In the spring of this year, Lloyd Shepherd and I decided to take our podcast, ‘The Curiously Specific Book Club’, a bit more seriously.

Now That’s Curiously Specific Part One: Tim’s Festive Five – The Curiously Specific Book Club

A very merry and curiously specific Christmas to one and all! May it happen as it should, on the 25th December and with everyone gathered in exactly the right place. Talking of which, here is Tim’s festive selection of excerpts from Series 1 and 2 – key moments when we managed to be curiously specific about a location or a date or both. Here you can get a strong sense of what our book-related outdoor adventures are all about. Excerpts include a trespass across a posh Kent golf course in search of Stig’s Dump, a Len Deighton-related psychic attack on a Soho coffee bar and a trip to a bleak and haunting part of the Lincolnshire coast in search of The Woman in Black’ Support us on Patreon and you can get early access to Lloyd’s Festive Five – his personal favourite podcast moments from across two seasons – with yet more highlights from the Curiously Specific library. See you for more adventures in 2023. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Until then we’d been taking books out into the wild on an irregular basis – and each resulting podcast was its own adventure with its own shape, texture, mood and length. We only made and published something when we had the time to do so, fitting it in between our day jobs and family life.

With Series 2 we committed to publishing more regularly – a new episode every week. And we revamped the format so that half of the show comes from our makeshift basement studio  – with us talking about the author, the book, mad discussions about dates and locations and the places each book takes us  – and the other half is us having fun adventures in interesting book-related places.

And boy have we had some adventures!

‘Dracula’ took us to Whitby (and Purfleet); ‘The Woman In Black’ to the flat and foreboding Lincolnshire coast; ‘Get Carter’ in Scunthorpe. And often we would have a magical moment when the book would land us in a place that surprised us, enchanted us, allowed us to enter deeper into the writer’s imagination.

We stood on the overgrown driveway of Manderley in Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’.

We found the weir pool where Michael Henchard considers suicide in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’.

We hiked to the abandoned brickworks where Jack Carter meets his end in Ted Lewis’s ‘Get Carter’. We found Fox Corner, the home of the Todd’s in Kate Atkinson’s ‘Life After Life’.

Often, of course, we don’t find what we’re expecting and we get a clue about how each writer’s imagination works when it comes to settings for a story. Some authors like to embellish or even completely make things up. Other are deliciously ‘curiously specific’.

You can catch up on all of Series 2 on all major podcast platforms – iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google, TuneIn (we publish on Acast). There are always two parts to every book episode and if you Support us on Patreon you can always get early access to Part Two without ads – and you’ll also get lots of extra material such as our show notes, research materials, photos, videos and maps.

If you want to get a quick idea of what we do, I recommend our Xmas specials where Lloyd and I both pick our top five moments from across the two series, that best exemplify the joy of what we do.

Now That's Curiously Specific Part Two: Lloyd's Festive Five – The Curiously Specific Book Club

It's Lloyd's turn to pick his five best moments from Series 1 and 2 of the Curiously Specific Book Club podcast. His picks take us deep into Mick Herron's commute to work in SLOW HORSES; the disappearing landscapes of Barry Hines's A KESTREL FOR A KNAVE; Nazis parachuting onto a Norfolk beach (and possibly drowning in the high tide!) in THE EAGLE HAS LANDED; and finally, and in Lloyd's case most memorably, the extraordinary discovery of Oldway Lane in THE DARK IS RISING. These are our special Christmas episodes to mark the end of our second series. Join us in January for Series 3, when we discover weird goings on in a very strange-seeming London Town….. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’ll be coming back strong with Series 3 in the New Year, kicking off with three London fantasy novels (we like doing things in threes) – ‘Neverwhere’ by Neil Gaiman, ‘Hawksmoor’ by Peter Ackroyd and ‘Rivers of London’ by Ben Aaranovitch. We’re then going to let three major crime queens – Christie, Rendell and Sayers – take us on adventures in Greater Manchester, West Sussex and Cambridgeshire respectively.

If you like the idea of us carrying on in this way throughout 2023, Sign up at Patreon. We’re only asking for a small amount of money and you’ll get an audio adventure every week and a new book to think about every fortnight. Thank you!