Jeremy Vine

Jeremy Vine has written a murder mystery and it is really quite extraordinary. Set in sunny, seedy Sidmouth, Vine’s tale twists and turns its way to a remarkable conclusion. Tightly packed into one crime fiction novel is a devastatingly tragic loss, domestic abuse, forbidden love, suicide and murder. Not to mention plenty of small-town gossip and some serious defrauding of vulnerable love-struck pensioners. What’s not to like?
The cast of characters is extensive but within it are some truly original and charming ones. It is hard not to feel empathy for our main character, Edward Temmis (or ‘Tennis’ to which he, naturally, answers, along with his nickname ‘Wimbledon’), a local radio phone-in host, adored by his elderly female listeners. He has fallen on hard times in his family life and in his career, and finds himself working in a garden centre.
And this character was especially important to Jeremy Vine. He explains ‘I had to create a presenter who couldn’t present. For a radio presenter, those two hours of your show are the most important of the day – the need to present, to ‘be present’ is practically genetic!’ And so, his character Edward is ripped away from the job he loves by a terrible tragedy, creating the central premise for the story: Edward’s journey and fightback. As Jeremy says, ‘This book is about Edward gradually re-finding himself’ – a sort of bildungsroman but with a midlife start point.
A chance meeting with the unfiltered, partially disabled, blue-eyed and totally irrepressible ‘Stevie’ (whose ‘skin had the near orange sheen of a Love Island contestant’) leads, somewhat improbably, to Du Maurier’s Rebecca, a suspicious house fire and an internet romance scam that seems to have most of Sidmouth in its grip. Is your head spinning yet? It will be. But what fun!
Also endearing is Kim, the estate agent who sells Edward his cliff-teetering house and with whom he has a highly charged sexual encounter. The house’s slow crumbling into the Devon sea seems to be a metaphor for Edward’s life – or at least his female relationships.
The setting of Sidmouth is nicely drawn and feels thoroughly appropriate and convincing. That’s not surprising, given that Jeremy’s in-laws hail from just down the road and this is where he spends much of his holidays; indeed, every summer for the last fifteen years while his children have been growing up. There is no BBC Local Radio station in Sidmouth but one can’t help thinking that Jeremy quite fancies it as a retirement project. He tells me of his admiration for his predecessor Jimmy Young, ‘he was still presenting at 84, on the air for two hours a day, and only removed against his will. He fought to stay. When a presenter stops presenting, they must have an identity crisis.’ Jeremy, BBC Radio Sidmouth is calling.
The novel’s plot has so many unexpected changes of direction that it becomes almost dizzying. Jeremy admits that not all of these were scoped out at the start. In fact, he compares plot construction with putting together a flatpack wardrobe or bed: ‘I have discovered,’ he tells me, ‘that it is better to leave the bolts a little loose when assembling one’s story. You get much better ideas as you go along.’
The novel is a bizarre mix of the comic and tragic. Some of Vine’s descriptions are clearly tongue-in-cheek and it is hard not to giggle at the pensioners’ riot when they stampede the radio station, Rock n Talk Radio 92FM, demanding the reinstatement of their hero. One senses that he enjoyed every minute that he spent writing this book and that a lifetime in broadcasting has given him a rich vein of amusing characters and unusual storylines. However, the story has its truly heart-wrenching moments too, most notably in the opening chapter.
And despite its slightly implausible swerves of direction and, occasionally, caricatured characters, Vine manages to keep you gripped to the very end. It is impossible not to get caught up in the lives of this small-town community and its radio station.
Vine is clearly not planning to hang up the microphone yet but writing is very much part of his past and his future. An English graduate, he experimented with some comic novels in his early career and has always enjoyed putting pen to paper. ‘I just love stories,’ he tells me. But what about the shift from real life to fiction? For him, that came naturally. ‘With fiction, you are, after all, still describing the same world but then you skid off into total fiction where all the characters are made up and the events didn’t happen – and I’m comfortable with that. It’s just painting pictures with words.’
And there is very good news for Jeremy Vine fans and murder mystery fans: this is the first in a new crime series and he has already written the second! How does he fit in the writing around a very busy day job? He says it is all down to his team at Radio 2: ‘I, more than ever, appreciate the work of producers. They do the hard work.’ And after all, he adds, ‘radio is all about stories and writing is all about stories. It’s not like jumping trains.’