Interview with executive producer Ruth Kenley-Letts
Interview with executive producer Ruth Kenley-Letts
Published: 31 August 2017
My instincts was that we should have a go at creating that Jacobean gothic world, because it helps us solve the plot, but we didn’t want to stay in it for too long, for fear that it might overshadow contemporary London
In The Silkworm we move from the fashion industry into quite a different world. You can’t help thinking that this is a novel about the publishing industry by a novelist who is well-known in the publishing world, and that this is a wry look at how it’s populated.
I found when I read The Silkworm that the characters are larger than life. The author clearly knows her stuff about the publishing world. It’s not just that she’s an author, she obviously has in-depth knowledge of the array of characters she brings to the reader. You feel you can and need to be faithful to the characters that she/Galbraith has written. We wanted to honour that in terms of cast choices as well.
For instance, having Lia Williams as Liz Tassel the agent, she’s an astonishingly brilliant actress who’s played lots of classical leading roles in the theatre and is a very detailed actress.
Rather like Tom, she really thinks a lot about how she’s going to play a scene and how she’s going to play a character. I’ve felt that she would be able to get the balance right and not just go for a really big performance that felt a bit bland. It’s important to get the detail in those performances.
When you read a book, I think you can have a lot of fun with it being larger than life, but on television you have to rein it in a little bit. Otherwise it can feel over the top. So, we were always very mindful of that.
Can you give us a summary of the story of The Silkworm?
The story begins with the arrival of a woman, Leonora Quine, a rather old-fashioned, slightly down-at-heel woman, at Strike’s office in Denmark Street who says that her husband, a writer, has gone missing and she needs his help. Strike’s rather loathed to take the case, he’s getting really busy in the office having had some success with the Lula Landry case. He’s finally making some money and he’s paying off his debts and this case doesn't seem on the surface to be one that will pay.
But there’s something about this woman that he is drawn to and with whom he empathises. He ends up doing a bit of investigating into her missing husband, which he thinks is going to be just a few phone calls and job done. But during those initial investigations he actually comes upon the body of the writer and it’s a very gory and horrible murder.
The victim has been trussed up in a house in Talgarth Road and he’s had his intestines ripped out. Around his body is a dinner table setting of plates and knives and forks, so it’s quite gothic.
The prime suspect is Leonora, but Strike is absolutely convinced that she has had nothing to do with it, so he starts looking into who might have done it.
They read a manuscript left behind by the dead writer. In this manuscript, there is a murder and the body of that murdered character is found and mirrored in exactly the same way as the body that Strike discovered in Talgarth Road.
The manuscript maligns many people in a thinly disguised way from the literary world. His agent, his publisher, his editor, his wife, and his girlfriend are all there, depicted in various macabre ways. All the characters in this writer’s life therefore become suspects.
We see the book played out in this macabre, Jacobean revenge tragedy within the show, which is fantastical and very different from the contemporary London setting. What’s the concern for you as the producer when you’re trying to do that?
The trick with adapting The Silkworm is making sure the two elements of the book can sit together - the real story alongside the book within a book. With a novel, you can go into that world defined by different chapters.
We have to marry those two worlds together on screen and my instincts were, as was the writer’s, that we should definitely have a go at creating that Jacobean gothic world, because it helps us solve the plot. But we didn’t want to stay in it for too long, for fear that it might overshadow the contemporary London that it had to sit in, visually.
Kieron our director has translated it brilliantly to television. He’s created that world in a very abstract way, so we only get hints of it. When you see Strike reading the book, it’s as though you go into the book and you get flashes of what he’s reading with words coming out at you. So, you’ve got book and story cleverly merged together - you’re allowing the reader to fall into the world of the book through the book, as Strike the character does when he's reading it.
