I’ve been on the road for about a week now, and have added around 1,700 miles to the odometer on my trusty Honda Fit. As I’ve traveled, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts – including getting my feet wet in writer Julian Simpson’s Pleasant Green universe. I’ve read Simpson’s newsletter Cartoon Gravity for a while now; while I’ve dug his thoughts on storytelling, it took me longer than expected to get into his actual audio storytelling.

[Mild spoilers ahead for Who Is Aldrich Kemp?]

I opted to begin with Who Is Aldrich Kemp?, which follows an intelligence agent named Clara Page as she investigates the title character, a possibly criminal mastermind with ties to all sorts of bizarre technology. There’s a moment in the third episode where Clara encounters a podcaster named Kennedy Fisher who’s also searching for Kemp.

From a narrative perspective, I began to wonder if Simpson was planning to introduce a twist. In countless espionage stories, uber-competent supporting characters tend to have a history of being too good to be true. A reporter on the same trail that this podcast’s protagonist was on? It seemed far too good to be true.

What I didn’t know at the time is that Kennedy is, in fact, one of the main characters of the Simpson-penned The Lovecraft Investigations, and her appearance here ties in with an overarching storyline in that podcast. So, you know, not actually someone who’s likely to be revealed as a secret baddie. Evidently, my spider-sense was wrong; evidently, I’d misjudged where the narrative was headed.

Except that, at episode’s end, Simpson revealed that another supporting character was, in fact, too good to be true – just not the one I’d suspected.

There’s a real elegance to that. If you’d been a longtime listener of all of Simpson’s work, Kennedy Fisher’s appearance plays one way; if you’re new to this fictional universe, it does something totally different. But there’s a larger sense of narrative misdirect here, and whether you’re a newcomer to this world or not, it plays out like gangbusters.