1--What is the title of your latest release?
CAN YOU SOLVE THE MURDER?
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
CAN YOU SOLVE THE MURDER? is an interactive murder mystery novel in which YOU take on the role of a detective and YOU must solve the crime by making decisions about who to interview, which leads to follow, what evidence to gather, and finally, who to accuse.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
The book takes place at Elysium, a floral wellness retreat set in an old country manor in the English countryside. One of the guests has been found murdered, and so everyone at Elysium is now a suspect.
I chose that location because it’s a familiar environment for a classic murder mystery. This will be the first interactive novel many readers have experienced, so I wanted to make them feel comfortable with the case itself before they get deep into investigating and making decisions about how to solve it.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Well, in this book the protagonist is the reader. So I can’t really avoid hanging out with myself and I do love meeting my readers…
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Insightful, determined, intelligent. At least, I hope so!
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
That interactive novels are harder to write than I realised. I grew up reading Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books, and I now write videogames as well as novels, so I thought I was familiar with all kinds of “branching narrative”. But this is my first full-length interactive novel, and it taught me a lot of about how they’re constructed. I just hope that pays off when I write the next…
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
My process is simple: I initially write what I call a Zero Draft, to get to the end as fast as possible. The Zero Draft is messy, full of holes, and inconsistent – but it allows me to see the shape of the whole story, so that I can properly assess what changes and revisions it needs. Then I go back to the start and work through the whole manuscript again, making those revisions and fine-tuning things until it’s ready.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I travel a lot for work, so I often eat alone. I like nothing more than relaxing in a dark corner of a good restaurant, with a book and a glass of wine.
9--Describe your writing space/office!
My study is a spare bedroom in my house, lined with somewhat overstuffed bookshelves. It overlooks a local park, with a stream at the bottom and a moor rising on the other side. I use a sleek modern computer, which sits on a rickety old desk, and I face the window so I can watch dog walkers in the park.
I write in Scrivener, on a Mac. I’ve been using Scrivener for almost 20 years (I helped design the graphic novel template included with it) and for this book I also used Miro.com to build the flow chart necessary to outline the story.
10--Who is an author you admire?
I was a great admirer of the late Ursula K Le Guin. Not only was she an extraordinary writer, but she set a great example of how authors can live in and address the world.
For a living author I’ll pick Mick Herron, author of the Slow Horses books. Mick has a wonderful lyrical bent to his writing, no doubt from his experience as a poet, but combines it with edge-of-your-seat thriller writing. He’s also one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
So many! But I’ll pick The Case of the Missing Masterpiece by Terrance Dicks. It’s a Holmes-inspired crime novel for children, and by modern standards very short, but when I read it as a boy it blew me away and had a big influence on me. It prompted me to start reading Sherlock Holmes himself, and it’s one of the reasons I now write mysteries and thrillers.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
I was actually doing a store event in Leeds, England to promote my Dog Sitter Detective books while my agent conducted the auction for Can You Solve the Murder? – my phone kept buzzing with messages while I was on stage being interviewed! It made the event rather more stressful than it should have been, but it was worth it when I finally spoke to her afterwards and she told me the book had sold.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
It’s an equal split between crime/thriller and sci-fi. I’ve read and loved both since I was a child.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
Blade Runner. I’ve watched it countless times and own it on almost every format there is, including limited special editions. It changed science fiction, and cinema, forever.
15--What is your favorite season?
Autumn. You still have summer’s lingering warmth, but it’s cool enough to wear a scarf. And the colours!
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Date night with my partner. Nothing big, just good food and good company.
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
A book: Deadly Animals, by Marie Tierney. Not only is it a great and often disturbing murder mystery, but it’s set in the area of England, and time period (the 1980s), in which I grew up – something you hardly ever see in crime fiction.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
I like a wide range of foods, but my default – both to eat and to cook – is Italian. I don’t think I’ve ever gone a week of my life without eating pasta in some form.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
I don’t have a lot of free time. I wish I had more! When I do get some, I read, go for walks in the country, and make music.
20--What can readers expect from you next?
I’ve already begun writing a second CAN YOU SOLVE THE MURDER? book, so hopefully there’ll be more news about that soon.
An Interactive Crime Novel
Step into the shoes of a detective and investigate the most mysterious crime of your career.
There’s been a murder at Elysium, a wellness retreat set in an English country manor. You arrive to find the body of a local businessman on the lawn – with a rose placed in his mouth. It appears he was stabbed with a gardening fork and fell to his death from the balcony above. But that balcony can only be accessed through a locked door, the key is missing, and everyone in Elysium is now a suspect…
Gather the evidence and examine the clues. Choose who to interview next, and who to accuse as your prime suspect. But remember that every decision you make has consequences – and some of them will prove fatal…
Do you have what it takes? Can YOU solve the murder?
Mystery Police Procedural [Penguin Books, On Sale: July 1, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9780143138884 / eISBN: 9780593513026]
Antony Johnston is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of more than forty books, graphic novels, and comic series. His graphic novel The Coldest City was made into the multi-million-dollar blockbuster movie Atomic Blonde. He is also a celebrated videogames writer, and is credited with many franchise-defining titles. Johnston is a former vice chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, a member of International Thriller Writers and the Society of Authors, a Shore Scripts screenwriting judge, and sits on the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s videogames committee. He lives and works in England
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