The Curiously Specific Book Club

In part two of our adventure with James Herbert’s The Rats we discover how much the East End has changed, and how much it stays the same. The Regent’s Canal is a crumbling, abandoned ruin in Herbert’s book - today, it’s a polite playground for joggers and cyclists. But cheap tower blocks still loom over the pleasure seekers, and unchecked development has us asking: is this what Eastenders really w...

Fancy a trip into the dark heart of London’s East End? A place of racist killings, crumbling housing, and striking schoolchildren? We’ve got an unexpected guide for you: James Herbert’s 1974 splatterpunk debut, The Rats. Don’t worry - we won’t be reading the really gory parts. But we will be using the book to navigate the 1970s East End - and it turns out that Herbert’s book has as much social his...

This is the second part of our adventure with Bram Stoker’s epic chiller Dracula . Having travelled south from Whitby, we find ourselves in Purfleet, Stoker’s imaginative location for the estate of Carfax and Jack Seward’s asylum. We then head to Piccadilly to pick a virtual fight with the online Stoker cognoscenti over the location of Dracula’s London pad. We end in a graveyard in Hampstead, disc...

We’re taking on a book which is as much a myth as it is a novel: Bram Stoker’s 1897 chiller, Dracula . Like Stoker’s eponymous neck-botherer, we find ourselves washed up in Whitby, one of the most theatrical settings we’ve ever seen for a book. We hunt down the bench where the Count attacks poor Lucy Westenra, and stand on the beach where his ship crashes into the shore of England. We discuss goth...

This is the second part of our adventure with Susan Hill’s classic chiller The Woman in Black. In our ongoing hunt for places which could have inspired the fictional locations of Crythin Gifford and Eel Marsh House we find ourselves in Lincolnshire, where the land merges into the sea seemingly without interruption, where old rock stars haunt interesting market towns, and where Marconi dreamed of t...

We’re taking Susan Hill’s classic chiller The Woman in Black out for an adventure. It isn’t easy, because the market town of Crythin Gifford and the scary old Eel Marsh House are not real places. But what if they were constructed from real memories, and reminiscent of real places? In part one of our latest episode we check out some likely spots in Yorkshire, and Tim tries to scare Lloyd with the t...

In part 2 of our Day of the Triffids adventure, we follow Bill Masen as he leaves London and heads down into Sussex, on the trail of the woman he finds himself in love with. We discover John Wyndham’s house in the countryside, and travel the Wyndham Way, our name for the road which winds along below the South Downs, with Wyndham’s school and home at one end, and Bill Masen’s refuge at the other. O...

We’re back in London, discovering the places and context for John Wyndham’s legendary dystopian tale The Day of the Triffids. Our hero, Bill Masen, has woken up in a London hospital to a world in which everything has changed - almost everyone has become blind overnight, and the plants which Bill helped to breed, the triffids, have begun to prey on the newly vulnerable humans. But where is the hosp...

In part two of our Riddley Walker adventure, we follow Riddley down from How Fents to Widders Dump, and then along the line of the old railway to Rose and Power. On the way we learn about Russell Hoban’s interest in shamanism and the occult, and speculate on whether he ever met the French alchemist Fulcanelli. We finish in Fork Stoan, known to us today as Folkestone, and try and figure out just wh...

We’re heading back to Kent! This time we’re having an adventure with Russell Hoban’s magnificent dystopian fable Riddley Walker. Set two thousand years in the future and based entirely in north Kent, the novel tells the story of a 12 year old boy and his adventures wondering a strange post-nuclear landscape, where towns have odd new names that echo the past, and where language has shifted and morp...

In part two, we move down the Wey river and on to the Thames at Shepperton, the site of a destructive battle between the British Army and the Martians. The tower of Shepperton church is supposedly seen from the south bank of the river and is reduced to a pile of rubble. If you want to hear our episodes without ads, as soon as they’ve available, subscribe to our Patreon page: https://www.patre...

We’re kicking off Series 2 with The War of the Worlds by H G Wells – the classic tale of Martian invasion that spawned radio shows, movies, musicals and even an ‘immersive’ experience. But where is the original book set? If you want to hear our episodes without ads, as soon as they’ve available, subscribe to our Patreon page:  https://www.patreon.com/curiouslyspecific Hosted on Acast. See aca...

Lloyd and Tim take on the 'holy scripture' of spy novels, John Le Carré's classic tale of 1970s Cold War intrigue and betrayal; the book that established George Smiley as one of the all-time great fictional characters - 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'. Our mission at the 'CuSpec' Book Club is to road test works of fiction that appear to be curiously specific about dates and locations. We go to the pla...

‘Lamb’s been banished. Where’ve they sent him? Somewhere awful? Bad as it gets. God, not Slough? Might as well be.’ In the middle of the third Covid-19 lockdown, Lloyd and Tim get together virtually for a Zoom around London’s Aldersgate Street and key points north and west of Slough House, the headquarters for Mick Herron’s titular Slow Horses. They spy on Slough House itself, uncovering countless...

‘A plan to brain-wash the entire framework of the nation,’ said Jean, over the coffee and croissants. ‘It’s hardly credible.’ After a long hiatus, Tim and Lloyd are back with the (unlucky-for-some) 13th Curiously Specific Book Club podcast. They start with something that comes easy to them both – a leisurely stroll around Soho. Who knew Len Deighton’s classic 1962 spy novel The Ipcress File was th...

“It began that summer, a hot and sticky summer that made the air shimmer and the walls melt.” We’re back in Brighton, for the third in our trilogy of books set in Southern England’s biggest seaside resort. The book we’re taking for a walk this time is a tale of bloody revenge set against a 1980s backdrop of shifting sexual politics and wrenching political change. Our guide is Bella, who woke up on...

"To those whom God has forsaken, is given a gas-fire in Earl’s Court” We’re joined in this, the 11th Curiously Specific Book Club podcast, by Andy (@DulwichRaider) from Deserter, who is our natural go-to mate for summoning up the spirit of alcoholic drift and under-employment that permeates ‘Hangover Square’ by Patrick Hamilton. We are forced to drink in all the pubs on or just off the Earl’s Cour...

“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.” For the tenth instalment of the Curiously Specific Book Club podcast, we travel to the southern coast of England for Graham Greene’s ‘Brighton Rock’. We discover the Brighton of the 1930s, a place of seedy glamour shoved up against repulsive poverty, a town of razor boys, prostitutes, gangsters and dodgy lawyer...

“Antiques and Women are my only interests. It sounds simple, but you just try putting them in the right order.” The third instalment of our East Anglian trilogy takes us to Essex. We immerse ourselves in the unreconstructed 1970s world of the UK’s favourite antiques dealer-cum-private eye - Lovejoy. We use Books 1 and 3 in the series - ‘The Judas Pair’ and ‘The Grail Tree’ - to explore Colchester...

“In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” For the 8th 'CuSpec' Book Club podcast, and the second in our East Anglian trilogy, we’re in Suffolk, following in the footsteps of German writer W.G. ‘Max’ Sebald as he walked from the lit...

“At precisely one o’clock on the morning of Saturday 6 November 1943, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and Chief of State Police, received a simple message… The Eagle Has Landed.” We’re in North Norfolk looking for the tiny village of Studley Constable, as described in Jack Higgins’s classic WW2 thriller about the attempted kidnap of Winston Churchill by a small band of German paratroopers...

We take you on a merry tour of the magical land of Peckham in South London, courtesy of Muriel Spark and her superb (and remarkably short) novel 'The Ballad of Peckham Rye'. We start at the address in Camberwell where Muriel Spark lived and wrote the book. We then follow a number of lost - or perhaps completely mythical - pathways down the old Surrey Canal, past a number of long-gone pubs in...

Lloyd and Tim sink into the murky and topographically challenging world of Joseph Conrad’s imagined London, as described in the classic 1907 novel ‘The Secret Agent’. It’s a world of foreign agents, mysterious assassinations, international tensions and (alleged) Russian intrigue - so nothing like the world today, right? Our route through London takes in foreign embassies in Knightsbridge, dodgy bo...

Lloyd and Tim discover the hidden landscapes at the heart of Susan Cooper’s magnificent fantasy, The Dark Is Rising. We travel to deepest Buckinghamshire to find Cooper’s fictional village of Huntercombe, and the home of her hero Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son. Lloyd gets obsessed with the dates of Britain’s first motorway for reasons which will only become obvious if you listen, while...

Lloyd and Tim take to the open road - or rather the somewhat congested A20. We're following the route taken by James Bond in Ian Fleming's 'Moonraker', travelling (at about half Bond's speed) between central London and Kingsdown, the supposed location of the Moonraker rocket base. We speed our way to the precise locations of two major car crashes in the book, puzzle over Fleming's (and Bond's) obs...