Over the
course of the Roy Grace series, the mysterious disappearance of
his wife, Sandy has always been there as a reminder to us of his
troubled past. With 'Dead Like You', you seem to have moved us
as readers firmly away from 'Sandy as possible victim' into the
possibility that she simply got fed up with Roy not getting the
top job and took off for pastures new. Did you originally have
that in mind or has it changed over the books? Or was I being
dense in thinking something nasty had happened?
About 12 years
ago I attended an open
day for the Police at the Missing Persons Helpline offices in
South London. I was staggered to learn that 230,000 people are
reported missing in the UK every year. The majority turn up
again within a few days but if they don’t turn up after 30 days,
they are unlikely ever to be seen again. At any one time we
have 11,500 people permanently missing in the UK, and the figure
is the same pro-rata to population around the western world –
there are 55,000 permanent missing in the USA, for example. It
is a staggering figure. And the big questions is, where are
they?
Some have been murdered and their
bodies never found – under the floorboards of monsters like Fred
West. Some have run off with lovers. Some have disappeared
deliberately, running away from debt, and reinvented themselves
in another country. Some have had accidents. Some have
committed suicide. But the one thing in common, is that the
families and loved one they leave behind are left in a state of
limbo, because they have no closure.
When I was asked about nine years
ago to create a new detective, by my publishers Pan Macmillan, I
wanted to make Roy Grace different to other fictional
detectives. I thought really hard about what it is that
detectives actually do, and I realized that first and foremost
what they do is to solve puzzles! Every major crime, whether a
murder, a rape, a big robbery or a fraud, is a puzzle, to be
solved in steady, painstaking steps. I thought it would be
intriguing to create a detective who had a personal puzzle of
his own that he could not solve, and I came up with the idea
that Roy Grace has a missing wife. Almost 9 years before we
meet him, we learn that he came home on his 30th
birthday to find his wife, Sandy, who he loved and adored, had
vanished.
My original plan was to reveal the truth about Sandy in the
second book. But to my amazement there was such excited
speculation by my readers about what might have happened to her,
that I decided it would be fun to keep it as an ongoing mystery,
and feed a little bit more information about her into each
successive novel, so that my readers could start to make their
own deductions. In answer to your question, in the first five
novels we have tended to see Sandy only through Roy’s
rose-tinted memories. There is a snippet of someone who might
be her in Dead Tomorrow but very fleeting. In Dead
Like You for the first time we see Roy and Sandy together,
twelve years back in time, and we see the relationship is not
quiet so perfect as Roy had always imagined. I don’t think you
were dense at all thinking something nasty had happened. But
equally there is a long way to go yet with this story strand!!!!
And I can promise you quite a shock at the end of the next
novel, Dead Man’s Grip!
Your books are
full of threat wrapped up in otherwise ordinary, sometimes
mundane situations. Do you consciously consider what kind of
threat will play most on peoples' fears as the basis for the
book, or does that come later?
I have always
tended to write about the things that interest and intrigue me.
I do a lot of psychology research in addition to the specific
research time I spend with the police and on other aspects of
each of my novels. I am interest both in what motivates
criminals, and in what the fears are that we tend to have. I
once had a valuable piece of advice from a very eminent
psychiatrist when I asked him what he thought, in general, was
the thing most people are afraid of. I expected him to say
terrorism, or war or cancer, but he surprised me with his
answer: “Most people are afraid of being alone,” he said. By
that me meant totally alone, rejected by all attempts at making
human contact, with no family and no friends. I have used that
theme of the fear of being alone in different ways in many of my
books. In Dead Simple for instance, Michael is trapped
in the coffin. In Looking Good Dead the mother is
chained up on her own in the dark. In Dead Man’s Footsteps,
Abby is alone, a self-imposed prisoner in her own flat. In
Dead Like You again being alone in captivity is a major
element in the story.
But I guess the biggest theme of all, and the one that
interests me the most is the innocent person getting into big
trouble through no fault of their own. This is Michael, buried
alive in Dead Simple. Tom, in Looking Good Dead,
who puts his entire family in jeopardy by doing the decent
thing, of trying to return a CD he has found on a train. And in
Dead Man’ Grip an innocent woman caught up in an
accident in which the grandson of the Mafia capo is killed – and
the terrible revenge on everyone involved instigated by the dead
boy’s mother…
Relationships
(good and bad) between victims and perps form an
important backdrop to your storylines. Was there anything which
made you look towards this aspect of life for your books?
I loved crime
stories from a very early age, devouring Agatha Christie and
Conan Doyle among numerous others. But although very different
writers, the structure of the classic English crime novel tends
to be the murder at the start and the rest of the story is the
puzzle by the police and/or private detective to solve it.
Solving the crime is much more important than the actual crime
itself, however heinous. Then, when I was 14. I read Graham
Greene’s Brighton Rock for the first time - and was
just blown away by this novel. Partly because it was set in my
home city (a town then) and partly because it was the first time
I read a crime novel in which the central characters were the
villains and the victims rather than the detective and team –
and in fact the Police play a minor role in the book. I have
always been deeply fascinated by human nature, and curious about
why we all do the things that we do, and that is what interests
me above all else about this genre. For instance, in Dead
Like You one of the central characters, Darren Spicer (his
surname is a homage to Brighton Rock!) is a career
burglar, just released from jail – and very much based on a real
life character I interviewed in prison.
You've made
more of a study of crime probably than most people. Do you think
crime occurs because of opportunity and circumstance, or intent?
In other words, do people do wrong more easily through
temptation or inclination?
I was a member
of a gym a few years ago and the owner, a really nice guy in his
late 30s, a committed family man, told me one day he was writing
a book about his life story. I asked him if he had a particular
angle and he told me yes, he had done five years in prison for
armed robbery! I was intrigued. He was from a good,
comfortably off, loving Jewish family, never in trouble as a
kid. But, he told me, he got into financial trouble at the age
of 22, was at a gym opened the wrong locker in the men’s
changing room and found a handgun. He took the gun and held up
a building society! That is a real instance of an opportunity
and circumstances. However, I don’t think there is any short
answer to your question and you’ll get a different answer for
theft than you will for murder: I think the majority of
thieves/burglars are victims of circumstances. Crap parenting,
broken homes, no moral values, prison life and its resulting
recidivistic spiral, and above all, almost certainly today an
expensive drug habit.
However killers are altogether
different: Some years ago I spent a day with the chaplain of
Broadmoor. To be an inmate there you have to be classed as
“violently criminally insane” and have committed an act of
severe violence or murder. I asked him if he believe from his
experience at Broadmoor whether people were born even or just
became evil. He told me that roughly 50% of the inmates were
schizophrenics – people born with a chemical imbalance in their
brain. These cold be treated with medication and many, provided
they continued to take their medication, could go back into the
community safely. The Yorkshire Ripper is a classic
schizophrenic, who said he had been informed by voices in his
head to do his slayings.
However the other 50% were
sociopaths – or psychopaths – (the same thing). A psychopath is
someone born wired differently to other people – someone who has
no “conscience” as most of us have. As a child it would not
bother him to steal his best friend’s favourite toy. As an
adult he could kill or rape and not lose a wink of sleep. These
are them most dangerous of all criminals – and often the most
clever. Think of Harold Shipton here in the UK, or charming
(genuinely charming) Ted Bundy in the USA…
Over the years
you've covered subject as diverse as transplants, 9/11,
surrogacy, genetics, pharmaceuticals and artificial
intelligence. Is there a particular subject you've been waiting
to use, but haven't yet, and if so, what?
I like to
explore and write about issues that can or do affect our lives,
and which may shape all our futures. In my Roy Grace series,
there are several themes responsible for major crimes that I
have not yet written about but certainly will – one of them
being lover’s jealousy. At the moment I’m writing about revenge
in my new book, Deads Man’s Grip – a subject that has
long fascinated me. Not that I’m a vengeful kind of guy…!!!
Is the advance
in DNA testing a good or bad thing for crime writing, and do you
think it will make crime writers lazy and readers too expecting
of a scientific solution every time?
As technology
progresses, criminals progress too. Ten years ago the first
place Police would look for stolen goods would be antique shops,
today the first place they checkout is eBay! The murder clear
up rate in the UK is 90% and I don’t see that getting any
higher. As science progresses, criminals get more forensically
aware, too. As criminals are caught because they make a mistake
as they are through good detection. What is interesting is
there’s a major shift from the days of Conan Doyle and Agatha
Christie to now in the importance of the crime scene. The crime
scene is still today vitally important but the mortuary and the
path lab are equally important. I wonder today, if a smart
defence brief were to walk up to Poirot or Miss Marple and say,
“OK, show me the forensic evidence to back this up,” just how
many last pages of Agatha Christie novels - and many others of
her era – would need to be rewritten…
You spend a lot
of time with the Brighton police force, and see an aspect of
life most of never do. Does anything about Brighton and its
'seedier underbelly', to use a PR phrase, surprise you anymore?
The one
thing that never ceases to surprises me is the way some people
live – and I’m not talking just at the poorer end of the scale.
I often go into people’s homes with the Police, whether on a
raid, or sorting out a domestic dispute or because of a missing
person, or because they’re suspected of running a brothel – and
a whole myriad of other reasons. The sheer slovenly way in
which so many people live shocks me. Recently, I learned a new
expression: I was with two police officers called to a domestic
fight in a low-rise apartment block in a pleasant area
Brighton. We entered the flat and it stank to high heaven. Out
shoes literally stuck to the carpet as we walked across. There
were soiled nappies on the floor, old MacDonald’s and Chinese
takeaway cartons lying around covered in fungus and mould.
Naturally, there was a 50” plasma TV screen on the wall… The
two officers calmed the situation down – the couple were going
hammer and tongs at each other, with a baby screaming in a cot.
As we left, one of the officers turned to me and said, “Peter,
this is the kind of place where you need to wipe your feet on
the way out!”
As a follow-on,
does the Brighton Tourist Board worry, do you think, about your
next book, or do they enjoy the exposure?
The
Tourist Board love the exposure! We’ve been having discussions
about Roy Grace tours of Brighton. I think the one thing that
that would prefer me not to mention too much is that for 9 years
running Brighton has had the unwelcome title of “Injecting Drug
Death Capital Of The UK”. We actually lost the title in 2008 to
Liverpool – but unhappily for the Brighton Tourist Board, we got
it back again last year!
Does your
writing energise or drain you, and how do you (if you have to)
cope with momentary obstacles in working on each book?
My writing
totally energizes me, especially when I’ve had a good session.
I constantly come up against obstacles because of my complex
plotting, and I find in the daytime that a short – or sometimes
long walk, either in the country or around the streets of
London, helps me to think clearly. My other big boost is my 6pm
treat of a drink – normally a vodka martini! My best writing
time is from 6-10m, fuelled by a moderate amount of alcohol and
music – mostly jazz during the first two thirds of a book and
opera arias during the last. I love setting myself puzzles when
I am writing and then working out the solution. I think the
hardest one of all for me was when I wrote Dead Simple, in how I
was going to create a credible way of getting my character,
Michael, out of the grave he had been buried in. It took weeks
of slog and long walks and stiff drinks (!) before it finally
came to me….
Poor old Roy
Grace; he's been through the grinder, privately and
professionally. Should we feel sorry for him, or is the old
adage that a policeman's lot is not a happy one just grist for
your mill?
In my
experience the vast majority of police officers do genuinely
love their work, despite the often crazy hours of the job, the
bureaucracy, the horrific sights they see and the internal
politics. The police look at the world in a different way to
the rest of us. I don’t just mean physically, but culturally
too. Last year, I was driving through Sussex on a sunny July
day with a Detective Inspector, on our way to a crime scene. I
asked him if he felt that as a police officer he viewed the
world differently to other people. He smiled and said, “You’re
looking through the windscreen at a beautiful summer day. I’m
looking at a man who is standing in the wrong place.”
There is however something different
about major crime detectives, particularly on homicide. I
would say they get more personally involved with their cases
than any others in the force, save those working with rape
victims. Murder is the ultimate horrific crime, because it can
never be reversed. Good homicide detectives, in particular the
Senior Investigating Officers become involved with the victim’s
loved ones, and rapidly feel a massive sense of responsibility –
and caring for these people – and for the victims. They become
all that stands between the victim and justice – and between the
loved ones and closure. That is why so many homicide detectives
go on privately working on unsolved cases long after they have
retired.
Roy Grace has indeed been through
the grinder, in his private life, both with his beloved Sandy’s
disappearance and now Cleo’s perhaps endangered pregnancy… and
professionally with a boss who disliked him, largely for his
maverick behaviour and tried hard to undermine him. But he’s a
survivor, and above all, he is a good man in a dark world.
Dead Like You by Peter James is
published in paperback by Pan on 14th October at £7.99
Read SHOTS review of DEAD LIKE YOU