Firstly, a huge thanks to everyone who’s already signed up to follow along with this serialised novel project! I really appreciate the early support off the back of merely a handful of mysterious letters and sten do invitations, and I hope the story will continue to entertain and intrigue as it unfolds!

For any readers who missed that first instalment, a quick precis – this newsletter is free and always has been and always will be (unless something terrible happens, like my house falls into a sinkhole and I lose all my stuff and I desperately have to brainstorm some drastic way of raising money to buy it all back). But I’ve launched a new project adjacent to the main newsletter for paying subscribers in which I’m planning to serialise the comedy mystery novel I’m writing, The Last One You’d Expect. There’ll be a chapter per month along with a series of notes and thoughts on each chapter and what I’m trying to do with it, which I hope will provide the opportunity for everyone to discuss their theories on whodunnit.

I’m hoping that for fellow writers, it’ll be a fun way of following along with a writing project as it unfolds and for mystery fans, it’ll just be an enjoyable interactive read that perhaps builds a community of people trying to solve it together. Obviously, I don’t assume that everyone who signs up to a comedian’s newsletter about art and making stuff is also immediately someone who wants to read an entire novel in monthly chunks (ooh, now I want to work up a comedy character called Monthly Chunks, he sounds fun), so most of the novel will be paywalled so that people can opt-in for it. But to give readers the chance to get a taste of the story and tone and characters, I’m sending out the first chapter in full here in the main newsletter. If you enjoy it and want to know what happens next, feel free to upgrade and join the community of readers! And again, to all who’ve signed up already, thank you so much, it’s hugely appreciated.

Before we dive in, for those NOT that fussed about the novel project (totally fair enough, this Monthly Chunks guy is a lot to deal with!) a quick update on the “We Made A Sitcom Nobody Asked For” project.

I’m currently releasing a 3-part making-of series leading up to the release of The Happiness Chain, the indie sitcom pilot I made with Ben Kent and a cast of incredible comedy talent over the last couple of years. The pilot will be out on November the 5th, and I’ve been blown away by the lovely response to the making-of series so far – thank you all who’ve watched and shared! For those keen to follow along with the story of how it came together, here’s Episode 2, in which I chat to Ben about how we went about turning it from a script into a finished product, and I learn a thing or two about golf:

And for those who want more of the novel, let’s get into it! Last time you had the Prologue materials. Now we’ll dive into Chapter 1:

CHAPTER ONE – FUCKING MURDER MYSTERIES

FRIDAY NIGHT, 10:50pm

Karl stood on the headland under a full moon, doubled up, laughing his head off. Illuminated only by moonlight and dimly by the yellow light that spilled from the house some distance behind him, he was an absurd feature of the inky black horizon, a tall, gangling, spindly figure cavorting in paroxysms of glee against the night sky. Around him the long grass waved gently in the cool evening breeze, and below him the sea crashed against the rock of the sheer cliff face. Panting for breath in between guffaws, he planted his hands on his knees to steady himself, then threw his head back and cackled at the sky. With one hand he reached into a pocket of the long tan macintosh he wore, produced a smartphone, and with a flick of his wrist, chucked it off the cliff. A second later, it landed in the sea below him with a splash. Still unable to contain his excitement, he produced a second phone from another pocket and chucked that in afterwards. Then a third, then a fourth.

Trying to get his giggling under control for a moment, he stooped down to pick up the Sainsbury’s bag at his feet and yanked it open to inspect its contents – three more smartphones, two laptops, three iPads. With one arm, he swung the bag behind himself like a discus, then lobbed it off the cliff in one violent arc that left him spinning giddily. The second he heard the immense splash, he erupted with laughter again.

Some distance behind him, drifting out from Pilspike House along with snatches of laughter and cheering and the sound of people who never see one another any more but really should do this more often, why don’t we do this kind of thing all the time actually?, came the ringing of guitars and the plaintive strains of a song that made all of them feel old and young and happy and sad all at the same time.

Snapping out of his giddy high, Karl spun to a halt and turned to look towards the house, his lip curled in disgust.

“I hate this fucking song,” he muttered to himself. But still it drifted through the air to meet him:

“Coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just fine…”

Inside the living room of Pilspike House, a mirror ball refracted the light across the antler horns on the walls, from which hung a garish banner that practically screamed the message “HAPPY STEN DO IZZIE AND FRANK!!!”, and across the figures of six dancing figures, briefly lost in their own shared nostalgia and transported away from the rational knowledge, deep in their bones, that this is a shitty song and they all hate it, actually.

“It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this, it was only a kiss, it was only a kiss!” Izzie belted, basically shrieking, as she grabbed Frank’s hand and led him to the centre of the room, where a large Persian rug was framed by the various sofas and armchairs that adorned the space. Frank let himself be led with the diffident shyness of a man who hated dancing in front of other people only slightly more than he hated dancing alone, but was willing to overcome both hatreds in order to dance, just this once, with his fiancee in front of their friends on their sten do, because in these circumstances it felt like maybe that did mean something, actually. That was Izzie and Frank, really – he always desperate to try and work out what things mean, because imagine getting to the end of your life without having figured out what it all meant; she always desperate to dance because imagine getting to the end of your life without having danced as much as you could.

“But she’s touching his chest now…” she sang, staring deep into his eyes as she laid her hand upon his chest. Frank smiled awkwardly back – he knew what the next lyric was, and hoped Izzie wasn’t expecting him to take her dress off in front of all their friends, because surely there had to be a limit to how much fun you could allow yourself to have in public. Izzie grabbed Kate’s hand as she drifted past and appealed to her with desperate urgency.

“Kate, take our picture, we’re so fucking young and in love!” she begged. Kate, never one to miss an opportunity to do something that might make someone else like her more, found herself reaching for her phone before her brain had even processed the request. She stopped abruptly when her hand slid into an empty pocket. She looked momentarily around the room – had she left it somewhere?

“I don’t know where I’ve put my phone!” she shouted over the music.

Out on the clifftop, Karl finally got his giggling under control and produced one final phone from the pocket of his jeans. On the home screen was a photo of him winking at the camera wearing a green cloak at a Traitors-themed escape room, clearly taken by himself. He scrolled to his recently dialled numbers, tapped on one, made the call, and put the phone to his ear, still smirking to himself.

Linda Richards sucked hard on a mint humbug and flicked idly through Woman’s Weekly. Alfie Boe had a new album out, she’d have to give that a listen. She glanced up at the clock – just coming up to eleven. Eight minutes until she could clock off and go home. God knows why they still made her stay at the harbour office so late. Nobody so much as ventured out of their front doors much past 9pm, except maybe to go to the Anchor and talk far too loudly and get overexcited whenever Dennis put “Don’t Stop Me Now” on, which was too often if you asked her.

She’d made the point several times to Gordon the harbour master that there really was no need for there to be a late shift and maybe it would be good for morale if they collectively just sacked it off. But he was still haunted by the memory of 1998, when a weather warning from the coastguard had come in at 10pm but was missed because nobody had been in the office, and the next morning someone who’d been on Countdown had fallen off the Pilspike Island ferry due to strong winds and it was all over the local paper. It didn’t matter how many times Linda explained that this was a highly specific set of circumstances and was unlikely to happen again. It didn’t matter how many times she reminded him that these days there were many ways for the coastguards to communicate information beyond merely calling the office’s knackered old landline. No matter what she said, Gordon was still haunted by the headline “I’ll Have A Fall Overboard Please, Carol” every time he closed his eyes and it wasn’t going to happen again on his watch.

So two nights a week Linda sat and manned the phones until 11pm and passed the time and, despite the utter pointlessness of the whole endeavour, she had come to enjoy these nights of stasis when she didn’t have to try and think of ways to pretend she was still interested in hearing about her husband’s coin collection. She quite enjoyed sitting right in the window, and picturing herself from the outside, framed in its yellow rectangle and then swallowed up by the darkness of the empty harbour’s wider frame, like something from an Edward Hopper painting. And yes, she did appreciate Edward Hopper as well as being an avid Woman’s Weekly reader and an Alfie Boe fan, she contains multitudes, she’ll have you know.

As she glanced casually through the magazine, her mind went back to the group she’d taken over to the island that morning. A nice group, mostly. Going over for a hen do or something, although God knows why there were so many men with them. The groom-to-be, even! That wasn’t how they’d done things when she was a girl. And they were all so old! Not one of them under 30. Imagine getting married after you’ve started finding grey hairs, she’d thought when the bride-to-be had introduced herself. Not that she was a bad-looking girl, she was beautiful, certainly. But it breaks your heart to think that on the day she gets married, instead of thinking “She’s never looked so beautiful,” everyone will instead be thinking “She looks really nice today, taking into account the fact that she definitely looked better ten years ago and should’ve done this then.”

People were just doing it later and later these days, and she couldn’t for the life of her think why. She knew they liked to complain a lot about money, these young people, but how much did a wedding cost, really? Idly, Linda started hashing out some figures on the back of a receipt. Obviously they’d be more expensive than hers was, she knew about inflation – she may not have know who Zendaya was, but she knew about that, by God! So let’s say the cost of a wedding had doubled since hers, that’d make it £3000. Surely all these young people could put £3000 aside before all their hair turned grey and their crows’ feet bedded in? Although knowing them, maybe they’d turn their noses up at the kind of food Linda and John had laid on and insist on something more “exotic.” I mean, what’s more exotic than a prawn cocktail and a chicken kiev, for goodness’ sake? Still, she could wind herself up thinking about this kind of thing all day and never get anywhere.

Linda folded up her magazine, got to her feet and reached for her coat. It was never usually an issue if she just started to make tracks five minutes early. Then all of a sudden the phone rang. Linda raised her eyebrows. This was rare, but not unheard of. Some panicked holiday-goer would sometimes call late to double check the time of the morning ferry before turning in for the night. After all, hadn’t somebody mentioned that there might be another guest or two to follow tomorrow? She sat back down and picked up the phone.

“Hello, Pilspike Island Ferry?” The voice at the other end was like an actor in a bad thriller, so laden with performative gravitas that it passed through “serious” and landed slap bang in the middle of “ludicrous.”

“This is Karl,” said the voice. Linda tried to think for a moment to see if it rang any bells. Nah, nothing.

“Who?” she said.

Karl sighed. He’d been hoping this phone call would get off to a more dramatic start.

“Karl,” he whined. “You took me over to the island this morning. We had a really good chat.”

“What about?” asked the voice on the other end.

“It was about who’s the best Poirot.”

“Oh, it’s you,” said Linda, a note of bitterness creeping into her voice. “You didn’t like me saying Colonel Mustard.”

“Yeah, because Colonel Mustard isn’t a Poirot, is he, knobhead?”

“You managed to swim the rest of the way, then?” Karl grimaced. He was sure he could actually hear her smirking.

“I’m actually a very good swimmer, I’ve got a medal for it and everything.”

“Plastic medal?”

“A medal is a medal. Look, there’s been a change of plan. Don’t come tomorrow. We don’t need any contact with the mainland until Tuesday.” Karl readied himself for the inevitable rush of intrigue – the furtive questions, the desperation to know more. Instead, he could now somehow hear her shrugging down the line.

“Ok.” This took the wind out of his sails a little. This was not how he’d imagined this conversation going.

“Don’t you want to know why?”

“Not particularly,” she replied. “You lot drag these things out forever these days. On my hen do we went to the Bull & Bush and my mum told me to make sure he washed his willy often enough and bought me a glass of wine, and that was enough for me.” Karl started grinding his teeth. This was not how he wanted this to go. He wanted mystery, he wanted conspiracy! He wanted to draw a cloak of secrets over the island and to dance brilliantly out of reach of the authorities and their questions! He decided to try another tack, and entice her into his genius.

“Quite mysterious though, isn’t it?” he purred. “A group of strangers stranded on an island? Cutting themselves off from all hope of rescue? Just what could be going on over there?” Behind him, a blood-curdling scream erupted from somewhere inside Pilspike House. Ah, he thought to himself gleefully. Let the games begin. “Well if anybody asks,” he said, turning to regard the house as the sound of raised voices and hysterical shrieking began to mingle with the music, “just tell them…Detective Karl Goggins is on the case.” He waited for a reply. There was a second of silence, then a dial tone. Karl shook his head and, suppressing another giggle, chucked his own phone off the cliff and into the sea.

Linda replaced the phone in its cradle.

“Fucking murder mysteries,” she muttered to herself, pulling on her coat. People were always going over to the island for “immersive” crime experiences these days, more and more since that Traitors show had taken off. Of all the things to immerse yourself in, crime had to be right down near the bottom, surely. What’s fun about pretending to murder people, or pretending to be murdered, or pretending to work out which one of your friends has murdered someone? Pretending to solve a murder was best left to the professionals, like John Nettles or John Thaw or Timothy Spall, or any other middle-aged middle-class white man with a vaguely eccentric air but an undeniably brilliant mind. She saw no reason why ordinary members of the public should start trying to take those poor men’s jobs any more than she saw any reason for her and her book club to turn up at Westminster one day and start passing laws, but all these young people seemed to want to do these days was pretend to solve murders, start podcasts and get married long after it would actually do the relationship any good. She just didn’t understand the world these days.

Still, if those vapid idiots on the island didn’t want her to come tomorrow then that suited her fine – she had plenty of other work to catch up on without needing to make another three hour round trip. She must have misheard about the other guests coming tomorrow. Just as she was about to turn the lights out, she heard a rap on the window, and turned. A uniformed police officer stood outside, peering in at her. Strange, she thought to herself. She thought she knew most of the coppers by sight these days, but the looming, broad-shouldered, darkly handsome figure peering in at the window was a stranger to her. But then Ilfracombe was a big town and always getting bigger, and as long as there were kids leaving their Buzzballs by the side of the road instead of putting them in the bin, they would always need more policemen, more’s the pity.

“Can I help you, officer?” she asked.

“Sorry to bother you – when’s the next ferry to Pilspike Island?” He replied. Linda looked over to the clock. 11:02. She knew her rights. She was off the clock now and that meant she didn’t need to answer this man’s questions unless he had a warrant, which she doubted.

“Tuesday,” she replied, and turned the lights out.

Karl was still manically giggling to himself as he jogged back across the grass to the front of the house. This was going to be the best weekend of his life. Hopefully nobody had spotted him out there on the cliff – he wanted the whole thing to go like clockwork. He opened the front door and slipped inside, where he was greeted by the unwelcome and very much not-in-the-spirit-of-things sight of a pale woman with dirty-blonde hair and tears streaming down her face, arms hugging her slender shoulders, bouncing repeatedly at the knees while staring fixedly at the ceiling and muttering “oh my god oh my god oh my god” to herself over and over again. That wasn’t very fun!

As Karl gently clicked the door shut behind him, Kate looked down to find him stood there, grinning idiotically like a big dog.

“Alright?” he said. As opening gambits go, he thought this was acceptable, but Kate didn’t look happy to see him. But then that wouldn’t be the first time this weekend.

“Where have you been?” she asked. Karl shrugged.

“Clifftop stroll.”

“Anthony’s dead,” she choked out, the words getting caught in her throat. Karl nodded, still grinning stupidly.

“Yeah!” he said, then quickly thought better of that and wiped the smile off his face, recomposed his expression into one of grave seriousness. “I mean…sounds like we need a good detective on the case!”

“I can’t have this!” Kate sobbed, her hands now fluttering at her temples. “Do you know how hard I worked to organise all this? I’m a people pleaser! How can I please people when one of them’s dead?” Ignoring her distress, Karl reached back into his pocket and produced a small spiral-bound notebook and pen, clicked the end and prepared to begin his investigations.

“Kate Riggs,” he began, “where were you on the night of the…” he looked back up to see Kate already running off into the house, wracked with sobs. He sighed.

“I’m a people too, you know,” he muttered to himself as he stomped after her towards a scene of, by the sound of things, absolute chaos.

OTHER BITS

A Quick Plug – I’m afraid I’m just going to keep plugging the same three things for the next little bit of time! Alongside the Happiness Chain making-of series, we’ve also got Eggbox coming back to the Pleasance on the 10th of November with another amazing programme of short films and script readings; and Jackman/Phantom is also at the Pleasance for a short run of shows at Christmas from the 17th-19th of December (we’re cooking up some very BIG AND EXCITING THINGS with this show, so I’d love you to come and see it if you haven’t yet!)

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – Jackman/Phantom was going to be part of the programme for this but sadly I’ve had to cancel it due to scheduling issues, but the Wormhole Weekend for Nottingham Comedy Festival is coming up in a couple of weeks and boasts an amazing lineup of weirdos and idiots, like The Mayor & His Daughter, Edy Hurst, Nate Kitch, Cerys Bradley, Michael Brunstrom, Katie Mitchell, Lee Kennedy, Caitriona Dowden, Sean Morley and more! Get along to it if you’re nearby.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – I posted an Instagram story saying I was on my way to Switzerland and my good friend Ellie BW replied with the word “Dignitas” but didn’t even put a question mark at the end of it, as if she was giving me an instruction. Found it very funny.

Book Of The Week – Still on Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You and do you know what, maybe some of the reviews are right, maybe it is hard work. But I still think she’s brilliant and am enjoying it and getting a lot out of it even if I haven’t taken to it quite as immediately as I did to her previous books.

Album Of The Week – While The Flood Rages by Max Richter, his latest collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor, after Infra and Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works, both of which are among my favourites of his. This one is the score for a ballet adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy, and my God it’s beautiful. After In A Landscape I was beginning to wonder if I was getting too familiar with Richter’s shtick, but this has shot up to be among my favourite albums of the year. Loving it.

Film Of The Week – The Social Reckoning. Rubbish, but Luke Rollason and I have been having fun devising a Muppet remake of it. Sam Eagle as Zuckerberg. Miss Piggy as the drunk white woman shouting slurs at cops. Bunsen and Beaker as the cops she’s shouting slurs at. Kermit as Jeremy Allen White. Gonzo and Rizzo as Kermit’s interns. Statler and Waldorf as Bill Burr. Scooter as Wunmi Mosaku. Animal as the woman trying to find Zuckerberg a tie. Mikey Madison as the token human.

That’s all for this week! Hope you enjoyed it, and maybe see you over on the paid tier if you’d like to keep reading and following along with the project! Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS I’m currently in Switzerland on Alice Fraser’s writing retreat working with loads of amazing writers on their excellent projects and I’m having a wonderful time. Look at this cute newt I met (think he’s here working on a memoir):

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