Episode Three: The Anna O Files Podcast

Written By Lex Brookman

Featuring Matthew Blake, author of Anna O.

Here’s the full written transcript for Episode Three of our podcast. All cited works will be listed below, along with the content warnings.

Lex:

Hello listeners, and welcome to the Anna O podcast in 2024 the world will know the name Anna O. It's the story that will wake up the nation and we are so excited to be able to share an exclusive sneak peek each week into this unmissable thriller coming from Harper Collins in early 2024. Allow me to introduce our very own sleeping beauty, Anna Ogilvy - who hasn’t opened her eyes in four years. Not since that night at The Farm when she was found asleep with a kitchen knife in her hand, her clothes bloodstained, and the bodies of her two best friends lying close. She’d committed the crime of the century – but nothing and no-one could wake her from the nightmare.

This podcast delves into the shocking details behind the Anna O case and the real life cases that inspired the story, the must read thriller of 2024. In episode one, you will have met Matthew - the man behind the madness of Anna O - and now we’re delving a little deeper into his inspiration, and creation of Anna Ogilvy.

Please note, we will be discussing the book, but we’ll maintain to remain spoiler free.

Matthew, Can you tell us how Anna O. started for you? Where did this project arrive? When did you have that little spark that said oh there’s a book there?

Matthew

Sleep seemed like a very good one. Really. It's all eight billion people on earth have it in common. I came across an amazing statistic that we spend about 33 years of our lives asleep. 

That's when I then discovered two things really. The first was what people do when they're sleepwalking. So all these amazing stories about people who get up in the middle of the night and go for 40 mile drives and then come home, get undressed, go to bed in the morning they have no idea they've done any of it and the idea that your brain might be asleep but your eyes would be open. So to everyone else you would look awake, but actually you're not, you're still asleep. 

You know, as a mystery writer, I'm always looking for things that are mysterious, and that's got an inherent mystery to it, because how can you, how can your eyes be open, yet you're still asleep? How would you ever know if the person you're seeing and what they're doing, whether they're awake or asleep? So I thought, well, that's got a good angle to it. And I came across lots of cases, real life legal cases of people who'd killed other people and claimed they were sleepwalking when they killed them, and how almost impossible it is for a jury to decide whether that's true or not, because unless you know, how can you ever decide? So? And the second thing was when I discovered resignation syndrome, which is the real life deep sleep that the people who've fallen to sleep for four or five years on end. You simply can't wake them up, and I mean that was just even more mysterious and even more of a mystery. 

Lex

One of the things I loved about Anna O is that it is so. It's so obviously well researched and we get to go down so many rabbit holes of research with various characters that I feel like I'm learning all of this wild, wild stuff. 

Matthew

The thing I really came across when I was writing the book is that reality is always more surprising than anything you can make up. So obviously I did an English degree. I've written speeches in parliament, I have a certain sphere of knowledge, but I didn't before this have any great insight into, you know, functional neurological disorders or sleep psychology. And when you probe into it, instead of me sitting here trying to invent that, what you find out is, is just way, way, way more interesting and far more scary, to be quite frank, and unbelievable. I mean even the idea that of a mythic deep sleep coming true, the idea that's a real thing. People suffer from it. No one quite knows what causes it or how to wake people up, that's. That is far beyond what any novelist could imagine. 

Lex

It feels like FNDs are just the tip of the iceberg as well. It feels like there is so much going on. Did you ever feel overwhelmed with your research? Because there are so many different facets and pockets of thought? 

Matthew

That's certainly true. And the next book I'm working on at the moment, which is about memory and false memory, and that's if it was possible, there's even more out there on memory than there is on sleep. So, yeah, I mean, it is possible to sort of get completely overwhelmed by it. But that, in some ways, was what made it such rich territory, because you could just pick the most interesting bits and put it all together and you sort of never ran out of material there. So it was, you know, the most interesting cases, the people who woke up 20 years later and were still convinced it was 1984 or something, or you know, there was just so much there that you could just pick the most fascinating stories and incorporate them into the tale. 

Lex

 So before writing, Anna O, according to my research so this is you know I found on the internet. So it must be true. You were a parliamentary speechwriter, having studied English at Durham University. So let's go back in time and relive the journey for me. How did we get to where we are today? 

Matthew

I was a speechwriter for my sins in Parliament, something you can only admit to within, you know, certain company or you get sort of stared at. But that was great fun though. It was great training as a writer, often liken it to being a news journalist, where you're really schooled in meeting deadlines and writing succinctly and you know not boring people. I found it very useful. Really, it was a. It's a whirlwind thing. It's publishing has very long timelines, so you can be waiting two years for a book to come out, whereas politics two hours is quite a long timeline. So it's good to get used to doing things at speed, I think. And yeah, it's, it's a. I did it coming out of university. It was amazing training. You've got to meet all sorts of interesting people, and I'd heartily recommend it to anyone who be writers out there. 

Lex

God, what a gear shift that must be. You're so right on that timeline moving from. We need something written for the five o'clock news to, your book comes out in two and a half years. 

Matthew

It is, and I think that's where I still do a bit of it, sort of freelance, just because it's nice to have the two time shifts and when you're working on a long project then go and do a short project its good fun, but it's also. It's also really useful to write in sort of different views. You know, right Keats had the idea of negative capability, where you can hold two conflicting thoughts at once, and I think that's the essence of all drama or all all great fiction. So training yourself to see things from both angles I think is a great skill. And when you're, as I did, quite a bit doing speech writer for hire, so you're writing for different clients, then then you, you learn that skill, you learn how to see things from, from different perspectives, and that really has helped in my, in my fiction writing. 

Lex

So the one thing is that I'm very cautious about talking too much about the book because I feel like when you read it, I almost want people to go in blind because that's the best way to consume it. 

So I'm not going to talk about Anna, but I would love to talk about Ben. Ben is my favorite character from the book. I feel like I loved him. I was frustrated by him on every single page. So let's talk about Ben and how you created him. Presumably, you know that you're tackling sleep psychology, so you know you need a psychologist. 

Matthew

I wanted it all to be based in real life material. I sort of then went and did all the research, found these sleep clinics in Harley Street that exist, to treat, obviously, you know lots of people have sleep disorders so they would go to a sleep clinic. Obviously, the sleep clinics in Harley Street tend to cater for quite high net worth clients. So you know people who might be famous,people might be singers, footballers, politicians, business people who've got sleeping problems, and so that's where the idea of the abbey came to me and I thought, well, that's again, I didn't have to invent it, it's all there. That would be a great and interesting precinct for it. 

And then Ben is the character of the main sleep psychologist. So he's a forensic psychologist, he's a criminal psychologist who specializes in sleep related crimes. And I've done quite a bit of research on forensic psychology and some, you know, people know that from Netflix series like Mindhunter or, for older viewers or listeners, Cracker, was the Robbie Coltrane series was a sort of pioneering on that and there's been a lot of books there and the behavioral science unit at the FBI, and so that that's been quite well documented and I've done a lot on that. But I've never seen anything which sort of applied that to sleep and all the things that can happen while you're sleeping. So that's where Ben came across. 

Really he was, he's got a sort of academic side to him. So he teaches at Burbeck in London but he also works for the Abbey Sleep Clinic. So he's got a sort of academic hat. He's got a sort of clinicians hat. He is very medical, obviously, but he's got a sort of very broad hinterland as well. He's interested in sleep and the history of sleep and the mind and Freud and all these sorts of things. So it was. That was what made him really interesting to me is that he's got a broad look at it and he can sort of view the Anna O case as both a sort of cultural phenomenon but also a psychological phenomenon and a medical phenomenon. So he's the perfect person for the job really. 

Lex

Oh, agreed, and I think what I love about Ben is that he does have this perfect balance of being the doctor, being a forensic psychologist, being the kind of expert on sleep to handle the Anna O case, whilst also being just a man with a wife and kids and responsibilities and things that he needs to do in day to day life. And I love, also that he loves films. That must be something that comes from you. Are you a massive Hitchcock fan? 

Matthew

I mean, I'd say, my two big inspirations, the two sort of, you could argue, the sort of great British exports to the world in this genre, are Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock. They're both, both iconic, both. You know, Agatha Christie's books are all still taking up a whole shelf of the bookshop. Alfred Hitchcock, probably still the most famous through a director who's ever been, yeah, I mean as a British writer. You sort of look at those two and just think, gosh, they're the pinnacle, really it's, and they have been for as long as I have been interested in writing, really. So I've, I watched their, you know, watch the Hitchcock films, I read their authority books and that's what gives me, gives me the inspiration.

Particularly, I think, obviously with Anna O  you've got that sort of mystery who done it? Element. But I think it's particularly the sort of shocking twist, the emotional reaction. That's what if you think of Alfred Hitchcock and something like Psycho, or Agatha Christie and The Murder of Roger Actroyd, or Death on the Nile, or Murder on the Orient Express, or, and then the one on has, you know, she specialized in breaking the rules and in not abiding by convention, you know so,so bringing those twists that cause outrage that cause the to be sort of people to try and get a banish from the detection club or that, and they're still quite shocking now. 

They're still sort of rule breaking now. So I've always been you know, Hitchcock, Hitchcock, the same so I've always ever since watching those films or even those books wanted to write something which might have the same impact on a reader. I want you, want you to get to the end of this book and either fall off your chair or fling the book across the room or rant and rave or talk about it. Just react. 


Lex

Okay, so confession I've never watched a Hitchcock film. 

Matthew

Oh, that is a terrible confession. 

Lex

But it's fine. By, by the end of us finishing recording these podcasts, I will promise that I will have watched more than one. So where do I start? What's the one that I should start with?

Matthew

Well, I mean, the most famous obviously is Psycho. So, and I think you know that's a good place to start. It's again that, breaks all the rules. The main character dies a third of the way through, which is a complete shock. You have this outrageous twist at the end which is sort of completely mind blowing. So, yeah, I'd start there. That, that certainly was a huge inspiration to me. You know, probably the most iconic thriller film still, still now. I don't think anyone's ever, ever topped it. The music is just phenomenal. So I’d start there. But then I also mean there's other ones like Strangers on a Train, which I think you can't beat, Rear Window, and then I'd go all the way back. I'm going to show off my sort of cinematic knowledge here.

Cinematic knowledge here. Shameless name drop. But I would go back to The Lodger, which is his very first film in Britain silent movie and it's all about a sort of Jack the Ripper style. 

So let's talk a little bit more about some of the more modern books that you've been loving. Obviously, Christie is the Queen of Crime. Yes, but who's really doing it for you now? 

Matthew

Oh gosh, well, so many. I mean we've been so lucky with the authors who sent the book out to, how generous they've been, and I mean one of the most amazing things was getting some of my absolute heroes to endorse. It's got Lee Child, Jeffrey Dever, David Baldacci, Nita Prose. 

Lex

Just a few small names you know, might have written one or two books between them.

Matthew

So that was just fantastic. I mean all of those writers I absolutely adore. I mean Harlan Coben’s, another one. I love the sort of very hook and hook and twist. You know, he gets you in with a sort of a very, very big, loud, noisy hook and then he just keeps twisting it and it's always great fun. So yeah, I mean then I love, you know, Ian Rankin, Val McDermott and Peter James, Linwood Barclay, all of them. I mean I'm a big mystery reader, so so Lisa Jewell, you know. So I read all of them. 

Lex

That's a great recommendations list to start us off with.
I think there are one or two books on that list that we can get going on. Let's go back to Ben for a minute, because I think some of my favorite scenes with Ben that he has some meetings with the Ministry of Justice in various coffee shops of large department stores and having worked in central London and having worked on Oxford Street, I walked past those cafes on multiple, multiple occasions, so I really enjoyed the idea that these kind of super clandestine important meetings might be happening right under my nose 

Matthew 

Well, I mean the thing is, if they're super clandestine, of course they all could, because if they're personally in a suit with a slightly bad dress sense could well be someone very important in the Ministry of Justice. No, that was great fun. I really enjoyed that. I mean, again, there's a lot of Emily, who's Anna's mother in the book is a former politician. There's elements of Westminster. The Ministry of Justice obviously gives it a big sort of Westminster angle to it in the sense that the Anna O case is so high profile and they're the ones who are in charge of it. So yeah, I did draw on what I'd seen, what I knew. The Stephen Donnelly figure, who's the Ministry of Justice figure, is sort of based on people I encountered at that high level in those sorts of places. So it definitely fed into it. And yeah, I think I can neither confirm nor deny that such meetings over scones take place. But it's all plausible. 

Lex

Which I think is just mind blowing Like just to get really true crime nerdy for one second. I was listening to a podcast about the Alexander Litvinenko poisonings and at one point they, like the Russians, tried to poison him in an Itzu on Oxford Street. And the amount of times that I ever had lunch in that exact Itzu on Oxford Street. The fact that things like the Ministry of Justice, the fact like things like spies and all of this world conflict is happening in our daily lives, but because we're busy getting our noodles and getting our coffee, we just don't think about it. But it's all happening and it's all right there. 

Matthew

Yes, well, I think also what's happened is social media is sort of bought all that closer to everyone and that's partly what Anna O explores appeared is that the case of Anna O has become a hashtag, it's become a big global sensation that's simply driven by social media and all the platforms and how true crime becomes sort of new form of celebrities. So I think, yeah, you have this sort of weird thing where it's some ways we don't see it because it seems impossibly distant, but then it's also impossibly close to home because it's. You can follow all the sort of twists and turns of all these cases and I'm fascinated also particularly by the sort of amateur sleuths, you know, the TikTok sleuths, and the real cases, tragic cases, many examples where people have started, you know, amateurs have descended on the crime scene and started trying to find things and the way in which that division between sort of law and order taking over the police, sealing it off, it being very much an official thing, that barrier between that and the general public has sort of broken down a bit, and with Anna O  that's particularly the case. 

Lex

You're so right, especially with things like Netflix documentaries and the way that we consume Netflix documentaries as general population. I have lost track of the amount of times that I've watched a documentary and then I've said to one of my friends oh my God, did you see so and so? I enjoyed it so much. And then I'm going hang on. No way is that can I say that, am I? Should I be enjoying this? You know? Horrific depiction of this terrible, terrible crime that's happened that I've just willingly invited into my living room. Yeah, and I'm consuming for entertainment. You're right. Along with the TikTok sleuths. It is just a completely different way that we interact with crime now. 

Matthew

Yes, but I think actually it's nothing too revolutionary. I think these things sort of come around in cycles. So I mean I remember when I was studying English. Often they're talking about the development of the novel and all these sort of New Gate ballads and stuff, the things people would write near executions, and you know they'd write true stories of highway robbers and all that sort of thing. So, in a sense that was just in print. Now we have it on streaming. But I think that ghoulish fascination with true crime has been there forever really. It's just there are different mediums through which we express it and the podcast Netflix thing is just particularly good for that. But I think it has always been there, I think. 

Lex
To round up, what do you want readers to know going into the book? What should we expect?

Matthew

Oh well, just be prepared to confront your deepest fears about the mystery of sleep and you know, don't bank on getting a good night's sleep while you're reading it and be prepared, just. I mean, the main thing I always love about mysteries is the game with the reader. That's always the thing. When I was reading a great Agatha Christie, it was always the sense that you were sort of playing, to see if you could figure it out and she was trying to outwit you, and so I mean that that's the fun of me, for this, for me of this genre, and I hope, I hope that no reader will actually figure it all out. Just when you think you've absolutely got the answer, it just completely pulls the rug out from under you. 

Lex

All right, Matthew. Thank you so much for joining us for our first podcast and I'm so looking forward to episode two. 

Matthew

Oh, thank you for having me. 

Lex

As we come to the end of our third episode of the podcast, I hope we have intrigued and excited you listeners. I’ve been so glad to be able to introduce you to Matthew; our wicked wordsmith , and give you a little more insight into the man behind the madness of Anna O. Stick around, because in our next episodes you’ll be hearing from some of our creators who’ve been celebrating Anna O for the last few months and hearing directly from them whether our murdering mistress is guilty or innocent… 

If you'd like to be one of the first to get into this propulsive, powerful novel about a case of a young woman who commits murder in her sleep, then you can order Anna O now from the links in our show notes and in the transcripts, which are always available on our website: thetandemcollective.co.uk. Keep your eyes peeled on our podcast feed for any further updates and breaking news moments from the case of Anna O.

Content Warnings for THE ANNA O Podcast. and the book itself:

Murder

Psychosis / Therapy / Psychotherapy

Suicide

Death

Hospitals

Poisoning

Death of a Child 

Imprisonment 

Refugee Crisis 

Alcohol Dependency 

Drug Addiction 

True Crime / Consumption of True Crime

Lex Brookman
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Episode Four: The Anna O Files Podcast
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Episode Two: The Anna O Files Podcast