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On The Table Read, “The Best Book Reader Magazine in the UK“, Jason Roche describes the story of his new book, How To Murder A Boyband.
How to Murder a Boyband is the starting point in Jason Roche’s Boyband Sandwich Trilogy.
Set in the early noughties when boybands were riding the crest of the pop culture wave, Paton Stipps is thrust into a world of music, boybands, celebrity and murder. How’s this all going to work out for a protagonist bored with his humdrum life …
Published on 24th May 2022, Jason Roche’s How to Murder a Boyband series has been percolating in the author’s mind for over 20 years, and is based at a time when boyband culture was its peak.
The author has created a vivid and entertaining retelling of ‘back in the day’ when the likes of Westlife, Boyzone, Take That, NSYNC and Backstreet Boys ruled the airwaves, and their celebrity was omnipresent. Funny and poignant despite the fact that murder is a key element of the plot, Jason Roche has nailed the zeitgeist of a time that’s known more for superficial stardom than substance. A premonitory #MeToo thriller … before anyone really knew what was going on behind closed celerity doors or how celebrity could and would be wielded.
With his funny, visceral and spot-on characterisation, readers will be delighted to know the second volume in the trilogy – Smug Dad – is already published and that volume three, the contemporary – How NOT to Murder a Boyband – is in prospect.
“How to Murder a Boyband is the complete guide to the extrication of the phenomenon, iconic with celebrity-obsessed fans everywhere … Boybands, set during the early noughties in London at the peak of Boyband hysteria. I wrote the first drafts of Boyband in my twenties – that’s my apology to the world! Boybands were so big and iconic I wanted to write a story which dealt with their supposed demise and celebrity self-destruction.
“How to Murder a Boyband forms part of what I’ve called “The Boyband Sandwich Trilogy” with sequel Smug Dad already published. I am deep into the final edit of the conclusion to the trilogy, How NOT to Murder a Boyband, a contemporary feminist novel with a unique female protagonist.
So the two Boyband novels serve as the sandwich, set twenty years apart in the early noughties and twenty-twenties respectively, with Smug Dad the twenty-tens meat in the middle!
“How to Murder a Boyband started earlier than anticipated … and thankfully so! I attempted my first full length novel in 2000 using a work laptop – clearly corporate regulations and access to technology were a bit laxer and challenging respectively.
About 6 months in whilst transferring the novel from said corporate laptop using a floppy disk (remember those!?) the unthinkable happened … it disappeared, sending a vast chunk of editing into the cyber wilderness never to be rediscovered again.
“The idea for How to Murder a Boyband had already been formulated in my head so it was a straight shoot-out between rewriting / edits the lost narrative or cracking on with Boyband – I was so excited about the new idea I jumped straight in and thankfully so because, upon reflection, I’m pretty confident that early attempt should stay hidden from public view for eternity!
“I completed the novel in under a year, secured a literary agent off the back of it who had some large publishing deals in the pipeline and multiple requests for the full novel, wrote a screenplay version with interest from well-known filmmakers and distributors, then … 9/11 happened and the entire market seemed to go into freefall, putting the deals on hold, sending my literary agent into a quadruple bypass surgery and early retirement and my writing aspirations into backburner mode with financial survival a seemingly more responsible pursuit coupled with some locational shifts and general life upheaval at the time.
“So for the entire noughties decade How to Murder a Boyband languished in a box in the loft until I started Smug Dad in 2009 and dusted off the novel to (gulp) see if it still had sea legs.
After my first literary agent completed reading How to Murder a Boyband, the feedback was she couldn’t put it down for the first two-thirds and subsequently couldn’t sleep for two weeks after the final third.
To compound my fear that the novel was a tad nihilistic, perverse, shocking (movie trailers love the word visceral) and disturbing, my mother-in-law was one of the many pushy family members ‘who absolutely had to read it!’ Well … she hasn’t uttered a word of it since … the literary elephant on the bookshelf!
How to Murder a Boyband has been adapted into a screenplay which I’m looking forward to adapting further as the remainder of the trilogy gets published.
Final Declaimer: this is not license or instruction to murder or harm Boybands in any way, shape or form …
Published by Cranthorpe Millner Publishers, How to Murder a Boyband(978-1-912964-99-4) is published on 24th May 2022 and is available in paperback (£8.99) and eBook format.
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