‘Professor Cain’s Nightclub’ features a group of completely dysfunctional friends living a fast and party-driven lifestyle, who try to set up a nightclub right from its literal foundations. But sexual politics ensure that the venture is doomed from the start as the hidden agendas and general debauchery of the four main characters are gradually revealed.

Morven Lennox is the author behind this contemporary novel, who used much of her background as writing influences. After working as a fitness instructor, studying social anthropology and singing in blues bands in Edinburgh, Morven uprooted her life to London. She first sat down to write a book in September of 2004, with no clue as to what it was about, Morven says it grew from perseverance and practice! Some latest interests of Morven’s include working towards owning a music club, so the topic of ‘Professor Cain’s Nightclub’ comes as no surprise! Morven used aspects of her occupation, ambitions, travels and liberal attitude, as well as her passions and desires, and exaggerated these until they became themes behind the story. We wanted to know more about Morven’s inspirations, which she explained… “Before I moved to London, my life was very easy as I had a good income from a successful business enterprise, and had been in happy relationships with people from a similar background to myself. However, I wanted to travel and experience more. When I moved to London, I was plunged into a world of cultural diversity, hardship, hedonism, club/drug culture, decadence, danger, uncertainty and complex relationships. I experienced the high life and the low life simultaneously. I kept a diary and then used it to shape the story.” When asked what made her decide to write the book, Morven told us that she felt she had something to say and could say it well… “I love the way words can amuse, emote and express, creating whole worlds from pictorial images in someone’s mind”.

For Morven, finding a coherent plot and creating drama was the biggest challenge of writing. She told us how the addition of a death to the novel added something other than humour, which in turn brought about conflict and pain, which is what Morven believes creates a good story. Though of course writing a novel comes with rewards too, which Morven explained to be simply her own amusement during the improvisational nature of writing, the feeling of achievement when it took shape and finally discovering that she had the self-discipline to sit for hours and keep focus!

By now you should be heading over to Amazon to purchase your own copy, but something that may surprise you from ‘Professor Cain’s Nightclub’ is that there are much easier ways to acquire premises for a music club than PAYE, sugar daddies and selling drugs! Plus, the most unique topic is how the sexual and economic statuses behind all types of relationships can be affected by altering psychological states, and how these relationships operate in a medium outside the accepted societal norm. This is Morven’s explanation, though all will be explained in the novel’s chapters…

According to Morven, the book aims to send the message that actions have consequences, so you have to take responsibility for them! In Professor Cain’s Nightclub, Morrigan loses her best friend whilst in the pursuit of her dreams, so has to live and cope with his sad demise as well as her own guilt.

Scroll down for a synopsis of the book…

Morrigan Lazarus, the protagonist, is a feisty dancer from Edinburgh who is obsessed with Maximillion Cain, an eccentric Jamaican DJ with a serious case of commitment phobia. Since most of the other characters are also obsessed with her she can’t accept his rejection and thus pursues him to the point of humiliation. The antithesis of Bridget Jones, Morrigan is hyperactive and she herself can’t handle commitment to anything except dancing and longs to own a nightclub so that she can dance perpetually with her own DJs and live bands but mostly she wants to escape the unbearable boredom and breadline existence of her NHS typing job as an office temp in a state system that she despises. 

Enter Jojo Fox whom she regards as her best friend and surrogate father but she has no idea of his real agenda and trusts him to fund the nightclub with cocaine deals and property ventures in Wales and Spain. Then Karl Willcock, a lively jeweller with a shocking dark side that surfaces gradually, manipulates all three of them for his own twisted amusement, and all of this results in a darkly comical and complex series of deceptions, betrayals, sexual adventures, moral dilemmas, and a robbery with extreme violence. 

After relationships between the four main characters explode into their ultimate climax, Morrigan finally acquires the means to fund her own nightclub without collaboration but has to live with the consequences of her own impulsive actions, which lead to a whole panoply of bizarre and violent circumstances which will keep the reader entranced to the very end.