You know you’ve made it as a crime writer when not only the police know your fictional detective, but even the villains do.
“I had a great compliment recently,” says Peter James, whose 11th Roy Grace novel, You Are Dead, is published by Macmillan in the UK this week. “A detective in Brighton emailed me to say he had just seen a villain he had been chasing for over two years. He leapt out of his car and chased this man through Brighton for 30 minutes and finally rugby tackled him and then handcuffed him. As he was booking this villain into the custody centre the villain turned to him and said, ‘You know, you’re just like a cop in a Peter James novel!’”
With more than 16 million Roy Grace novels sold, it’s almost inevitable that James’ novels have found their way on to criminal bookshelves. In the 10 years since the publication of Dead Simple, Roy Grace has become an institution in the British fictional detective firmament, sitting at the top table with John Rebus, Alan Banks, Tom Thorne and few others.
Having read all 10 novels that precede You Are Dead, and reviewed many, I believe Peter James’ success boils down to two key factors: inventive, pacey story-telling and the likeability and credibility of Roy Grace, a down-to-earth, everyman copper with a strong ethical code and a streak of common decency.
REVIEWS OF PETER JAMES NOVELS
Not Dead Enough (2007); Dead Man's Footsteps (2008); Dead Tomorrow (2009); Dead Like You (2010).
I ask James what he likes about the detective he describes as his ‘literary alter-ego’.
“I envy and admire his instincts, the way he is with people, and how he rose so fast up the career ladder- and knew when to stop rising,” he says.
Grace, currently a Detective Superintendent in Brighton, where he has spent his entire career, is a copper’s copper who has eschewed an managerial role in the corridors of power where he feels uncomfortable and out of place, in favour of keeping his hand firmly in investigative matters, where he is an empathetic and inspirational leader to a pretty diverse group of detectives.
Grace is a policeman who rings true with his real-life counterparts, whose expertise and experience James, who is renowned for the depth and quality of his research, has mined tirelessly.
“I have received so much support from the police over the years, they’ve helped me with my research and put up with my questions, and I hope that I’ve portrayed their lives truthfully within my work,” he says. “Roy Grace might be fictional but his narratives have been shaped by real life experiences – which I’ve witnessed in person and second hand. Every cop that I’ve met has a story to tell, and every cop you will ever meet has, at some time, had his or her life on the line.”
One of the features of the development of the series – and indeed other fictional detectives, including Rebus – has been that it also chronicles the changing face of British policy and in particular the extent to which bureaucracy and politics have imposed themselves on the detective’s working life, impeding their ability to get the job done.
James says that during his time writing the Grace series he’s seen this trend “massively’ changing working lives, and to a dangerous extent.
“Political correctness – in some ways a good thing as it has change most forces from being institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic into being much more liberal. Health and Safety has crept in to a ridiculous level,” he says. “But what is really hurting the police are the swingeing budget cuts from the Government. The police no longer feel that government cares about them and this is very dangerous for morale.”
Grace absorbs the slings and arrows of force bureaucracy with much frustration but ultimately enough equanimity to continue being effective. As the cases have passed and his experience gathered, James says he’s changed with the job.
“I think he has certainly developed, in terms of becoming wiser, but I think that his integral values have stayed the same, and unlike many cops he has not become a cynic – not yet anyway,” he says. “The biggest change his how he has moved on in his private life, finally accepting Sandy is almost certainly dead…. Or is she???”
The Roy Grace back story is dominated by the disappearance without trace of his wife Sandy some years before the series started. In my review of Dead Man’s Footsteps in 2008, I remarked that the Sandy storyline, which in that novel was being used as a stick with which to beat Grace, felt ‘forced’ and was ‘somewhat tedious, even questioning whether James himself was committed to the Sandy angle. (Something he responded to in the positive in an e-mail exchange at the time).
The further Grace has grown away from Sandy – he has a new bride and a young child – the more influential this storyline has become and in some ways the more threatening to Grace’s hard-earned equilibrium. There’s no question now that Peter James is committed to the Sandy story arc, but her reappearance, plus the fact that Grace is constantly confronted by both vengeful villains and nasty superiors prompted me to ask whether the author actually liked his detective, given how much adversity he continued to heap on him.
“I’ve spent so much time with him I think it would be difficult not to like him. I try to make him realistic – and the truth is that almost every police officer I’ve ever met has, at some point in his or her career, had their life on the line,“ he says. But I always say and I mean it, that if I was ever unfortunate enough to have someone in my family or a close friend murdered, Roy is the detective I would want as the SIO of the investigation.”
James is a little more even-handed with the other major character in his book – the City of Brighton. His love of his home City with its alternative edge shines through, even if he does portray it as having a murder rate on a par with that of Detroit (or Morse-era Oxford).
“Brighton is the hippest and coolest city in the UK,“ he says. “Like all vibrant cities around the world it has a dangerous, edgy side, a great restaurant, bar and club scene, and stunning architecture, and it is a very libertarian city. There is an expression which the police and the press use which sums the place up perfectly. ‘Only in Brighton…’”
The question James’ millions of fans will have is how long Grace can soldier on, protecting the city from the forces of darkness. He’s reached the literary age (pre-teen at 11 novels) where some series start to struggle, but James has maintained a very high quality, and there’s no end in sight.
“There’s still plenty of fight in Grace. In You Are Dead he’s reenergised by his new married life with Cleo and their baby; his new family give him a new reason to carry on doing what he’s doing. And he has only aged two years in 11 novels – he is still a relatively young man at 41!”
You Are Dead by Peter James is published in hardback on 21st May (Macmillan, £20)