Utterly Delightful: A Guest Post by Charlotte Vassell

This punchy detective novel packs not just one, but two intertwined mysteries. A classic crime procedural that pulls back the curtain on a group of well-connected people who are used to getting away with — murder. Read on for an exclusive essay from Charlotte Vassell on writing The In Crowd.

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I often find that I work best with an impossible deadline. There’s no room for feelings of inadequacy when you’ve somehow got to fit in writing a novel in three months around looking after small children. It was mid-October 2023. My debut novel The Other Half had come out in January that year in Britain, I’d written a second DI Caius Beauchamp novel that I wasn’t totally convinced worked, and I was about to meet my new American editor for the first time over Zoom. I explained the plot to him and he very diplomatically said something like ‘you’ve given yourself a lot to do’ and so I threw the novel out. It was dreadfully incoherent, it was unfixable, and I had to hand in a draft to my editor at Faber & Faber in January. In the end all that survived was a single paragraph describing a former laundrette-turned-gentrified café in East London. I wish I could say that I soldiered on with a stiff upper lip stoically producing a manuscript with little drama, but I didn’t. I cried a lot, told myself off quite sternly, and then marched off for a good long walk while I roamed the back of my head for inspiration.

On my walk I found a character: Calliope Foster, an enchanting, arch, society milliner. She had all the right markings of a heroine. I had worked for a gentlemen’s hatters on Jermyn Street while at drama school, and I understood hats and the romance of them. I also understood rowing having briefly been in the crew of my university’s second boat. I am not a natural athlete but I am naturally morbid, and while I appreciate that you would expect this of a crime writer, I fear I am more morbid than most as I cannot pass a body of water without peering in and expecting a corpse to be floating in it. I had a beginning then: a beautiful woman and a dead body bashed into by a crew of sweaty, posh men rowing on the Thames. As it was October, and I do love spooky season, I was reading an old favourite of mine: Halloween Party by Agatha Christie. I don’t want to give spoilers, although it has been out for quite a while, but I thought the idea of people not taking what teenage girls say seriously curious – and still too frequently true. So it began, a fevered three months of working late at night and during naptime, and then there it was: The In Crowd.

It’s been an utterly delightful year since its publication. I couldn’t believe that it was nominated for an Edgar Allen Poe Award and to win it was something quite else. The only real hope I had in attending the ceremony in New York was to get to eat scallion schmear-stuffed bagels, proper tacos dripping with guacamole and a good slice of pizza. I gleefully ate all of these and then cried again, this time on stage in front of the world’s best crime writers. It’s all been delightful, utterly delightful.