In Conversation with Charlotte Vassell, Author of ABC Pick “The Other Half”

We are so excited to announce our January book club pick, The Other Half by Charlotte Vassell! Set in the captivating world of London’s high society, Vassell’s debut begins with the murder of a famous socialite, Clemency O’Hara, and follows the ensuing investigation that exposes scandals and dark secrets among London’s most influential people. We can’t wait for you to read along with us this month!

For people who haven’t read The Other Half yet, can you give us a quick summary of the book and an Instagram caption you would use to describe it since the story begins with the murder of a prominent influencer? 

It's a police procedural, and it's very much a satirical look at young, wealthy, quite posh Londoners. I think the tagline on the novel, "You know how they live, this is how they die" is an absolute classic, so I'd stick that on there.

Your book has been described as A Handful of Dust meets The Great Gatsby, and I really enjoyed the literary references throughout the book. What inspired you to write The Other Half, and are there any specific mystery books or writers that were especially influential during your writing process? 

I tried to write it at least three times before I wrote it in 2020 in the pandemic. I was furloughed from my job, stuck in my little flat, so I was, like, right, “I'm going to finally write that book.” I'm so deeply flattered by the Evelyn Waugh comparisons. I absolutely love Evelyn Waugh, and you’re seeing it now with Saltburn—that kind of Oxbridge University—because the university chucks you in the way of people who you wouldn't have met before, from different backgrounds. It very much started out as a class commentary, with people from different classes meeting at Oxford, and then it ballooned from there. And I realized when I was trying to write it that these characters were so awful—these dreadful, navel-gazing privileged people—that the only way I could really make it work was to make it a police procedural, to give it plot and drive it. So that was the process of shaping how the novel looked. 

I grew up watching Agatha Christie TV shows with my grandmother. The who-dunnits are so prevalent in British culture; you almost just absorbed it because it is something that's always on television. I think crime novels are a really good basis to build a satirical novel. If someone's been murdered, something's gone really horribly wrong in society, so you get to have a look at that society in quite miniscule detail and pull apart what's wrong. 

Before you were an author, you studied history and art history, trained as an actor, worked in advertising, and were a purveyor of silk top hats! Can you tell us a bit more about these experiences and how they have influenced your writing? 

I have a history degree, so I'm very, very interested in politics. I read political theory books quite a lot, so that sort of stuff plays into it. When I started writing the second [book], I joked to my husband that I’d run out of things to write about, run out of the little bits. I'm a massive Jane Austen fan– have been since I was a lonely teenager rewatching the 1995 one on a loop—and it's all these little bits that I love that have played in. There's references to the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood; if there's ever a pre-Raphaelite art exhibit, I'm there. My Fair Lady is my favorite musical—those were my favorite songs to practice when I was at drama school—-so there are some references dotted around.

One thing for me is I'm mixed race—my mum's white British, and my father's parents are Windrush era Jamaicans—and in terms of my own personal history, it really felt important for me to incorporate a thinking about and criticism of the British Empire, and to have characters questioning the hierarchy of Britain, the social status people have, and that relation to empire because it's so pervasive. It's one of the things people don't necessarily talk about — it's quite controversial – but it's very much there in the fabric of everyday British life. I think that my historical training played very much into that. And all of the art history bits I love and the literature I love just fed into it without much effort.

The Other Half is our book club pick for this month! Are there any specific book club questions surrounding themes or characters that you hope people will keep in mind as they read? 

That's such a good question. I think there's a question around friendship in the book, and who was really friends with whom, and the meaningfulness of relationships between peers. I think you have two sets of that: you've got the detectives on one side, and then you've got Rupert and his group of friends who are at his ridiculous McDonald's birthday party. So friendships are really interesting. I think there's definitely something around literature and art, and using literature and art almost as a personal crutch at times when you're in crisis, so it'd be interesting to know how people feel about that kind of intertextuality, whether referencing other texts brings it alive to them in particular way or give things particular meaning. Being in L.A., and living in America, you don't have the same script running through your head if you were reading a British book as I would. Class is really so prevalent as a theme in the book, but as someone stepped away from it, from outside of it, looking at the British class system and the nuances of it must be really quite interesting. 

One of my favorite parts of the book is the love triangle between Nell, Alex, and Rupert, and I’ve read that the idea for this dynamic actually came before the full idea for The Other Half. How did you go about developing their unique characters and slowly revealing their complicated relationships with Clemmie and with each other? 

One thing I really tried to do was keep the plot moving along, and just have these little moments between different people at different times where you can see a little bit more of them. There's a chapter where Rupert and Alex have a beer at a pub, and you see their competitiveness really come out in that chapter. We see Rupert and Nell talking in a square in Bloomsbury and you see her kind of hating him, loving him, and also pitying him, all in one go. I tried not to let it overwhelm the plot too much, but like you said, that was the basis of the novel originally. I've got a couple of attempts in the depths of my laptop where I've tried to write their love triangle, and I just hadn't quite got it, so I'm very pleased that you like that characterization because it was quite a lot of work in order to get it. [And there are these] languages that they share—there are these Mycenaean bits, so they have this shared love of classicism. We talked about books that inspired me— I had read The Secret History back in 2017. That is such a wonderfully, kind of silly campus novel with the classicism element to it —classicism and classism. I think that kind of stayed in the back of my head, and I think the characterization that Donna Tartt does in that is really interesting as well.

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but I absolutely love both the cover and the title of your book! What was the design process like, and how did you come up with the title and tagline? Were you ever considering different ones? 

The cover was all my wonderful publishers, and I think they've done an absolutely cracking job. I think it tells you that you've got crime, you've got a body, you've got a peaceful house, you've got manicured lawns, but it's also really beautifully bright, so you know it's going to be kind of fun. I think they absolutely nailed it with the cover. The cover for The In Crowd, which is the second volume, is also absolutely beautiful, and they've nailed that as well. 

Actually, I didn't come up with the title. I had a different working title called Demimonde, which was quite pretentious and didn't quite work. My agent and I brainstormed and he came up with this, and I thought it was brilliant. You’ve got the saying “how the other half lives” about wealth disparity, but you’ve also got [Clemmie’s] other half—Rupert is the boyfriend of Clemmie, who you find out on the first page is murdered, and he’s the other half as well as being fabulously wealthy and aristocratic. So, I think it absolutely nailed it as a title. That was my very clever agent’s lobby.

You mentioned your next book, The In Crowd, which I am so excited to read! What can you tell us about it?

Caius, Matt, and Amy are back, and they are investigating two cold cases. So, a pension theft in the early 1990s, and a girl who disappeared from her remote Cornish boarding school in 2014. And it opens with Cauis being stood up at a fringe theater off the West End, whilst watching a kind of a mickey-take version of an Oscar Wilde called The Importance of Beering Earnest because one of the actors is very drunk. And one of the actors throws up on a man in the audience [sitting] next to him and this very cute girl who he quite likes, and the guy's dead. And then it all goes from there. 

Caius is such an interesting character. He is a police officer who also happens to be obsessed with fitness, elaborate cooking recipes, and Jane Austen, and he is one of the only people who is unafraid of Rupert. His character felt so refreshing, and I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about creating his character and setting him apart from other detectives? I’m so happy we get to see more of him!

Me too! I didn't want to write a detective whose partner and kids hated them because it makes it dark. I really wanted it to be light and to be about Caius being a millennial detective. At the very beginning of the book, he's just been dumped, and he's going for a jog, and that's how he discovers the body. He has that kind of millennial and Gen Z belief that “I can be better, I can eat better, I can exercise better, I can read books.” He's very aspirational in his goal of self-improvement, but he's also a bit silly at it as well, so I think everyone is slightly laughing at him because he's got some foibles. And I really wanted the relationship with the other detectives—Matt and Amy —to also be that kind of thing. It was also important to me that Matt was also an ethnic minority, and it was important to me to have someone else who understood [Caius] automatically in that sense.  

Although I love Caius, Nell is my favorite character, and I love that she works at a poetry publisher (kind of) and regularly quotes Jane Austen. If Nell had a book club, what do you think she would be reading, and what do you think she would think of The Other Half? 

Oh, I reckon Nell probably wouldn't read a crime novel because she only reads literary fiction. I think she'd be really into I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel. I'm halfway through it now, and it's [about] this woman who's obsessed with this guy and stalks the other woman he's seeing through Instagram, and she just refers to him as “the man I want to be with.” It's phenomenal, and I think she'd be really into that.

The Other Half is your debut, which is so exciting! What has that experience been like overall, and are there any parts of the book that you are especially excited for readers to experience? We’ve talked about some of my personal favorites! 

I'm still slightly in shock that I'm a published author, to be honest. The whole debut year just kind of went by [with me] being, like, “I'm in New York, I'm in New York, this is crazy! I'm in Arizona, I'm in Texas.” And even just going to literary festivals in the UK, I’d be thinking “I'm [sitting] here, and I'm talking nonsense, and people have come to hear me talk.” It’s absolutely insane. 

In terms of the bit I'm excited for people to read, the opening is very funny. I think the McDonald's bit is very funny, and I think people will enjoy that. It's a bit of a ride in terms of the plot, and I think there's so many different things for different people. So if you're trying to just follow the plot of the murder because you love a crime, you've got that. But if you like a little bit of snarky social commentary, it's there. If you want to meditate on pre-Raphaelites, then that's there as well. 

What is one thing your readers would be surprised to know about you? 

I'm gonna get back to the silk hat thing. When I was at drama school, my part-time job was selling hats at one of London's remaining traditional hatters. I used to be able to look at a man and tell you the size of their head in centimeters without having to measure. There's one of those talents that I don't think you'd ever need if you didn't work in a hat shop!