Books: Jermey Vine joins the club of ‘cosy crime’ authors

Do you like your crime true, cosy, or would you rather go to bed without thoughts of murder rattling around your head?

“Crime divides the room,” says journalist and BBC Radio 2 host Jeremy Vine. “Friends will either have watched every single true crime thing, or they’ll say, ‘I don’t watch it because it gives me nightmares’.”

Vine personally loves the lot, from his ‘queen’, Agatha Christie (“Who was like The Beatles; the first, the band that was impossible to follow,”) to the true-crime docs Netflix is awash with.

Above all, he loves a good old-fashioned English whodunnit, the kind Richard Osman has revived in spectacularly popular fashion.

“Osman’s first book reopened it all, it’s opened the gate for lots of us, which I’ll always be grateful to him for,” says Vine, who now, 49 years on from reading his first Christie - Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, aged 11 - has written one himself.

Murder On Line One is the first in a cosy crime series in which a sacked and grieving local radio host discovers that someone has been offing his loyal listeners, and so he begins to investigate.

Vine wants readers “to feel suspense, but to know that in the end, everybody in it is in safe hands”.

For him, cosy crime offers a way to consider murder and violence in a “safe and controlled way”. Encountering it in real life is very different.

Vine grew up in Cheam, Surrey, and remembers it was “a different time in the 1980s, you’d regularly see fights in pubs”. He was beaten up twice as a young adult, “not badly, just knocked around. And it gave me quite a fear of physical violence, because I’m not very good at fighting. In fact, I’m useless”.

As a student in Durham, he was carrying king prawn balls back from a Chinese takeaway when he found himself surrounded. “The food was taken, and I suppose I deserved it, because it was that thing of town versus gown. I was in their territory.”

Another time, he was punched in the face at a New Year’s Eve party. “That’s such a shock when that happens. You never forget it. It’s really sobering.”

Now he has a “good radar” for anyone looking for a fight for the sake of it, but what terrifies him most is the very thing that Murder On Line One starts with, the death of a child. “That’s the thing I couldn’t handle,” he says.

As a journalist who covers current affairs day in, day out, Vine is fairly resilient when it comes to harrowing new stories, but some do stay with him.

The story that has kept him “awake at night” is the murders of Caroline, Hannah and Louise Hunt in July, 2024, by Louise’s ex-boyfriend. “I have two daughters and that’s your worst nightmare, that someone gets into their lives who is coercive, violent and wants ‘respect’ from everybody, but doesn’t earn it. I feel so sorry for Mr Hunt and his daughter, Amy, who survived.”

BBC radio commentator John Hunt returned to the airwaves in March after the murder of his wife and two daughters. “He’s my hero and I’ve never met him,” says Vine.

“To say, ‘Right, I’ve got a choice here. I can either cave in or I go back to my job and say, this has happened, but I’m going to try to live my life for my daughter, I’m going to go and be back with my listeners’. I think it’s amazing. I think he’s an amazing man.”

Every day, Vine gets up at 4.30am and writes for 30-40 minutes and is already 100,000 words into book two.

“I tap on my laptop on the edge of my bed. Then I get up, get my cycling gear on, get on my bicycle, and go to work.”

However, he’s not braving the commute on his beloved penny-farthing. He texts a photo of it, jauntily hanging on the wall in front of him as we chat.

“I can’t really,” he muses. “You just don’t want to go down a hole, or stop suddenly, that’s when you’ve got a real problem.

“The lads who used to ride them 100 years ago would apparently lean back in the saddle and put their legs over the handlebars in order to stop flying over the front.”

Vine had a “very painful” tumble himself, which won him the headline: ‘Jeremy Vine rushed to A&E after falling off penny-farthing’.

“It’s the funniest headline of my life. It doesn’t get any better,” he says with a laugh. He kept the newspaper clipping.

The joy of the machine outweighs the perils though. “It spreads joy, people love looking at it,” he says. “There’s no higher purpose in life than to spread joy.”

Next month Vine will turn 60, an age he “feels pretty good about”. “When I was a kid, 60 was as old as the hills. When my granny was 60, she was shrivelled! She looked like she was 107!” he says, not unkindly.

“Things have changed, 60 is the new 43.” He says it’s helped that he’s dodged so-called ‘sniper’s alley’, the age bracket people often claim “a whole load of bullets come at you that are major illnesses. If you swerve them, by the time you get to 52, you’re gonna have another 25 years - and I managed to swerve them!”

He’s planning to spend the big 6-0 having drinks with friends and family.

“I’ve got two lovely, lovely daughters who think I’m an idiot, and they’re always good to spend time with,” he says delightedly.

Vine says the big birthday is not making him take stock or think too far ahead.

“All I want to make sure I do is get tomorrow’s programme out. Journalists are very short-term. We’re just working on a story, and it comes out tomorrow. So the real ambition is to try not to fall off the air tomorrow.”

That said, there are still achievements he’d like to tick off. “I would like to write a bestseller, to be really frank with you. Let’s see what comes of this lovely book...” he says, practically twinkling with hope and glee.

He still gets a “massive” buzz from live broadcasting. “I can’t even tell you,” he says. “Phone calls make a show. They really do, they’re the most exciting thing for me.”

No matter if it’s people ringing in to chat about the weather because they’re lonely (“That’s a very valid phone call,”) Boomers and Gen Z going to war over home ownership and avocados, or people clamouring for capital punishment.

“We have quite a lot of specific demands for flogging. There’s a flogging fantasy going on with some people I must say,” says Vine genially.

“Whatever’s being said, you’re trying to either not react or react appropriately.

“And sometimes things are completely fantastically eccentric, and that’s all part of it.”

Murder On Line One, by Jeremy Vine, is published in hardback by HarperCollins.