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Jack Valentine, Vampire Detective: writing, casting & recording season 1, part 1
- Josie Jaffrey
- Aug 29
- 13 min read
Updated: Aug 30
From March to May 2025, we were busy in the Battle Birds studio recording part 1 of the Jack Valentine, Vampire Detective podcast, and we had an absolute BLAST.
Our sound designer Beth Crane is now busy stitching everything together, while Hedley Knights (who did our sound recording) is busy composing the theme music. All of that is labour-intensive and will take a while, so in the meantime I thought I'd write a bit about our incredible cast and crew, the assembling of the team, and the fantastic time we had recording.
Why a podcast?
I’m fortunate enough to have a very dear and supportive friend who kept telling me ‘You should turn May Day into a podcast.’ Eventually, she said it enough times that I thought I’d give it a try. That friend is Jen Sugden, who is not only a Sunday Times Bestselling fantasy author, but is also (along with her husband Chris) the writer and creator of the highly-acclaimed indie podcast Victoriocity on which their first novel is based. What I'm saying is that when it comes audio drama podcasts, she knows what she's doing.
My other half is the wonderful Max Windich, a voice actor who plays Burney in the sci-fi comedy podcast Oblivity. He knows a fair amount about podcasting too. I, on the other hand, very much did not, but I had an idea for a Jack Valentine prequel story, I thought it would be fun to make a podcast with my favourite people, and they both assured me that they would help with the bits that left me boggling. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the podcast literally wouldn’t have been possible without them. They held my hands through the entire process, start to finish.
Still not entirely sure what I was doing, I wrote the script for the first half of season 1 at the end of 2023, comprising 7 episodes that I thought would be about 45-60 minutes long each (according to the word-count guidance Jen gave me). The writing process flowed much more easily than I was expecting, but there were some sticky points. The Jack Valentine podcast is a prequel to a six-book series that I haven't quite finished writing yet, which is in itself a prequel to three other novel series comprising ten novels, all set in the Silverse (a vampire and zombie-filled version of the real world), in which I have also set sixteen short stories. Suffice it to say that the continuity was a NIGHTMARE.
Thankfully, my editor Adie Hart – always a safe pair of hands – went over the script for me to check for errors, and Jen and Max gave it a read afterwards to point out spots where it could be improved, or where it just wouldn't work for audio. I finished the edits in the autumn of 2024, and then we were off.
Jen very kindly offered to direct the podcast...
...and introduced us to the Battle Birds Production super-team of Beth Crane and Hedley Knights, who would take care of all the technical audio and recording work.
Jen and Max helped me pull together all the information I needed for casting, then sent out calls through their acting network asking for auditions, and we got some absolutely outstanding submissions. By Christmas 2024, the podcast was starting to take shape.
Casting
Casting was a joint effort between Jen, Max and me, but it was agonising. One of the roles was very easy to cast – Hunter LeMay Alderley – because I wrote the role with Max in mind, and no one else auditioned! But the rest were tough. We got so many incredible auditions that choosing the best was genuinely heart-breaking at times. I wish we could work with every actor who submitted to us, and I hope we might get to in future seasons.
When we'd made our final decisions, the line-up of voice actors was so good I was a little intimidated. I can't believe I get to work with such talented people. We have Grace Kelly Miller as Jack, who has serious podcast experience from No Small Rolls and blew us away with her audition. As everyone's favourite character Cam, we have the wonderful Nathan Peter Grassi, who directed Victoriocity and whose voice acting credits include The Amelia Project, Marvel Move and Zombies, Run! The chemistry between Grace and Nathan behind the mics was just brilliant.
I'm personally thrilled to have Beth Eyre playing Mina Parchek – I adored her in the Wooden Overcoats podcast and she was PERFECT as my problematic fave Mina – and I still can't quite believe that Richard Rycroft – whose screen credits include Game of Thrones, The Crown, Wolf Hall and Bridget Jones's Baby – appears in the podcast as a new character for the prequel, Professor Wilks.
A full list of the cast and their bios is on our website (www.jackvalentinepod.com), so I'm not going to list all their accolades here, but believe me when I say that they are all outstanding actors. I can't wait to share their performances with you.
Recording
I would be lying if I said that I wasn't nervous the first time I walked into the studio, but Beth and Hedley were both so welcoming and calm that I settled into it almost immediately, and then we were off and having fun.
That first day – a Saturday – was a bit of a blur. I made Jack Valentine cupcakes (of course), because Jen had reliably informed me that actors run on sugar. Adie kindly offered to provide production support, bringing her stage management experience to help us all muddle through, and Beth Crane was incredibly gracious with her hospitality, going above and beyond to pitch in calmly wherever she saw a need.
We started slowly with a small bunch of actors and a recording schedule that I wasn't sure we'd be able to complete in a day. We didn't – in fact, we never managed to run on time on any of the four full recording days we had scheduled – but we were trying to get everything done as quickly as possible to minimise costs, and to minimise the amount of time we had to ask our cast and crew to dedicate to the project. We did the best we could, and the calm professionalism of Jen and Hedley in the studio reassured me that everything would be alright. And of course, it was.
I wasn't able to get to the recording in person for day 2 the following Saturday – Max and I had no childcare, and he had to be there to perform – so Hedley did some audio wizardly and sorted me out with a remote link that meant I could be in the studio virtually and still parent.
In theory. In reality, I wouldn't have been able to manage that day if Adie hadn't volunteered to come and help me out with the toddler-wrangling, which meant she did all the child-entertaining and I spent the day on the computer. She was an absolute lifesaver.
It was a tough day. We had a huge list of scenes to get recorded, and a jam-packed studio. We only had Kofi Young (playing Deputy Boyd) in the studio for one weekend, because they'd travelled a very long way to be with us and we didn't want to put them out more than was absolutely necessary. The challenge was that Boyd is a big part of the series, who not only appears in a lot of scenes, but appears in a lot of ensemble scenes with almost every character present.
That meant things got a little cosy in the studio, and there was a lot of time spent shifting mics and jiggling things around to make space for everyone. By the end of the day, we were even further behind schedule than we had been before, and had to start prioritising Kofi's sections of the scenes, and the scenes featuring actors who were only with us for that day (Joyce, Richard and Ian). Still, we didn't manage to get all of Ian's parts recorded before we had to wrap for the day.
Somehow, everyone kept it together and managed to put in some amazing performances with Jen and Hedley at the helm. I have no idea how they did it, but I was incredibly grateful that they did.
Then it was Sunday, and I got to come back to the studio for our second big ensemble day. It was another very full schedule, and again we didn't manage to get everything recorded that we had hoped we would. This was all down to me, by the way: I was the one who did the scheduling, and because I hadn't properly appreciated how much longer it would take to record scenes with multiple characters, I just hadn't programmed in enough time.
But everyone worked around the wonderful chaos with such good humour, and I got to meet Kofi and Pip in person, which was lovely after having worked with them remotely the previous day. We also had a handful of new actors in the studio to record their scenes – some of the most entertaining ones of the whole pod.
In particular, I have to mention Phil's scenes as Lawrence. It's not spoiling anything to tell you that Lawrence is the housemate of a murder victim who appears in the very first episode of the pod, and when he finds out about his friend's death, he's distressed. Very distressed. And while Phil's devastated performance was exactly what we wanted, it was also incredibly dramatic and absolutely hilarious. Does it make me a bad person that the sight of a grown man weeping had me crying with laughter? Probably, but either way I literally had to seal my mouth shut to stop myself from ruining the take.
I hadn't expected to miss being in the studio so much – it was hard work that required constant, active concentration that I'm just not used to paying while I tap away at my computer writing and daydreaming – but I was euphoric to be back that Sunday after having missed the previous day. It wasn't just FOMO either – though that was absolutely part of the draw – it was more that I really enjoyed the process and the environment. Everyone is SO PROFESSIONAL. Hedley sitting at his multi-screened computer adjusting the recording equipment with a board of dials laid out in front of him; Jen sitting with her eyes glued to the script, actively listening then giving confident and salient direction; and the actors who somehow brought out aspects of the characters that I didn't know existed.
The whole thing was magical. It wasn't just that I was humbled that so many people were working together on a script that I'd written, but that together they were making it into something so much grander and more wonderful than I'd ever imagined it could be. My job in the studio was to give scene summaries at the beginning of each section we recorded, so the actors knew where we were in the story and what everyone was feeling (we recorded out of order to minimise the number of days each actor had to spend in the studio), then after each take I conferred with Jen to make sure we had everything we needed, and that we were both happy. Technically, I was still involved at that stage, but it didn't feel like I had much to do with the way the story was shaping up in the studio. Instead, it felt as though it had taken on a life of its own.
By the end of the third day of recording, we were now hopelessly behind schedule, which terrified me, but which Jen reassured me was completely normal. We still had a load of scenes left to record with Pip, but he wasn't scheduled to attend the studio again, so it was a huge relief when he kindly agreed to come back for the last day's recording we had booked in for May. That just left Ian's last few scenes to record, but he was busy that day in May, so we'd just have to come up with another solution for his remaining scenes. Jen had warned me at the beginning of the process that scheduling was always a nightmare – so many diaries to juggle! – and she hadn't been kidding.
For me, the next six weeks passed very slowly indeed. For Beth, they must have been a whirlwind. She was already busy doing the rough edits on everything we'd recorded so far, and somehow she managed to prepare them all for us to listen to before our final recording session in May, so we could work out which scenes and lines we'd like to take another run at. That was when I got to listen to the podcast as an (albeit rough) audio product for the first time. It was EXCITING.
In the meantime, we also got to do a bit of remote recording, because Beth Eyre (who plays Mina Parchek) was in rehearsals for the West End production of Giant, so very kindly slotted us into her busy schedule remotely. Recording wizard Hedley sorted everything out for us on the technical side, so it was glitch-free and very much like being in the room together in person.
Then it was time for our fourth and final day in the studio, which I approached with surprisingly strong mixed feelings: thrilled to be back, but sad that it would be our last.
It was so cosy that day. You know how in the final of RuPaul's Drag Race they always have the main judges – no guest judges – and Ru says 'It's just family'? That's what the last day in the studio was like. We had Erika Sanderson (who plays Ms St Jean) with us for the first time, but otherwise it was just Grace, Nathan, Max and Pip behind the mics. For the afternoon, it was just Grace, Nathan and Pip, and we recorded some of my favourite sections of the entire podcast in that session.
I wanted to rerecord scene 1, because it had been the first scene we'd recorded and no one had settled in properly at that stage. I thought, now that we all knew what we were doing, we could probably record a better take. We were just setting up for the afternoon, and while the production team was out of the studio, Grace and Nathan came up with the silliest, most perfect idea for the retake. Cut, print, DONE. I won't spoil it for you, but it was incredible.
We'd also had to leave some of the big emotional scenes between Jack and Drake for that afternoon, carried over from the weekend in March when we'd run late with everything. Pip and Grace delivered them perfectly in one take. The whole thing was a dream, and by the time we were done I felt really emotional about leaving the studio for the last time.
We did get one final hurrah, though. To record Ian's last scenes, and a few last sections with Nathan that we'd had to skip in order to cram in everything else that needed recording, we had an evening and my and Max's place to tie everything up. It was a lovely, quiet way to say goodbye to the characters – for the next little while, at least – and celebrate everything we'd achieved in what felt like a remarkably short period of time.
Throughout the process, I was just blown away by people's kindness. The actors who were willing to slog across the country – or in one case, down from Scotland! – to the recordings, even though we weren't able to pay them much for their time. The cast and crew who offered lifts to people who needed them, and stepped up to take care of each other with cups of tea and snacks, particularly when others had long stretches in the studio and weren't able to do those things for themselves.
It was that warm environment more than anything that made the experience so wonderful.
I had known almost no one at the beginning of the recordings, but by the end I felt like we were all friends. What an incredible bunch of talented and kind humans. I can't thank them enough for everything they did and continue to do to support the podcast, and us.
What's next?
We had our wrap party in the summer, which was so much fun that I only remembered to take one photo! So please enjoy this pic of Grace sipping on our signature "Jack-quiri" cocktail, specially created by Max to look a little like Jack's famous Valentine's Massacres.
Right now, Beth is busy working on the sound design while Hedley composes the theme tune. We've basically done the easy bit, and now we've left Beth to the hard work of actually making a podcast. We don't have a release date yet, but we're expecting it'll be sometime in 2026. If you'd like to follow along as it all happens, then we're on Bluesky and Instagram.
In the meantime, I'm just about to finish writing the first draft of season 1, part 2, so if the first part does well on release, I hope we'll be able to get recording ASAP. I, for one, am super keen to get back into the studio. The whole recording process may only have taken five recording days, but it's made a huge impression on me.
The thing this experience has really cemented for me is how much the journey and the process of creation is where I find fulfilment. When I’m sitting on my own with my computer for the umpteenth time, trying to get up some enthusiasm for writing another book that probably won’t sell, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that creation is the point. But sitting in the studio, listening to incredible actors bringing my characters to life, under Jen’s expert and insightful direction, with the support of Max and the Battle Birds recording and sound design team who know exactly what they’re doing and are kind enough to open their home studio to us all, it’s just magical.
This experience has been the most positive one of my entire writing career, with such kind and talented people supporting us at every step, in ways I never expected. I get a bit emotional about it, honestly. I’m so incredibly grateful to them all, and I want to do it all over again.
Roll on part 2!
You can support the Jack Valentine, Vampire Detective podcast through Kofi or Patreon. The links are on our website here: https://www.jackvalentinepod.com/support
You can buy Jen and Chris’s Sunday Times bestselling book High Vaultage and listen to their award-winning podcast Victoriocity here: https://www.victoriocity.com
You can listen to the Battle Birds’ award-winning podcast We Fix Space Junk here: https://battlebird.productions
And listen to Oblivity (featuring Max Windich as Burney) here: https://www.oblivitypodcast.com. There's also a super-cool online escape room available on that site. Highly recommend!
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