PETER
JAMES:
Reveals all about Roy Grace and his new book DEAD LIKE YOU
Peter
James has written 25 books, the most recent of which feature
Brighton-based Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. His books have been
translated into 29 languages. In England they are published
by Pan Books and in the US by Carroll
& Graf Publishers. James has written supernatural thrillers,
spy fiction, Michael Crichton-style science-based thrillers, and a
children's novel, as well as the introductions for Graham Masterton's
collection 'Manitou Man' and Joe Rattigan's collection 'Ghosts Far From
Subtle'.
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.
Read
SHOTS
review of DEAD LIKE YOU
Dead Like You by Peter
James is to be published in
paperback by Pan on 14th
October at £7.99
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