Charlie and Kate Weston (You May Now Kill The Bride) discuss her hilarious comedy thriller wherein a group of friends go on a hen do, one of them is murdered, but they don’t stop going to hen dos…

Please note there is some swearing in this episode.

General references:
Below Deck

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Kate Weston: Murder On A School Night
Kate Weston: You May Now Kill The Bride

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 14th March 2024; published 12th August 2024

Where to find Kate online: Website || Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

01:56 The starting point/inspiration – hen dos (and Kate’s own)
06:17 Why the murders?
08:01 How did you plan/write the book?
10:34 Creating the friends and their personalities
14:58 Was there a particular reason why you offed Tansy first?
16:37 Did you want the murderer to be worked out?
18:36 Have you got a favourite character?
20:00 How did you keep the balance between the bonkers and the realistic?
21:55 Jeremy’s club
23:34 Could someone else have been the murderer?
25:29 Could DI Ashford and Lauren’s thread ever end happily?
27:04 Transitioning from writing YA
28:59 What are you writing now?
29:29 Tell us about your stand-up career

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 103. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. I’m Charlie Place and today I am joined by Kate Weston, whose utterly fun thriller, You May Now Kill The Bride, is absolutely bonkers unrealistic, and always reminds us that it is so, which I love. Tansy, Saskia, Dominica, Lauren, and Farah, are life-long friends getting together for Tansy’s hen do – that’s bachelorette for those of you across the pond. They’re going to a new age retreat that won’t have alcohol or phone reception or anything that anyone but Tansy will find fun. Farah’s peeved – Tansy’s only known her fiancé three months and this hen do’s eating into Farah’s own festivities, which she’s waited ten years for. Dominica could do without all this, she’s got work, and there’s pressure to look after everyone. Saskia’s playing event planner as she wants to start an events business and wow her wealthy Holland Park friends, and Lauren is moping because she’s still not over her long-term on/off situation with Farah’s brother who is now with Tansy’s newest friend, who Tansy has invited to the hen do. Sounds confusing – yes – but only at the beginning and I think that’s also the point as well, this is a fantastic whodunnit. Anyway, Tansy’s not going to survive the hen do and the friends are going to start questioning how well they really know each other and who’s shared their secrets. And there’s probably going to another murder later on. Hello Kate!

Kate: Hello!

Charlie: Thank you for waiting for me that entire time [both laugh] So, yeah, this is an absolutely brilliant book, and you had me thinking throughout, all the time. So I’m going to start with the very start. What was the starting point in this book, the inspiration, that sort of thing?

Kate: So I guess this book actually has been in the making for years. The idea came to me when I was in the thick of hen season, that period in your life where everyone you know is getting married and that’s where all your money goes. But I couldn’t write it until I had a bit of distance from that. I needed to sort of separate myself. So I think it was mostly that period in your life where you are going on hen dos, every penny you earn is going on a hen do, and then you have to go to the wedding and you have to buy the wedding gifts. I guess it’s kind of like a passive aggression in the WhatsApp groups, you know? There’s these WhatsApp groups going on, and someone’s always taking the reins of the planning, and there’s always this tension of is everyone putting their weight? Is everyone doing everything they absolutely can to make this person’s dream come true? And I think that was the beginning of it, was being in these groups and seeing my friends in these groups and seeing how much they changed people and people’s behaviour. In a way, you don’t see it coming because you’re launched into this period in your life where at first you’re kind of like, ‘oh, one friend’s getting married’, and you’re like, ‘oh, a wedding, how fun!’ And then all of a sudden you’re in this period where there’s a wedding every weekend, you’re dashing up and down the country, all your money’s going on hotels and train tickets and hen dos and that sort of thing. And I think it was born from that, those experiences and speaking to people. And also the fact that hen dos have, over the last few years – I mean, certainly before the pandemic – over the last few years, they’ve grown and they’ve exploded. It’s no longer one night out, if someone says, ‘I’m going on a hen do’, it’s not like we’re going to the local pub for drinks, it’s, we’re going away for a weekend. We’re going to stay in a farmhouse for the weekend, everyone has to donate a kidney to the fund [Charlie laughs]. If you’re not willing to lose a body part to fund this trip, then are you really someone’s friend? So, yeah, it was really born from that, but I needed a little while to re-centre myself after being in that world myself. And I think it was also because I myself got married in 2022, and I was supposed to get married in 2020, so it was that period in the pandemic, and I was hen-doed out by that point. I was like, I’ve been to everyone else’s hen dos. Everyone I knew had children, and I was very much kind of like, ‘oh, don’t worry about it. Like, it’s fine, I don’t need a hen do’. And there was this, ‘but you must. You must have a hen do’. And I did; my friends threw me an incredible hen do. I had a great time. But it was like when I said to people, ‘I don’t think I want a hen do’, there was this, ‘What? This is not okay. You have to.’ Yeah. So I guess they’re born from how much hen dos have gone out of control.

Charlie: So you’re definitely not a Farah, then, by any means?

Kate: I don’t have the money to be a Farah! [Charlie chuckles.] That was never on the cards. I mean, I think [chuckles] some of it was influenced by reading articles about influences that had hen dos that were £50,000 weekends away. And I thought, ‘well, my wedding didn’t even cost that much’. Yeah, definitely not Farah. No. [Both laugh.]

Charlie: Well, can I ask you what did you do for your hen do?

Kate: We had a lovely vegan lunch at one of my favourite vegan restaurants. We went to Wilton’s Music Hall and had some drinks there. And then my friends had hired a boat that you could stay on in St Katherine’s Dock. I’m a huge Below Deck fan, so there was a bit of a theme to it and we stayed on this boat for the night. And things were still quite Covid-y, so it was nice to be able to go somewhere with your friends and have this experience where it was just you and your friends and you felt free to have fun. So yeah, it was actually incredible. Very lucky.

Charlie: It sounds absolutely lovely; that’s actually one of my favourite places, St Katherine’s Dock, so, yeah, that sounds very nice. Okay, so I know that you’ve written books for younger age groups that have got murder in, but I suppose I had to ask, where did you get the idea of including a murder in this book? Obviously, within that context of you having already written about that sort of thing, if that makes sense?

Kate: I think… [laughs] this is going to sound bad, and I hope my friends don’t listen to this, but just being in those WhatsApp groups. The WhatsApp groups are rife with people being cross with each other. And, you know, sometimes you’re in those groups and you’re like, ‘oh, this is going to turn any minute now; people are going to be having a go at each other’. And I think my brain always goes that extra step to, ‘someone’s going to kill someone’ [both laugh], which obviously, like, they’re not, but… And I think the initial tag-line I had for this was, ‘some will live, some will die, some will get botox’ [Charlie laughs] because it felt like that sometimes with those hen dos – you go away on the hen do, and you’re like, ‘is this going to end in disaster? Is this going to be like how everyone falls out? Is this going to be the end of everyone’s friendships?’ Because so much stress and pressure has gone into this. And then the poor bride gets there and doesn’t know any of the stuff that’s been going on in the WhatsApp group – who’s been saying to who that they’re not putting enough effort in or other arguments about not getting deposits fast enough. And you kind of sit there and you go, ‘this could so easily go quite badly wrong’ [chuckles]. And I was like, ‘well, imagine if it ended in murder!’ So, yeah [chuckles].

Charlie: Brilliant. That answers the question that I had originally of knowing the whole plot because I think, with the murder, we kind of do. But, I mean, there is just so much going on in this book, and I know that I spent a lot of time thinking the murderer has to be one of the friends. It has to be. And I was like, ‘no, it can’t be!’ And then, ‘well, it’s got to be this person!’ You did really well with that. And I had to ask, with all this tracking everything that’s going on, how did you plan/write this book?

Kate: So this book was probably the hardest one I’ve written because I’ve written other murder books before, I’ve written books that aren’t about murder, as well. And this one, I think, was the hardest because it took me a couple of goes, actually, just to get the tone right and also to get all the kind of moving parts right, because I wanted to make sure that the main thing was that these are friends that deeply love each other. They absolutely adore each other. They’ve been friends since birth. Because I think that is one of the main components of a hen do as well, is that everyone loves the bride, and these are friends that really love each other, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still have beef with each other, you can’t still hate each other for things or find things that people do annoying. And I think that’s part of long term friendships, is that you can be friends with someone for a really long time and you develop these things where you’re like, ‘God, it actually really annoys me when they do that, but I still love them and I still want to be their friend’. And I think getting that bit right and getting the intricacies of their friendships right was almost harder than the plot and the whodunit side of things, because I wanted to make sure that, throughout, you still had this love between them, even though obviously one of them is killing. But the reason she’s doing it is because she so loves the others that she’s, like, protecting people. So, yeah, that was almost harder than the plotting the murder bit, in a way, because I think it’s very easy with murder books to move towards it all being very savage and all being very like, death and, like, hatred and stuff like that. Whereas, like, the heart of this book is actually love. It’s just maybe not quite the love that you think [laughs].

Charlie: It’s a particular kind of extreme love [Kate: yeah]. But, yeah, I can totally believe that the friendship and the group was most difficult. I mean, it wasn’t a hard book to read in that way – it was easy and fun, as I’ve said – but I could see that obviously you’d spent so much time working on it for it to work out as it did so well. I want to talk to you more about characters themselves, if we say, obviously, there’s a few different characters in this book, but if we concentrate on the friends, can you tell us how you developed them, their personalities and the drama, as you’ve been saying? Yeah. Just how you came to develop and fit them all together, I suppose.

Kate: I feel like there’s a little bit of me in each one of them which, when you’ve read the book, is quite bad [both laugh]. And I think all of them are, in a way, from different points of personal experience. I wish I was as together as Saskia is. I wish I had that… in Saskia’s life, everything is perfect and everything is planned and everything is set together, which is also sort of her downfall. And I’ve always wished I was one of those people that had my shit together and I’m just never going to be. I have to accept now, at nearly 40, that I’m not that person. So I think Saskia came quite easily to me, actually, because I think she is quite an inherently funny character, and I feel like people know Saskias, but maybe less extreme versions of a Saskia. Farah was the bit that I think everyone has but a lot of people don’t admit to, which is the competitive streak that you have. Because I know we’re not supposed to be competitive, we’re not supposed to be jealous and all this stuff, but people are. It’s a natural human thing, and I think sometimes you just need to accept it. And I think Farah is that competitiveness, like, she is that person. She is the person that wanted to get the highest grades at school, that wanted to have the best of everything. And I feel like everyone’s got a bit of Farah in them, but it’s whether or not they admit it to themselves. So, yeah. Lauren; I identified a lot with Lauren, actually [laughs]. Being that kind of character – for a long time I was the only single one in my friendship group. But also, Lauren’s terrible [Charlie laughs] in a way that I think people don’t necessarily see at first. So, yeah, a lot of Lauren came from me. All these characters are probably my absolute worst bits [laughs]. Dominica’s just incredible; she’s a powerhouse and I needed a character that was going to take charge of the situation because there is always a character that takes charge of the situation and there’s always a person in a WhatsApp group, in a hen do planning, that takes charge of the situation, that is ready to go just a little bit feral as well [Charlie agrees], and ready to throw themselves into everything. And Saskia is ready to take control, but she’s not ready to go feral. She’s absolutely staying away from that. So I think Dominica was the one that was like, at any cost and so driven to achieve any goal that she sets herself. And that is just how it is. And Tansy is the one who doesn’t realise that she’s doing things that upset people. Which, again, I think is something everyone has the capacity to be; I think all people have that capacity to do things that upset people without realising that they’re upsetting people. And I think Tansy does do that, but I think also maybe some of what Tansy does isn’t necessarily as accidental as she makes out. I think she hides behind it a bit and I think she goes, ‘oh, yeah, I’m just a bit flaky and I didn’t realise’. But she may be a little more calculated than that. But I do think all of us, at some point, do upset people without knowing it, without realising it. I think that’s quite normal. I think there’s this thing at the moment where people don’t like unlikeable female characters, specifically, in books, but I think all people have the capacity to be unlikeable. No one is entirely likeable and I think it’s more important to have those characters out there. And I stand by my unlikeable characters and find them in some ways likeable.

Charlie: I’m gonna stand right by you in that, I think it’s more important to have characters that you can understand the motivations, even if you don’t necessarily like them. Yeah.

Kate: Yeah.

Charlie: It’s interesting what you said about Tansy, and I’m glad you said it, because throughout I was thinking, ‘she can’t be that ditzy as they’re calling her, she can’t be’, you know, and sometimes I was thinking, ‘well, maybe every now and then’, but no. I wondered, actually, was there a particular reason that you offed Tansy first?

Kate: Yeah [laughs] I just thought, you know what? She would be the one, because I think she’s annoyed a lot of them. And she would be the one that you could see each one of them having a motive to kill quite easily. So it felt like she was sort of prime candidate. And also, she was about to get married, and that feels like a good [laughs] dramatic place to have a murder, so, yeah. And it also works with the title so [Charlie: it does indeed], there’s that [both chuckle].

Charlie: Yeah, I mean, you certainly made me think – once you got rid of Tansy, I thought, ‘okay, well, I can’t see how it’s going to work if yourself, Kate, gets rid of all of this group of friends one by one’, and then, of course, you don’t, which works really well. But you always made me think, then, who is going to be next? [Laughs.] And then I know I started to start really liking these people. I think I totally agree with you – lots of the times they’re not likeable – but you do start to come to care about them, and then you’re like, ‘I don’t want any of them to die! Who’s going to be the next one?’ So I have to say I’m relieved that you did leave them at the end – we got the friends there, and there were other people as well that I thought were very good murders. So, yeah, I suppose I want to say, the murderer themselves, did you want them to be worked out? Because I know, I’m going to hold my hand up, I’ll say I didn’t figure it out until the end, and I don’t know if I was kind of wrong, I suppose, to have not figured it out?

Kate: No. I mean, I think it’s different, isn’t it? Like, some people want to know who the murderer is, and they get annoyed if they get to the end and they haven’t figured it out. Some people don’t want to know who the murderer is, and they get annoyed if they get to the end and they have figured it out. My hope was that it wouldn’t be so easy to work out that everyone worked it out; also that it wouldn’t be so hard that no one worked it out. So I’m hoping I’ve struck a balance… because I think part of the fun is – especially when you’ve written the book – one of the best things is people sending you messages being like, ‘I figured out and it’s definitely this person’. And you get to sit there and just be like, ‘well, I’m not going to tell you either way’, but it’s quite fun when people have that. And I think part of the fun of reading books with your friends and stuff is having that conversation and being like, ‘who did you think it was?’ You want there to be some speculation about which character it was because then it adds to the excitement, it adds to people’s enjoyment of the book. I think I enjoy, when I’m reading a book like that, to have suspected several people along the way. I enjoy being proved wrong. I enjoy getting to the end and going, ‘I didn’t see that coming’. But I know that there are people that if they get to the end, they haven’t figured it out, they get annoyed [laughs] and they find that annoying and it’s just because everyone’s different and everyone wants a different reading experience. So, yeah, I’ve tried to keep it a balance of those two options but I’m pleased that you didn’t work out who it was [both chuckle].

Charlie: I know it sounds weird, doesn’t it, because I’ve read it and, I now know who the murderer is and stuff and I’m only one person, but I can see where you’ve done that balance, I suppose I can say. Have you got a favourite character?

Kate: So favourite isn’t necessarily because I like them.

Charlie: Absolutely.

Kate: But characters that I really enjoyed writing – I really enjoyed writing Saskia because she was just so funny to me. She was such a funny character to write. And I really enjoyed Lauren. One of the characters I did enjoy writing the most, though, was Joss [chuckles] because I think he does some things that are just laughable and are just things that guys used to do, when you were younger; every woman that’s read this book pretty much has come to me and been like, ‘oh, we all know a Joss’. Like, everyone’s had messages from a Joss. And so I think [laughs] writing that perspective was quite funny for me because it felt quite cathartic in a way [laughs]. So, yeah, I think he was one of my favourite bits to write, actually.

Charlie: I thought he was a murderer for a while.

Kate: Did you?

Charlie: Yeah [laughs].

Kate: I just don’t think he’s got that about him.

Charlie: No, no, true, true. I think it was the text messages, that made me have a think. But, no, I think… I mean, for me, I really liked the, I suppose, trajectory of Lauren’s character development because I think she comes into her own so much in the end, in a way that maybe is the strongest way. I don’t know. I mean, Farah has obviously got a strong one as well. The thing that I mentioned in the introduction, no one’s going to go to another hen do after you’ve lost someone. You know, you’ve had one person murdered, you are not going to go to another hen do and you’re not going to go to another hen do. And of course they do, but then you have always got in the background, like other people have said they’re not going to go because, you know, there’s been a murder and then there’s not going to be so many people at the wedding because they don’t want to get murdered. I suppose I want to ask, for yourself, when writing, how you kept the balance between the completely bonkers unrealistic and the realistic.

Kate: Well, I think, to be honest, Farah would not stand for not getting married or not having the hen do that she genuinely thinks she deserves [Charlie agrees]. But there’s no way she’d allow that to happen. She’d be absolutely furious. She’d do more murders herself. So I think I always had that in my mind, that the character that Farah is, there’s no way she’d have allowed for there not to have been a hen do. And I think, also, these women are such good friends that they believe that there’s no way any of them could have done it. Like, they’ve known each other, some of them, since birth, since they were four years old. When you’ve known someone that long, there’s no way that that person is a killer, you know them. And I think that those two things kept the balance for me of, I personally would not go on any more hen dos [laughs] or go to the wedding or any of that sort of thing, but I think these women were not me. They were not making my choices and they’d also been friends for such a long time and they had that trust and that safety in their little friendship bubble that made them feel safe to do it. My rationale for that [laughs].

Charlie: No, it’s interesting! I hadn’t actually thought of anything like that. It’s good. And I’m glad you wouldn’t go to any others, after that sort of thing. That’s good to hear.

Kate: No, I’d not leave the house, I think [Charlie laughs].

Charlie: No, I don’t blame you. No, I don’t think anyone would, would they?. You have some really, really illegal and one that’s illegal and then one that’s like, illegal and extremely shocking. Where did you come up with this idea to add in Jeremy’s club?

Kate: Well, Jeremy’s club was actually one of the last elements that got added because I knew I wanted Jeremy to do something really despicable and I couldn’t quite work out what it was, because he’s obviously a man of great money and class and power, and he’s also a complete dickhead. So you needed something that tied all those things in together and something that would give him more power in the world that he lives in. And that just ended up feeling like the best option. And also because sometimes the way that people in positions of power, in all countries, just seem to get away with stuff, you kind of go, ‘this is almost not as unbelievable as you think it would be’, because everyone’s looking out for everyone in some way, it’s just that Jeremy’s making money off it. And it does feel like there’s a lot of men in positions of power that get away with stuff without that. So, yeah, it felt like it fitted with Jeremy’s tone and with the sort of thing he’d do. And with some of the things that are said earlier on in the book where Saskia is like, ‘well, Jeremy’s best friends with so and so from Scotland Yard’, and this kind of thing, it fitted in quite nicely. Yeah, Jeremy also quite a fun character to write because just a despicable human who then obviously, I had fun killing off [Charlie laughs].

Charlie: So, yeah, could someone else have been the murderer, do you think, at all? Was that ever an option?

Kate: Yes.

Charlie: Yeah?

Kate: I think Farrah could have easily been the murderer [Charlie agrees]. I mean, she’s all over the shop. She would probably get so stressed that she lost it a bit. As Lauren says earlier in the thing, she’d watched a documentary about killer brides. I think Farrah could have done it; equally I think Lauren could have done it because, as everyone points out, Lauren is not as ‘poor me’ as she portrays. Saskia could have easily done it to protect her life and everything she has. So I do think other people could have done it and other people were an option, but, yeah, Dominica just seemed like the right one to me.

Charlie: Did you write any other of the options or were they just things that you were mulling around in your head?

Kate: Just things that I mulled around in my head and I think one of the options I mulled around in my head was Saskia and Jeremy working together [Charlie: oh!], which then I was like, ‘actually, I don’t like that and I don’t want Jeremy to make it to the end’. So I decided that was more fun. Yeah. With Dominica, it just seemed to fit really well with her character in that she just took her character that extra step, where she’s been trying to protect everyone for so long and she’s doing everything out of a kind of love for her friends. Yeah, so it just felt like the right move, a kind of complex move, because I think [with] the others, it would have been sort of a selfish thing, whereas Dominica really believes she’s done it for the good of everyone else. It could have been.

Charlie: I certainly don’t need to ask you who your worst character is, the one that you don’t like the most [Kate chuckles], I think that’s pretty evident from your words here. DI Ashford – I wondered if he was doing that thing, having a dating relationship with Lauren deliberately, to get some more information. Maybe I was thinking too much into things, I don’t know. Is there any world within your book where that can end happily.

Kate: With DI Ashford and Lauren? [Charlie agrees.] I mean, I feel like they probably could. Yeah. I think Lauren needs to take a minute, maybe have a minute for herself, get over things properly. I think they probably could make a go of it. It just depends whether DI Ashford wants anything to do with her, really, after everything that’s gone down with her friends, because, I mean, [laughs] there’s quite a lot to unpack in her friendship group, I think, after what’s happened. It would be quite full on. They’ve been through quite a lot together, so it’s whether or nothing that would stand the test of time. Because they’re not really going out when she sleeps with Joss, they’re not really together. And also he’s been a bit like, ‘oh, not interested in you, interested in you, not interested in you’. So I think it could; there’s scope for them. It just depends if either of them… Lauren might not want to have a relationship with the detective that was investigating the case when loads of her friends died. It might not be something she wants to keep hanging around, or it might be – she might like the safety in it. I don’t know. Yeah, they could work out.

Charlie: I thought he was a murderer. Couldn’t figure him out with the retreat centre, but otherwise. Yeah. So I was going to ask – and I’ve left it till the end because it’s not about the book itself – but you’ve effectively, I suppose, transitioned from writing for a younger age group to writing for young adults/adults. How has that been?

Kate: Quite good fun [laughs]. Yeah, quite good fun. I think as far as I’m concerned, I would still be writing for young adults as well as adults, because I think that’s quite important to me to carry on writing for that age group. Yeah, it’s been fun. There’s so much of it that’s not as different as everyone thinks it is; I think people see it as quite a big leap and it’s really not as big as people think. I guess you’re just allowed to swear more and do more naughty things and obviously the storylines are a bit more things that I’m going through in my life right now. So it’s been fun. I like writing for both, to be honest. I love reading YA books, I love reading adult books, so why wouldn’t I enjoy writing them, you know? A lot of people ask that question and I just think there’s not been that much difference [laughs] just allowed to swear a bit more.

Charlie: [Laughs.] Well, I’m going to ask this question now, I’m going to turn my questions around. What are you writing now?

Kate: So almost ready to go to print is the sequel to Murder On A School night, which was my last YA book, and that is teenage detectives Annie and Kerry, they’re a crime fighting duo that are solving their own murders. So I’m writing that and I’m also working on my next adult book, which I can’t say anything about.

Charlie: It’s in progress, that’s the important thing for us. Yeah.

Kate: Yeah.

Charlie: So I’m going to have to ask you about your former stand-up career. What can you tell us about it? Where did you gig? Any particular themes or whatever you want to tell us?

Kate: It was mainly around London, although I obviously branched out to other places as well. I mean, it’s been years since I’ve really done it regularly, but I do go back and do the occasional gig still. Most my stuff was around feminism and a lot of my humour that you see in the book is the same kind of thing. Yeah. And I do miss it. I’d love to go back to it. So I haven’t done it for a while in any sort of regular way, but hopefully I would be able to go back to it.

Charlie: Well, Kate, thank you for being here today. It has been lovely. It’s been an absolute hilarious pleasure to read your book. Thank you for being here today.

Kate: Thank you for having me.

[Record later.] Charlie: And thank you very much for listening. Please do share this episode with anyone you think would be interested in it. The Worm Hole Podcast episode 103 was recorded on the 14th March and published on the 12th August 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

Photo credit: Joanna Bongard

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