Countdown favourite Susie Dent talks new novel: "I absolutely don't look down on 'cosy crime', but I wanted some grit in there"

It’s partly – like so many things – Jimmy Carr’s fault. “He teases me about the number of non-fiction books I put out,” admits Susie Dent. (There are, indeed, 12 of them available on Amazon.) But her new, “nervous” foray into novel-writing is also down to her dad.

“It was a bit like when I first started on Countdown,” explains the Channel 4 quiz show’s queen of words. “In both cases I was asked several times to do it, and someone had to apply a little bit of pressure before I actually said yes.”

In the case of Countdown, that someone was Dent’s boss at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), where she worked as a lexicographer; with the novels, it was, “first and foremost”, her father.

“I don’t think I ever would have taken the step to write fiction, because I always say that dictionaries have as much magic and adventure and enchantment as anything you’ll read anywhere. But the proudest my parents have ever been of me was when I got a short story into my school magazine, and Dad was always asking, ‘Why don’t you go back to fiction?’. Sadly he never got to read [the novels], but he knew I was writing them.”

Those novels – the second of which, Death Writ Large, was published last week – concern a team of lexicographers turned reluctant sleuths at the rather OED-like Clarendon English Dictionary. “When a university lecturer falls from the tower of an Oxford church, and graffitied runic messages begin to appear across the venerated walls of the city,” teases Dent, the booksmart bloodhounds must “follow a path of linguistic clues that question the true definition of justice.”

It’s not as far-fetched as it seems: lexicographers are “word detectives”, insists Dent, constantly “looking for clues and talking about evidence”. And it’s not quite as gentle as it seems, either.

“I absolutely don’t look down on ‘cosy crime’, but I wanted some grit in there – not blood and gore, but in terms of human nature. Like Agatha Christie, who we all turn to for comfort reading, but there’s actually quite a lot of darkness in her work.”

So if it’s not cosy crime, what is it? “Well, there’s a lot of cogitation over linguistic puzzles, and I hope readers will find pleasure in that, as I do. It would be a real joy for me if they maybe stop when they come across one of the clues and try to solve it before moving on.” So is it… ‘lexi crime’, perhaps? “I love that! I might be on my own in that genre – I can be the number one in ‘lexi crime’. I’ll take it.”

However you class it, Death Writ Large is a deeply satisfying read. Its perfectly paced, twist-packed puzzler of a plot is shot through with lightly worn learning and a lexicon of fascinating and unfamiliar words that feel both vocabulary- and life-enhancing.

“I’ve always viewed language as both a retreat and an energiser – it’s where I go when I want to feel fired up or take solace,” says Dent. “The dictionary itself gives you such an understanding of our preoccupations over the ages, and reassurance that people before you have felt this too, and needed this word as well.”

It’s a speech that could easily have tripped off the tongue of Martha Thornhill, the book’s protagonist – as Dent is happy to admit. “Oh, I’m definitely Martha in many ways. She can be extremely honest and quite cold sometimes, because she lives in her own head a bit. And some of the things she says come straight from me. For example, she talks about loving the dictionary’s ‘singletons’, which are words the OED records as having been used only once.

“They’re like linguistic mayflies – they live for a day then die. And so many of them are beautiful, positive words, but we’ve completely dismissed them [from the language] because we’re so pessimistic – words like ‘respair’, which is the opposite of ‘despair’, fresh hope or recovery from despair. So Martha writes about those, and that is entirely from me.

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“In fact, when I did the first edit of the book, I realised she was a bit too much me, so I then made her completely untouched by other people’s opinions of her – which is the opposite of me. That was probably a bit aspirational, because I really want to be that sort of person.”

And did that work? Is Martha’s fictional insouciance influencing her real-life creator? “I think it is. This will sound very narcissistic, but until recently I had a Google Alert set on my name, so that if I was talked about in the newspapers, I’d know about it, and at least be prepared. But honestly, every time it gave me a ping on my email, I could feel my heart racing and I was expecting disaster – even though I would usually then see that it was actually the most banal thing being said. So, recently I turned it off, and that’s been so liberating. Now I just need to write another eight novels in the series so Martha can keep rubbing off on me…”

• Death Writ Large by Susie Dent is available to buy now

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