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Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and my guest this week is Jonathan Coe, whose new novel is The Proof of My Innocence,

which is a multi-genre, postmodern experiment. Maybe he'll dispute my characterization of it thus,

which tracks the very short life of Liz Truss's premiership along with much else besides.

Jonathan, welcome.

Can he sort of telling me, I mean, this is a book that has so many sort of interlocking elements.

How did you sort of plan it or arrive at a structure?

Through the collision of lots of different moments, I suppose, as is always the way when

I'm writing a novel.

I suppose it kind of began with my discovery of Cozy Crime as a genre, which is a genre,

obviously, there's been around for a long time.

I think the Oxford companion to crime writing says that the first description

of a detective novelist Cozy goes back to the 1950s, and of course it gestures back towards

golden age crime writing, Agha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Marjorie Allingham and so on.

But I first became aware of the term in France when I was on a book tour, and I was taken to a bookshop in a lovely coastal town called Osegore, just north of Beirits.

And there was a big, big section of English books in French translation. But the signage over the selection said Cozy

Crime in English.

And I thought, well, this is obviously a big thing now.

And another example of kind of British soft cultural power, because all the writers in this

bookshop were British.

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