» Peter James interview
Peter James novelist and film producer talks to Andrew Kay about the art of committing crime fiction to the page
AK:When did you write your first book?
PJ: The first published was a terrible spy thriller I wrote in 1981 called Dead Letter Drop. I really wanted to write crime, but it was a nowhere genre back then. I read an article in The Times that said with Ian Fleming’s death there was a shortage of spy thrillers, I thought I could writeone. To my amazement I got an agent and to my bigger amazement he got it published - to my even bigger amazement still it completely flopped. I wrote a second one and that was called Atom Bomb Angel that flopped too.
Have they been re-published?
I bought the rights back and I keep them out of print, they are really not very good.
So, your first big break was Possession?
Which veered on crime, in that someone actually committed one, but it was not a crime novel. I wrote Possession, kind of a one-off book, and my publishers Gollancz said to me “You know I think we can build your name up if we pigeonhole you as horror” and at that time in 1987, horror was in the ascent. You had Steven King, Dean Koontz, James Herbert and it was the big genre. I was grateful to have a publisher who was enthusiastic and I said yes. It was a poisoned chalice because within five years, four or five books for me, the genre had gone into decline and crime was starting to rise out of the penny dreadful ghetto. Gollancz had done a marvellous marketing job, kind of Britain’s answer to Steven King - but not wanting to be. I moved from the supernatural and wrote a science fiction novel. I moved publishers to Orion hoping to get repositioned as a crime thriller writer but they just did not do it.
Did they want more horror, psychic thrillers?
They said they wanted crime but they kept marketing my ‘horror’ tag, I got very frustrated. I was half way through a two year contract and I changed agents, to the wonderful Carole Blake. She asked if I was brave enough to buy myself out of my contract. I bit the bullet and did it.
Was it an expensive business?
Very, and traumatic - I had to do it before my new agent was able, ethically, to approach anyone else. I had quite a white knuckle ride for about a year - it was the first time in two decades I was without a publisher.
And no crime writing record, was it a gamble?
Yes, it was really, and I didn’t know how, my old horror. Luckily my film career was going well so I could afford to take a risk. It turned out to be the best decision ever.
You had produced films in your twenties.
A raft of horror films and then at the other end of the spectrum we did Spanish Fly which I wrote and produced with Terry Thomas and Lesley Phillips. Barry Norman described it as “The decline and fall of the British family film”.
It didn’t put you off?
It did put me off. I decided comedy wasn’t my thing! Although Barry Norman admitted to me later that his mini cab driver really liked it. I co-produced Biggles too, more successfully.
A precursor of revival Hollywood adventures
It was, but made on a relatively low budget. We filmed the First World War just outside Bedford! We did also make some big, high-profile films, which fared better. The Neptune Factor, which was the first disaster film in 1972 with Ernest Borgnine and Walter Pidgeon, was big budget for its time. But it is writing novels that has always been what I really wanted to do with my life.
But it is a solitary business.
I got slightly disillusioned with writing in the late 90s, because I was finding it kind of quite depressingly solitary and not writing what I really wanted to – crime. I had been writing novels almost full time for ten years. Part of the attraction to me of making films is that it
is a team effort. But it can be very frustrating. I had fun back in the film business – I made The Bridge of San Luis Rey with De Niro and Kathy Bates, A Different Loyalty with Sharon Stone and Rupert Everett, Merchant of Venice, with Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons, but just did not find it fulfiling.
Had the film business changed?
No, not at all really, it is still just as dishonest! Only the platforms are changing - with the big swing being towards home entertainment.
Are you actively producing now?
No, I am working on one film, more as an advisor than an active producer, with a young film maker, a very classy horror film. What I want to do is have control of a TV series of my Roy Grace series books. Having had three books filmed really badly, I have decided I am going to do it myself, and with an unknown playing Roy Grace. I don’t want a David Jason or a Robson Green thrust on me.
Roy Grace is your new character; your new hero. Is he you?
A bit of me, or the me that I would like to be! He’s braver than me. In the new book he climbs down Beachy Head to help somebody, despite having a fear of heights. There is no way that I can get within five feet of the edge of it.
But you are passionate about research, you witness autopsies, crime scenes, murder victims, watch horrific stuff…
Height and claustrophobia are the two things that do me in. I did get very scared when I was writing Dead Simple. The story starts with Michael getting buried alive, a practical joke that goes wrong. I went to an undertaker and said “put me in a coffin for half an hour, screw the lid down, I want to feel what it is like to not be able to get out”. I suddenly thought, shit what if he gets run over?
But you did have your mobile with you?
I was still terrified. I also spend a day about every two and a half weeks with Sussex Police, on patrol, at crime scenes or in their offices, I have some hairy experiences.
On a regular basis throughout the year?
Pretty constantly. I was in a situation recently, they had a guy ‘five times wanted’ for armed robbery and there was a tip off that he is in a flat in Hove. When we got there was a whole bunch of police, plain clothes, dog handlers and the local support team, the guys with the armoured vests and battering rams. I knew one of them and he said “Are you coming in?” I said yes and he said “Stay clear of the door in case he shoots”. They literally rang the door belland said “Mr Smith are you in?” Silence - so they smash the door off its hinges. This big ugly lad bites one of them on the nose, jams his fingers in the eyes of another. They get him and throw him on the ground, handcuff him and put leg manacles on him. He is lying there and says “You ******* *****, I hope you fix my door, last time you did this I got burgled.”
Are you insured for these outings?
I don’t even think about! I accept the risks.
Do they become parts of the stories?
Yes, very much so, a big part of what I am doing with Roy Grace is building a reality, and every book pulls in the background of Brighton and the world of the police in our city.
The picture of Brighton is incredibly clear, is that important?
As important as the characters themselves. The sense of ‘place’ is crucial in almost every crime novel I’ve ever read.
The way that Oxford is important to Morse?
And Edinburgh is for Rebus, LA for Elroy. I am published in 28 languages, and each country seem to love the setting. In Germany for instance, I am a top ten best seller. We recently did a tour for German journalists of Roy Grace’s Brighton. It is kind of bizarre. I get letters from all over the world from readers wanting to come and see it.
Brighton has a veneer of sophistication but you don’t have to scratch very hard to discover the seamy side of the city.
My favourite book as a kid was Brighton Rock. I was born and brought up here and you are absolutely right, one of the great things about Brighton is that you have this elegance and beauty but beneath the surface it can be very sinister. Brighton in the 1930s was christened the Crime Capital of the UK. It has always had this very dark undertow. When I was a kid there were certain names that if you heard them or saw that person in a pub you got out because somebody would get ‘bottled’ – some of those people are still around.
There are still gangs in Brighton?
We have a gang called TMC – Team Massive Crew and they are really revolting 14 to 18-year-olds, you see them wearing track suits with a baseball cap on and one glove which means they are tooled up. Initiation into this gang involves raping a woman or stabbing a police officer. They are the skuzzy element of Brighton crime but at the other end of it… Well, three consecutive chief constables have also told me that Brighton is favourite place to live for First Division criminals. A, it is a nice place and B, you have a harbour either side, great for importing and exporting contraband. You have got all the channel ports, for a quick getaway, Gatwick, a larger number of antique shops per capita than any city in Europe, fantastic for fencing stolen goods. And the largest number of injecting drug users in the UK per capita. Not to mention the affluent recreational drugs market.
It is not a pretty picture is it?
This would frighten some tourist boards but it is a fact. I have a theory that it is the cities that have a dark underbelly that are the most vibrant to live in. If you look around the world, where is it great to live in America? New Orleans and Chicago, LA, NYC. Melbourne is probably the most attractive city in Australia, Sydney is pretty but Melbourne has got more gold. Melbourne has had 37 gangland shootings in the last five years. The next book is partly set there.
What takes Roy Grace to Australia?
Dead Man’s Footsteps is about Ronnie Wilson, a ne-er do well from Brighton, who has gone to see an old friend in New York, a billionaire with offices on the 87th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Centre to try to get him to back a new business venture. He arrives for the meeting at 9am on the morning of 9/11 – just as the mayhem is starting. Ronnie has a big life insurance policy and seizes the opportunity to fake his disappearance. Six years later a woman’s body turns up in the boot of a car in a river outside Melbourne which is connected to him. Although I want to keep the focus of Roy Grace in Brighton, one of my problems with British crime writing is that it gets very parochial, set here and staying here, whereas, if you spend time with the police, many senior detectives during their career will have gone abroad following up leads. In Dead Man’s Footsteps part of the book takes place in Brighton, part in New York and part in Melbourne. I have just been to Moscow and spent time with the Chief of Police. That’s a book on its own.
If you and I see two guys looking in a shop window our immediate thought is what are they going to buy. A policeman thinks why are they looking at that? Are they going to rob it?
Will Roy Grace’s missing wife come back?
There are developments in the new book. But of course if I tell you, I would have to kill you…
It is a wonderfully tantalising sub plot, no evidence she is dead, no evidence she is alive, just occasional strange sightings. I am gob-smacked by the amount of interest that this has generated. When I was creating Roy Grace I drew from an experience 12 years ago. I went into Hove Police Station and this guy, Dave Gaylor, was an inspector and there were 20 blue boxes on the floor. I said “Are you moving?” and he said “No, those are my friends”. I said “Friends?” and he told me each was a file of a murdered person where the crime had not been solved. He was one of the first detectives to specialise in ‘cold cases.’ He said “I am literally the last chance saloon for their families to get closure, for those victims to get any kind of justice”. That fascinated me. I thought what detectives do is solve puzzles and I though it would be fun to have a detective who has a puzzle of his own.
How many detectives come up from the ranks and how many from academia?
They all have to go through basic training, a lot now come out of Universities but they still have to go to Police Training College. A surprising number have had other careers first.
The detecting process, from reading the books, seems an intellectual process.
I think a lot of detection is about powers of observation and I think that the detectives that I have met in the last decade tend to be very observant people. The police look at the world in a different way than you and I. If you and I walk down the street and see two guys looking in a shop window our immediate thought is “They are wondering what they are going to buy”. A policeman thinks “Why are they standing there? Are they going to rob it? Are they doing a drug deal? What are they discussing?” It is a culture of suspicion, that everybody is up to something. You get it from the villains too. I was in a plain clothes car and we were trailing a drug deal, it wasn’t an obvious car. I was in the front with a detective, both with our seat belts off in case you have to get out the car. At a T junction the detective was on his mobile and two cool dudes walked in front of us, and gave us thumbs up. I said to the detective “are they friends?” He said “No, they’ve been inside for drug dealing”. I asked what was all that about and he said “Antennae, if you are a dealer you are constantly using your antennae for spotting police”. I asked how they knew and he said that they could see two guys, a plain car, not wearing seat belts, one driving, one on the mobile – detectives!
Is the drug problem in Brighton growing?
Several senior police officers have said to me that there must be some legalisation of drugs because they are not winning. 80 per cent of crime is drug related. It is very interesting how crime is changing. I was at a Brighton Central briefing meeting a year ago and the then commander, Chief Superintendent Kevin Moore, said how the city had come on since records began. They had not had a burglary that night in the centre of Brighton and Hove. I said “Great you are winning with crime” and he said “No, it has changed, you have two types of burglar in England. The night time burglar is called the creeper burglar, the professional is in the one who breaks in and takes your Georgian silver, and then goes and fences it. Then you have the chaotic or ‘acquisitive’ burglar who does most of the stuff in the afternoon, an opportunist, who needs his 30 - 200 quid a day for his drug fix who mugs you or smashes your window and grabs your CD or whatever. But the old-style overnight ‘creeper’ burglar – the pro burglar – can now make three to four grand a day as a drug dealer or on identity theft or internet fraud. Not crawling up drain pipes at three in the morning, breaking in and trying to sell stuff”. The majority of crime in this city is drug related. An addict needs between £30-500 pounds a day to feed their habit. They get only ten per cent of the value of what they steal. And there are 2,500 in this city. The maths are scary on how much is stolen each year.
Car theft is a strong theme in Not Dead Enough, did you actually meet car thieves?
I met an ex… now turned adviser to the police. It is big business. Because Brighton is quite a wealthy city, there is quite a big crime belt here. It is probably not any worse than many places but the one thing we luckily don’t have here is the horrible gun culture growing in some inner cities.
We don’t have it or we don’t have it yet?
We have not got the kind of inner city racial or gang culture problems. I don’t think we are big enough to have it at the moment.
We don’t have ghettos. Brighton is only 250,000 people. Almost a village.
Yes, it is a reasonably safe place. It has also got a legacy of tolerance which goes back to the Regency days. Misbehaviour has always been accepted. Louche behaviour should I say. What changed Brighton was the railway line in 1849 when all the villains in London were able to come down and brought with them cock fighting and all that kind of bad stuff.
How far down the path are you with making the TV series?
Not very far. I am not in any hurry to do it. When it first came out I sold the rights but I was not happy with how it was going and I got them back this summer. You can actually do yourself more harm by having a bad series, because far more people will watch television – 5-10million than will buy your book (a few hundred thousand) – so you will tend to be judged on quality of the series. I remember Karl Hiassen’s sales went down after the film of Striptease. You can really hurt yourself with a bad adaptation. Selling your film and TV rights to an outsider is like selling your soul to the devil because the producers will do what they want, and the directors will do what they want. And you don’t get that much cash from a film or TV deal to make it worth those risks.
So Roy could end up being a Chicago cop?
I had a straight-faced call from people who had the rights saying we could make it in Scotland. “We have the money to make it in Scotland”.
Because the Scottish film board had cash?
Absolutely. I said a flat no. The whole point of Roy Grace for me is that it is set in Brighton where I was born. I know the streets. Everything about Roy Grace is about this city that I love and adore. I want to write about this world down here. I am not writing a book that is set in Aberdeen or Liverpool or Leeds or anywhere else in the world. That is a different book with a different character.
When you are writing do you actually visualise how it might look on screen?
It is more that I am conscious of how visually people think today, thanks to film and television. I am very conscious that as far as writing goes, 100 years ago when there was not such a thing as film and TV, people probably approached a book in a different way. I think people are conditioned to think of the structure in terms of movies. I was writing sitcoms for a few years in America, you have to have a laugh every 12 seconds because the broadcaster reckoned that a lot of people are channel surfing and if they hit your show and you can grab them with a laugh you can hold them. Whilst I am not writing a laugh every 12 seconds I am very conscious that somebody’s got the option to read or write or just watch TV, channel surf or net surf, or the radio, there are so many distractions – even knitting!
How do you avoid distractions? You choose a country life taking away the temptation of lunching, café trawling, shopping.
I divide my week between my London flat, where I spend part of the week, and Sussex.
Is that your isolation - do you write there?
I write in both and I love the contrast, the sense of being in the city, and at the same time coming down here just completely out of earshot of neighbours. As for distractions, I usually have a massive vodka Martini, which focuses my mind!
Do you pace yourself, set a target for each day when writing?
Yes, my writing day starts at 6pm which is an odd way round. I have a vodka Martini, put on some jazz or opera then I work until about 10.30 then flop and have some supper and slump in front of the telly, watch something junky like Desperate Housewives. In the morning, I revise what I wrote the night before. I try to write a chapter a day and I plan the next chapter before I break in the afternoon then start again at six. 6pm to 10.30pm is my best time, five days a week. Saturday I do less, Sunday I try not to do anything creative and catch up with emails, paper work and stuff.
Do you need that discipline?
It is very important. Every writer has a different way of working but I think that for me once I start writing I want to write something every day to keep the flow and the rhythm going. Last thing at night I go to sleep working out the next chapter in my head and I am almost living it the whole time. I get up and go for a run in the morning and I am thinking about it.
Half the year you write, the rest is…?
Promotions, revising and the editing process. I delivered the new book in September. I have been on the road a lot this year, The Far East, Australia, the States and Europe - Germany seven times, I won an award there last year and two in France, and I have just been shortlisted for another two.
It must be strange to win awards in countries where it is not your first language.
Yes, because you don’t know what the translation is like. But it’s a wonderful feeling!
Do you speak another language?
French but not enough to really read it well.
You have to trust a foreign publisher will do justice to your sense of the language.
The biggest surprise is Germany. My mother being a Jewish refugee, I was brought up to really dislike Germans. But I’ve discovered it is today, a delightful country, the people have a great sense of humour, they really do and in the last three years I have got to know a lot of people and have a lot of German friends. They have a culture of public readings so I work with a German actor. You can have an audience of 100-300 people and we alternate, he will read a chapter in German, I will read one in English. Then we have Q and A, he translates or we have a translator and they really laugh, at everything. But in Looking Good Dead there is a scene when Tom Price comes home and he goes to his study and his wife is randy. She comes into his study and she says “Come to bed” and he says “Give me a few minutes” and she says “Two minutes” and he says “Five minutes”. Then she goes out and comes back a minute later and says “30 seconds or I start without you”. We got to that bit in Germany and nobody laughed. The next night it was the same thing, nobody laughed. The third it happened again and I said to my German publisher I don’t understand why they don’t find this bit funny? He said “What bit?” It had been cut. It’s not in the German edition. So I rang my editor and said “What’s going on?” and she said she didn’t realise it was a joke!
Straight translation would be no better
I think the only way I can judge it is if people enjoy the book and the reviews are good.
Would you make a good detective?
I don’t think I am brave enough, all police officers are much braver than people realise and are often in positions of considerably personal danger. I will see them jump out of a car and apprehend a mean looking suspect and say “Empty your pockets”. Or they can be chasing someone, on their own, at night. I am not sure that I am that observant either. But I do think perhaps if I was 20-years-old again then maybe, whereas last time I would not even have considered the police. I would look at it more openly now. I think one thing that would drive me nuts is the bureaucracy: If you arrest somebody you end up signing your name 37 times. What I do admire about the police, and I have got friendly with them at all levels in Sussex they are incredibly good and committed people. I remember a previous Commander at Brighton talking about what the police earned. He said “For me it is not about money, the riches come from within”. They are not highly paid, the commander, for instance, gets less than a headmaster.
There’s respect in the books for the police, but there is a misogynistic bigot who you occasionally give glimmers of brilliance.
Norman Potting!
There is something great about him, almost Dickensian and otherwise everyone would be too shiny, too keen.
He is one of my favourite characters, I have him in the next book reading porn. He’s there because I see him in the force – I don’t want to portray everyone as perfect – they are not!
He has moments of clarity as a detective?
He treads a very old fashioned path but just occasionally he drags everyone back to the reality that there is value in good old fashioned policing. You were asking earlier about what makes a good detective, it is perseverance. A lot is just drudge, and there are people like him in the force. I have got other unpopular figures, such as Alison Vosper.
You describe her as sweet and sour?
27 on the Chinese take-away menu, but Potting I do like because I actually know him, I have met him, an old sweat in Brighton’s John Street. You can sit with him at the bar and you can talk for hours about arrests and stuff.
You still enjoy including your friends names, I was thrilled when I cropped up and in the most recent one Glenn Mission appears.
It is kind of fun just to do that. I shall have to have somebody in the next book reading Latest Sussex. And of course I sometimes put the names of people who have upset me on mortuary freezer doors, or toe tags!!!
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Peter James Not Dead Enough is published by Pan Macmillan in paperback on 7 December 2007 £6.99
January 31st, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Ihave now read all three of the Roy Grace books and I think they are wonderful.
Gripping, page turning, exciting-just what a novel should be!