although you stepped back from full-time broadcasting some time ago, you’re still doing a regular and very much current affairs column for SkyNews in Sydney, as well as your regular Word Watch commentaries?

Kel Richards: I haven’t retired. I’m just doing less because I’m slowing down. I’m not retired, just slowing down. I’m probably working about half a week, I do a regular five minute spot with Peta Credlin on Sky News, and then I do other bits on Sky News occasionally as a panelist on various panel programs.

I do a one hour weekly talkback show about words and language called the Word Clinic, which is on 2GB in Sydney. 4BC in Brisbane, and the Nine Radio. Network. I do a spot for a Perth radio station. Once a week I write a column on language for the Australian Spectator. Once a week I write two small columns for a magazine called Australian Geographic.

What Kel is reading now

So I’m keeping busy and one of the reasons I do that is the work is just so enjoyable. Now, because I pick and choose what I do, I’m mostly doing things about language and as a journalistic specialty language is just wonderful.

There was an American journalist named William Safire who wrote a column called On Language for The New York Times for about 25 years.

It is just an endlessly interesting area because the English language is a river, not a lake. It is changing all the time and just watching it and being aware of that and following what’s going on and finding the origins of common expressions that we used, that is just endlessly entertaining.

So what I’m doing by keeping on working at least part of the time, is just keeping myself entertained.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about your reading tastes. What are you reading at the moment and what would you like to recommend to our listeners?

Kel Richards: I’ve usually got several books going at a time, three or four or five books going at a time. Then I can read a chapter out of whatever I’m in the mood for. I’ve just read a biography of William F. Buckley, Jr, an American journalist, magazine, publisher, commentator, very interesting and colorful man, and a very good writer.

I read books about words and language almost constantly. I’m reading a book at the moment called Johnson’s Dictionary, A Modern Selection, and it’s a paperback, which is selections out of Johnson’s 1755 dictionary. That’s fascinating.

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P.G.Wodehouse – at the top of the list

I’m reading, what else am I reading? I’m reading a P.G Wodehouse book of short stories, Meeting Mr. Mullins. I’ve got a range of books going at any one time.

There’s always one or two of them about language and then the others could be a bit of light fiction, which I read just because that’s how to get to sleep at night. It’s really relaxing and biographies and I’ve just got a huge range of interests

And I just one of the things that I can do, seeing I’m not working full time anymore, is read more and I do. I like hard copies. I can’t read off a screen. It’s not right for me.

Jenny Wheeler: Tell us about the light fiction that you are reading at the moment.

Kel Richards: Oh at the top of the list for light fiction is Wodehouse. Wodehouse is wonderful. If anyone hasn’t read any Wodehouse., you haven’t enriched your life to be honest. Evelyn Waugh called P.G. Wodehouse the master on the basis that Wodehouse came up with an average of two completely original similes on every page.

Now, Waugh is right. He’s that sort of writer. If you haven’t read any Wodehouse. In the Wodehouse stories, aunts are always the villains. The poor Bertie Wooster has always been put upon by aunts to do things he doesn’t want to do, like presenting the Sunday School prizes or something. So they’re always the villains.

Aunts ‘mastodons bellowing across a primeval swamp’

And in one, one of the stories there is Bertie at a country house and on the big front lawn of the country house. Two of his aunts, Aunt Dahlia and one of the other aunts are calling out to each other.

And the way Wodehouse describes it is it was “aunt calling to aunt like mastodons bellowing across a primeval swamp.”

Now that is just very good writing and in one story Bertie Wooster is trying to get in to see an important businessman. And there’s one of these secretaries who is really tough who won’t let him in, and he says she was one of those ice cold secretaries only Genghis Khan would dare to cross, and he only on one of his better days.

Now that’s the sort of writing, which is just wonderful. If I’m not reading Wodehouse, and I read Woodhouse a lot, then I still like those old fashioned clue puzzle murder mysteries. I don’t mind re-reading Agatha Christie or re-reading John Dickson Carr, or any of those detective novels written in that Golden Age, the 1920s, thirties, whatever.

Georgette Heyer, who was really well known for her regency romances, but a lot of people don’t know she also wrote some very good detective novels set in that era.

Why Shoot A Butler? Indeed…

She wrote them in that era, and I read one of those recently. Why Shoot A Butler? It’s a great name for a book from that era.

That’s the kind of light fiction that I read.

Jenny Wheeler: Are you writing any fiction yourself at the moment?

Kel Richards: Not writing any fiction at the moment. I’m working on a book called How to Write Clear English, and if I can find a publisher for that, I’ll be very pleased. Although I tell you what I did do at one stage because I grew up as a boy really loving the Sherlock Holmes stories. I have written some Sherlock Holmes Pastiche stories.

And there’s a whole little market for that now. It’s a particular genre in the world and there’s an American publisher who specializes in publishing nothing but new Sherlock Holmes story. Sherlock Holmes Pastiche. So I’ve sent him a book. I sent him a book some time ago. It’s still something sitting on his desk and whether it ever gets published or not. I don’t know.

That’s the only fiction that I’ve had anything to do with recently. I’ve been mainly working on nonfiction, so I spent ages working on the Vaux book. And then I’ve spent a long time writing this book on how to write clear English, which I think I’m finally getting towards the end of.

Where to find Kel Richards online

Jenny Wheeler: Where can readers find you online?

Kel Richards: Ah, thank you for the opportunity because this is really good. This is good stuff. You’ll like this. I run a website called Ozwords.com au. OZ words com au.

Now what I do is I write a language column every day. Seven days a week that appears on the front page of that. As well as that, I run a newsletter and you get the language column turning up in your inbox if you’d like to get it for nothing.

And there’s a contact page, so you can send me any comment question, whatever you’d like. And the best comments in questions and my answers turn up on the Q. and A. page. In fact, the best part of the whole website is the Q and A page because people ask terrific questions about, someone asked me recently about under the pump.

Why do we talk about someone who’s under pressure being under the pump? It’s a really good question, and in fact, it turns out the experts don’t know, but they’ve got multiple guesses. It’s just a completely interesting area. And I do this Oz words.com au every single day correspond with readers of the website every day.

By all means, have a look at the website and if you find language interesting, you’ll love it. And if you want to, get in touch.

Kel’s ‘Best job ever…’

And the best job I’ve ever had in my entire life? The best job is being grandpa and we have a couple of little grandsons and they are just adorably cute.

They’re the best looking. Two little boys. There’s a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old, best looking 4-year-old and 6-year-old in Sydney. And the smartest, and I speak with totally impartial judgment on that. And they’re wonderful and they come over and come for a sleepover and we spend time with them.

So there’s lots of other things happening as well.

Jenny Wheeler: Sounds wonderful Kel. I’m stunned with your erudition. It’s been great fun talking and thank you for coming on the show.

Kel Richards: My pleasure.

If you enjoyed Kel you might also enjoy…

Patti Callahan, and her books about C.S. Lewis tragic love. Or Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen mysteries… Both on past Joys of Binge Reading episodes….

If you enjoyed Kel, you might also enjoy hearing Pattie Callahan’s Narnia Magic – her series of books dealing with C.S. Lewis and his tragic love for American author Joy Davidman.

Patti has devoted seven years of her life to researching the remarkable relationship between C S Lewis and his American wife, Joy Davidman. Her dedication produced two best-selling books, the first, Becoming Mrs Lewis, tells the story of the precious years of love and marriage the two authors shared before they were separated by Joy’s early death.

The second, Once Upon a Wardrobe, delves into the inspiration behind the magical Narnia children’s series.

LISTEN TO PATTI CALLAHAN

Or if you’re into mysteries, listen to Stephanie Barron and her Jane Austen mysteries:

Stephanie Barron’s popular Jane Austen mysteries feature the famous novelist as a crime investigator and are so close to real life that Stephanie sometimes hears Jane’s voice in her head as she writes. Hi there, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler and today Stephanie talks about channelling Jane Austen, World War II espionage novels, and That Churchill Woman.

LISTEN TO STEPHANIE BARRON

Next Time on Binge Reading

Next Time on Binge Reading – Irish magic from Jennifer Deibel – the best- selling and award-winning author of a series of charming Emerald Isle stories combining history, family faith and romance.

Her newest book, The Irish Matchmaker…introduces matchmaker Catriona Daly.

As daughter of a well-known matchmaker, Catríona Daly is no stranger to the business of love–and sees it as her ticket away from the sleepy village that only comes alive during the annual matchmaking festival.

She has some ideas for herself, but she has to be very patient to see it all work together.

That’s next time – two weeks from today – on the Binge Reading show

And remember – if you enjoy the show. Leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.

That’s it for today. See you next time, and Happy Reading!