Lloyd Shepherd and I have now completed what we’re calling Season 1 of The Curiously Specific Book Club podcast. Do have a listen, if you haven’t already.

It’s mainly for people who’ve ever wondered whether the dates and places mentioned in well-known works of fiction are factually correct or entirely made up (or a bit of both).

We’re also using this as excuse to have some great days out in some really interesting places. Perhaps we’ll encourage you to do the same.

This podcast series is something we decided to do having completed The Riddle of the Sands Adventure Club podcast series a while back. Having realised we still liked each other enough to want to carry on going on book-related adventures together, we started looking for other books, beyond Erksine Childers’ classic spy novel, that make a feature of mentioning specific dates and places throughout. It turns out there are quite a few.

The promise of ‘Curiously Specific’ is that, with each book, we go to the places described (“so you don’t have to”) and discuss how accurate the writer has been both about the locations and the dates mentioned.

We started with books based in Kent simply because it was easy for us to get out there from South London and record everything we needed in a day.

We moved on to books that are set in landscapes that have pretty much disappeared – or changed so much that it’s a fun task to try and track down what’s left. The next three are based in East Anglia, and the final trilogy is a set of Brighton-based novels.

Please bear in mind that we just make these for fun, in our own time and for no money. So we’re not always rigorous about sound quality and editing, especially given that we’re doing most of our recording out in the wilds and on the hoof. We’re taking turns editing the podcasts ourselves too, so there’s quite a lot of on-the-job training and learning going on.

There’s now likely to be quite a long break until series 2, I’m afraid, because both Lloyd and I have proper paying work to do. We are, though, already putting together a list of books we’d like to take out for an adventure. If you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear from you.