Open Book - 15/11/2009

Mariella talks to Frances Fyfield, whose bestselling crime novels are influenced by her previous career as a lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service. She explains how a recently discovered fascination with her local butcher's shop influenced her latest book, Cold to the Touch. The short story writer John Cheever was sometimes described as the Chekhov of the suburbs. As a new biography of this chronicler of the American middle class is published, Mariella talks to its author, Blake Bailey, and the novelist Paul Bailey, who interviewed him for the BBC 30 years ago, to find out more about Cheever's life and work. And there's advice for another book lover with a problem from The Reading Clinic. The editor of Granta, John Freeman, has some suggestions for an Open Book listener who is in search of reading matter for a trip to San Francisco.