20 Feb 2023
For Harpenden-based author Jonathan Stroud, the experience of seeing his supernatural book series Lockwood & Co transformed into a Netflix TV show was one of the stand-out moments of his life.
“In your life you have a few moments where you know everything slightly shifts – getting married, when your child is born – and there was that moment where I just walked inside this set and I was suddenly inside a very, very accurate representation of what I had always just seen in my head.
“And I just felt everything profoundly just shift, just a little bit.”
Based on a sequence of five novels, Lockwood & Co follows the story of Lucy (Ruby Stokes), a girl with psychic abilities who joins a London ghost-hunting agency run by teenagers Anthony (Cameron Chapman) and George (Ali Hadji-Heshmati).
Together the trio must investigate some of the spookiest and deadliest spectral hauntings in the city, armed only with the tools of the ghost-hunting trade (magnesium flares, iron filings, chains and salt bombs), their courage and a thermos of tea.
It has proved a sleeper hit for the streaming site, becoming the top rated show on Netflix UK and in the top 10 in 80 other Netflix countries.
The show was filmed at Ealing Studios in the midst of Covid restrictions, which unfortunately limited Jonathan’s visits to the set.
“I didn’t go down to watch the filming as often as I would have wanted to. It was really stringent and if there was a Covid outbreak then production would have to stop, which cost huge amounts of money.
“So every day there were various tests and if you were an outsider like me then you had to get tested a few days before and then again when you went so when it actually came down to it I only went a handful of times.”
“But it was a tremendous thing to go and see the sets they had built at the studios – they created my characters’ house – they basically built a London townhouse in the studio – and when you walked in it was like being in a real house, you honestly would not know you were inside something in a big wooden box – there were absolutely incredible amounts of detail.
“It really was extraordinary to see the amount of effort that people would go to making everything on the shelves, the stuff on the walls, the little stains on the stairs where people’s hands had touched it, it felt like a real house. That really was quite a profound and disorientating experience.”
The show had a long gestation period, being first optioned by production company Complete Fiction back in 2017, but after a slow start things really picked up over the past few years.
“It’s been a long time,” Jonathan admitted. “Joe Cornish [Attack the Block, Ant-Man], the showrunner and key writer and director, and Complete Fiction came to me back in 2017 very much wanting to do it.
“At the time he was working on his film The Kid Who Would Be King [2019], so a couple of years went by where it was all very quiet, but they kept on reassuring me that they would be up and running with it soon.
“And so it proved as over the last three or so years it’s just been an absolutely massive push from the guys – all through the pandemic they were working away on it with Netflix UK.”
He is full of admiration for the production process: “They’ve done a terrific job. These things do take a long time and the amount of person-power you need to get them up and running it’s a wonder they get made at all – it’s very different from sitting in your room scribbling a book onto your computer.”
Jonathan attributes much of the series’ success to Joe Cornish: “Joe has a real sort of visionary quality. He and the producers – Nira Park and Rachael Pryor among others – really know the books very well and wanted to be true to their essence, but having said that they then added other levels of vision, for example,
“Joe brought in absolutely all sorts of really cool eighties tracks [including post-punk classics from Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure], it’s got an absolutely terrific soundscape, and the aesthetic of the actual programme uses London in a really funky, slightly downbeat but very glamorous way, and I wouldn’t have a clue how to do this. It does give you an edgy eighties vibe, but also very lush.
“Joe has absolutely masterminded something that stands on its own but also complements the books, so everyone’s happy.
“There was a tremendous day where they showed me the three actors for the first time on a little test screening. They’d got the three of them together in a room and got them to read out a few lines from the script. They sent me this video and I was again so nervous thinking ‘what if I don’t like them?’, ‘what if they don’t seem right?’, but I turned it on and I was just so happy because Ruby, Cameron and Ali just embody the characters to brilliantly.
“They look the part but also have such a lovely chemistry, they do a tremendous job and absolutely carry the whole thing – there’s hardly a shot in the series where one of those three guys isn’t in the frame.
Jonathan grew up in St Albans, attending Wheatfields Junior School and St Albans Boys’ School, and attributes his childhood in the city as shaping his formulative writing career.
“St Albans has this tremendous way of being very intimate, very ancient, very vibrant, as you walk around you’ve got so many different strands intertwining all around you.
“I was in St Albans the other day as my son was running a cross country race in Verulamium Park. I went past the Roman ruins and had flashbacks to my own childhood. I remembered walking around the park, going down little paths and kind of inventing stories – as a kid I was always looking at the landscape and the town and turning it into a prop for whatever story I was thinking about at the time.
“That’s all good practice – it’s the kind of place that breeds stories and I was very lucky to grow up there.”
Apart from Lockwood & Co, one of Jonathan’s other novel series is also edging closer to becoming a TV adaptation.
Film rights for the Bartaemius Trilogy, which uses satire and magic to explore the class struggle, were originally purchased by Miramax in 2002, but languished in development hell for nigh on 20 years.
In 2019, Start Media acquired the film and television rights to the [now four] books in the sequence.
Jonathan revealed:“There is movement on Bartaemius, we’ve got some great people working on it, getting a script together and I’m hopeful.
“It’s been a while since those books came out but Bartaemius is a 5,000-year-old genie who is used to hanging around, so a couple of decades is not an issue. I feel like we’ll probably get something on screen sooner rather than later. Twenty years ago it would have been quite difficult to film something with so many special effects for all the genies and magic, but now the technology is there to really do that quite effectively.”
With the Lockwood & Co books gaining acclaim among a new generation of readers, does Jonathan have any intentions of returning to that world?
“I did five books and that felt a good number, but having said that my heroes are constantly having different cases with different ghosts and phantoms, and I quite like the idea of a casebook with a few short stories and other adventures.
“So you never know, I always had an itch to go back into this world, so it is giving me a possible excuse.”
Lockwood & Co is streaming now on Netflix and the books are available from Penguin Random House.
