The Joy of Murder
The autobiography of Joy Swift Includes a specially-written, solvable whodunit.
read reviews
pre order The Joy of Murder book
The Hidden Thread
 
You can't keep a good woman down!

"My name's Joy Swift" I said nervously
"and most weekends I kill people!"

“My name’s Joy Swift” said the very confident young women sitting next to me “and most weekends I kill people!” .

Sitting next to her an elegant older woman also claimed to be “me” and although there have been many times when I’d sincerely thought it would be a great relief if there really was more than one Joy Swift, this wasn’t one of them. What I was actually thinking is unprintable - just another fine mess I’d landed myself in because of my crazy invention. The reason this time was an appearance on a television quiz show called “Tell the Truth”; a celebrity panel had to guess which, out of the three of us, was “The Real Joy Swift” - something, now I’ve started to think about it, that’s probably an impossible question to answer.

After all, the “real” Joy Swift has, over the past 25 years been married 134 times (frequently and repeatedly to the same man) and given birth to 230 illegitimate children. She’s been battered and bruised countless times and been “arrested” more times than she cares to remember. She’s also committed (at the last count) around 2000 murders - you’ll have to excuse the vagueness I’m afraid, but when you’ve been responsible for that many deaths you start to lose track after the first few hundred - something that’s a bit more understandable perhaps given that she’s been stabbed, poisoned, shot, strangled and drowned more times than she cares to recall.

Thankfully, as I hope you’ve guessed, none of these things has happened to the real Joy Swift - I’m honestly nothing like any of the characters I’ve played over the years since I originally invented the idea of Murder Weekends in 1981. This isn’t to say plenty of frighteningly real things haven’t happened over this period - like the time I was arrested by the Anti-Terrorist Squad or when I was rushed to hospital in New York, after a spectacularly innovative murder went dramatically wrong and a badly burnt leg turned gangrenous - but I like to think it’s possible to separate out the “real me” from my invention.

And that, in a round about way, is my main reason for sitting down to write this book. I thought it would be nice, given I’m now approaching the 25th anniversary of the original Murder Weekend, to document the highs and lows, the tears and the laughter of a quarter century of murder, mayhem and a great deal of merriment - to tell, as it were, the story of Murder Weekends and, echoing perhaps the words of a very good friend who once said to me “Joy, you are Murder Weekends”, a (little) bit about the story of Joy Swift into the bargain. To do this, I’ve divided this book into three sections:

The first deals, in the main, with how Murder Weekends “came into being” - from how I hit upon the original idea to the first few years of their development. It also includes some material about my life, mainly because I hope it gives some insight into how and why I came to hit upon the “madness of murder” as a career.

In the second part I wanted to document some of the funny, sad and frequently downright ridiculous things that have happened on Murder Weekends -

  cover of Joy's book

the kind of things that the guests rarely - if ever - get to see (which, in some cases, is just as well I think).

Finally, it’s funny but when I started to write and was trying to think about how to describe “the real Joy Swift” the best way I could think of was through what I do - so I’ve set you all a little challenge to solve "Absolute Murder". I hope you have as much fun trying to “solve the crime” as I had in creating it.