This afternoon I've had the pleasure of speaking to writer Elly Griffiths once again, this time for Felixstowe Book Festival where we were together, in front of a capacity audience, unpicking her new time travel novel 'The Frozen People'.
It's always such a joy spending time with Elly. She has such energy, positivity and humour, and this latest book, taking criminal 'cold cases' to another level, is entertaining and fascinating.
In this book, the first in a new series, we find a police team in London is enabled to travel back in time to investigate unsolved crimes. We are introduced to Elly's new hero Ali Dawson as she has to step back into the Victorian period, at the request of a politician eager to have his past redeemed.
Elly has always had a passion for Victorian literature, she says, and Wilkie Collins is her favourite writer. Her enthusiasm is clear and infectious as she reveals details of everyday life of that time.
So the Victorian period was very much on my mind in the past week and a newspaper article caught my eye the other day which seemed very timely. It reported on a new exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum and suggested that the great writer had his own 'sliding doors' moment, worthy of any time travel novel.
Charles Dickens it seems could have become an actor rather than a writer. He had received an invitation to audition for a key actor-manager in Covent Garden but had to miss the appointment through illness. By the next season Dickens was established as a parliamentary reporter and his career had taken a different route.
It's always intriguing looking back on these things, isn't it? And we can do it in our own lives - the 'what if?' question. But in spite of Elly's police team being able to go back in time, we need to deal with the here and now. And I love the quote Elly shares from the physicist Carlo Rovelli: 'Time travel is just what we do every day, isn’t it? Every single day we travel one day ahead in time.'
Thank you for reading.