She Wrote a Murder Mystery to Survive Turning 40

Gemma Denham, first-time author of The Storm, and what England taught me about people who get things done quietly

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I have a soft spot for England that never really healed.

I schooled in London. Le Cordon Bleu, three years, learning to cook at a level that would either make me or embarrass me forever. I fell in love with the place. The light, the pubs, the particular way British people understate everything that matters most to them. I was half convinced I’d stay. Marry a British girl. Live above a bakery. Bake bread for the village. That version of me is still out there somewhere, probably making perfect shortcrust pastry in the Cotswolds while I’m here in Honolulu talking about ahi.

So when Gemma Denham came on 50 Tastes Of Gray, I was already rooting for her before she said a word.

She’s from the Midlands. Near Nottingham. Office manager by day, logistics, materials, making sure grownups show up where they’re supposed to be. Writer by night. First-time novelist. Mother of two boys, 16 and 12. Married. Takes her mum to afternoon tea in old stone cottages with open fires blazing. Savory first, always. Mini cakes in the middle. Scone with clotted cream last, because that’s the reward and she knows it.

She is, in every sense, a woman who runs her life like a tight operation.

And then she went and wrote a murder mystery.

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The book is called The Storm.

It’s set in the Lake District, that spectacular, moody stretch of England where the roads are single-lane, the signal disappears entirely, and nature can shut you off from the rest of civilization without much effort. Gemma knows it well. She takes her family there every October half-term to hike. She’s walked those roads, felt that isolation. When it came time to trap a cast of strangers in a hotel with a body on the floor and rising suspicion, she knew exactly where to put them.

The setup is Agatha Christie by way of lived experience. A woman named Lizzie, fleeing a controlling boyfriend who wants too much from her too fast, checks into a writers’ retreat in a remote Lake District hotel. She picks it specifically because there’s no signal. No Wi-Fi. No way for him to reach her. She needs to think. She needs space. She gets both, along with a storm that takes out the road, a dead body, and then another one, and the slow, creeping realization that one of the people stranded around her is responsible.

It’s creepy, she told me. Her word. Delivered with a quiet satisfaction that told me she meant it as a compliment to herself.

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Here’s what struck me about Gemma.

She turned 39 and decided she was not going to slide passively into 40. Instead she made a list. Forty things to accomplish before her fortieth birthday. Some of them small and silly. Some of them enormous. Swimming with sharks in the Maldives, not in a cage, but free in the open water, a group of sharks larger than her body moving inches away, made her list. Writing a novel made the list too.

Both got done.

That tells you something about who she is. The kind of person who doesn’t announce ambition, she just executes on it. Quietly, between the school runs and the office and the shepherd’s pie from scratch. She doesn’t make noise about what she wants. She puts it on a list and gets after it.

I’ve interviewed a lot of people on this show. The ones who genuinely impress me aren’t always the loudest or the most decorated. They’re the ones who kept going when it was inconvenient, when no one was watching, when the kids were loud and the day job was long and there was every reason to wait until next year. Gemma is that kind.

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She also confessed something that I’ve never heard before on this show.

When she writes action scenes, a fight, an escape, a struggle, she acts them out. Physically. In her office. And when a scene requires her character to be restrained, she recruits her family to actually tie her up. Masking tape first. Then parcel tape. Then gaffer tape. At one point her youngest son did the honors, secured her to the chair with maximum effort, announced he was going out, and left.

She sat there, bound, wondering whether she could get free before her husband came home from work.

She got out. That scene made it into book two.

I don’t know a better story to illustrate the commitment it takes to write something real. She didn’t research restraint techniques on YouTube. She lived it, in the most inconvenient, slightly absurd, completely dedicated way possible. That’s craft. That’s the kind of detail that separates a thriller that feels authentic from one that doesn’t. Method, baby.

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And then she turned the tables on me.

Toward the end of the show, I handed Gemma the mic and told her she was the host now. Without missing a beat, she asked me what happened after I left London. I told her, LA, the bands, cooking for Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, an entire career that started in kitchens and ended up here.

She listened the way good interviewers do. Fully present. Not waiting for her next question. Actually listening.

When I told her she was a damn good hostess, I meant it.

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Gemma Denham’s debut novel The Storm is available wherever books are sold. Find her on Instagram and X… search her name, she’ll come right up.

Watch the full episode of 50 Tastes Of Gray on YouTube.

And if you haven’t had a proper afternoon tea in an English cottage with an open fire going, fix that. Life is short and clotted cream exists for a reason. (I’d be happy to tell you how to make it).