“These are my dead friends”: Peter James on Dead Like You

Dead Like You is the sixth book in the Roy Grace series. Detective Superintendent Grace is a professional whom a lot of readers can probably relate to: he’s decent and dedicated. But he’s suffered tragedy in his life – his wife’s disappearance – and also uses some quite unusual methods. Where did the idea for Roy Grace come from?

Roy Grace was inspired by a real life police officer, Dave Gaylor. The first time I met him was 15 years ago, when he was a Detective Inspector in Brighton. I went into this office and the floor was covered in piles of blue and green crates crammed with manila folders. I asked him if he was moving and he replied, deadpan, “No, these are my dead friends.” I thought, great, I’ve just met the only weirdo in Sussex CID! He then went on to explain that he just been put in charge of reopening unsolved cases – what we now call ‘cold cases’ – for Sussex Police. He said that each crate contained the principal case files of an unsolved homicide. Then he said something that had a big impact on me: “I am the last chance the victims have of justice, and the last chance the families have for closure.” I thought these were incredibly human words, and when my publishers asked me some years ago if I would like to create a new detective character, I immediately remembered this.

The great thing is that Dave Gaylor, who rose to the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent, knows he is the career model (but not physical model) for Roy Grace and loves it! He and I have become very close friends over the years. He reads each book as I go along, normally in 150 page chunks and we talk through all aspects of the police activity in the story and who in the force it would benefit me to talk to, and we travel overseas to police conferences together and meet other police contacts around the world – most recently to New York, and to the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

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 realised 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 nine years before we meet him, we learn that he came home on his 30th birthday to find his wife, Sandy, whom he loved and adored, had vanished. And he has not had any sighting of her or word from her since.

The Roy Grace detective novels have sold over one and a half million copies in the UK alone and five million copies worldwide. The series has been translated into 33 languages and there’s a TV adaptation in the works. What do you think is behind this success?

I think it is a combination of elements. The most important of all is the character of Roy Grace himself, that he is believable. It is of course a huge help having a real life character at the back of him. But the intrigue of Sandy, his missing wife is big hook all around the world. I get emails every day asking what has happened to her – and in each book I seed in a little more of the mystery… But in addition to Roy I have his new love, Cleo, who runs the mortuary, and a cast of characters in Roy’s work colleagues, each of whom has a personal life we get to learn about. Another important factor is that I write my novels as thrillers, rather than as police procedurals, almost always with a hook in the first sentence, and short chapters – because that is how I like to read myself. Another absolutely key element, and one which really separates me from almost every other writer in the crime genre, is the depth of research I do. I realised when I started to get to know policemen in my earlier, pre-Roy Grace thrillers that they really do have a culture of their own. They look at the world differently to the rest of us, and I figure that if I was to create a believable central character who was a detective, and to give him believable colleagues, and to make his work realistic, I had to fully understand that world. I’ve been very fortunate in that Sussex Police are incredibly helpful to me. I spend an average of one day a week with the police – anything from being out on patrol, at a crime scene, out on a dive boat, in the call centre, or the operations control room, or just being a fly on the wall in different offices.

The biggest compliment I’ve had was from a Detective Sergeant who emailed me last year to say he’d just spotted a villain he had been after for two years, walking along a street in Brighton. He leapt out of his car and chased him for two miles, finally flooring him with a rugby tackle and handcuffing him. As he was booking him in to the custody suite the villain turned to him and said, “You know, you’re just like a cop in a Peter James novel!”

What book has influenced your own style the most as a crime writer and why?

My biggest influence is undoubtedly Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Brighton Rock is quite simply the book that made me want to be a writer the first time I read it, when I was a teenager. It is also the inspiration behind setting the Roy Grace series in Brighton.

This timeless novel is both a thriller and a crime novel, although police play a small part, and the story is almost entirely told through the eyes of the villains and two women who believe they can redeem them. Graham Greene has a way of describing characters, in just a few sentences, that makes you feel you know them inside out and have probably met them, and his sense of place is almost palpable.

It is for me an almost perfect novel. It has one of the most grabbing opening lines ever written, and one of the finest last lines – very clever, very tantalising and very, very “noir” – yet apt. Green captures so vividly the dark, criminal underbelly of Brighton and Hove, as relevant now as when the book was first written, and the characters are wonderful, deeply human, deeply flawed and tragic. And yet, far more than being just an incredibly tense thriller, Greene uses the novel to explore big themes of religious faith, love and honour. And additionally, a bonus, it is also unique for being one of the few novels where the film adaptation is so good it complements rather than reduces the book.

Dead Like You is set in Brighton, which many Australians would associate with beach holidays, not seedy crime. What fascinates you about the location, and why have you set the Roy Grace novels there?

I was born and raised in Brighton and as a teenager it was an exciting place – brash and vibrant and with a dark underbelly that was clear to all who lived there. To the outsider Brighton is a hip, beautiful seaside city, but it has a long history of darkness – right back to its roots as a smugglers’ village! In Regency days it gained a reputation both as a fashionable bathing resort but in 1841, when the London–Brighton railway line opened, criminals flooded down from London, finding rich pickings and a much nicer environment than their city! They brought cock-fighting, prostitution, pick-pockets, muggers, smugglers, burglars and gangs. Simultaneously, with the railway enabling quick access from London, many wealthy Londoners brought their mistresses down here and it became known as a place for “dirty weekends”.

Three consecutive Chief Constables of Sussex Police, as well as its current Police Commander, have all told me that Brighton is the favoured place to live in the UK for first division criminals. The reasons are: firstly it has a lot of escape routes – very important to all criminals. It has the Channel ports, Eurotunnel and Gatwick Airport and London is 50 mins by train. It has a major seaport on either side – Shoreham and Newhaven – perfect for importing drugs and exporting stolen cars, antiques and cash. It has the largest number of antique shops in the UK – perfect for laundering stolen gods and cash. For nine years running, except for one year, it has held the title the Tourist Board do not like me mentioning: injecting drug death capital of the UK. It has a wealthy young population, combined with the largest gay community in the UK, providing a big market for recreational drugs. It has two universities – so, a big drug-taking student community; a huge number of nightclubs; and a large transient population. Very importantly, and to my great good fortune, it has not been over-written by other writers. The only previous authors to delve into its criminal underbelly – were, first, Patrick Hamilton in The West Pier and then Graham Greene in Brighton Rock in 1938.
Three consecutive Chief Constables of Sussex Police, as well as its current Police Commander, have all told me that Brighton is the favoured place to live in the UK for first division criminals. The reasons are: firstly it has a lot of escape routes – very important to all criminals. It has the Channel ports, Eurotunnel and Gatwick Airport and London is 50 mins by train. It has a major seaport on either side – Shoreham and Newhaven – perfect for importing drugs and exporting stolen cars, antiques and cash. It has the largest number of antique shops in the UK – perfect for laundering stolen gods and cash. For nine years running, except for one year, it has held the title the Tourist Board do not like me mentioning: injecting drug death capital of the UK. It has a wealthy young population, combined with the largest gay community in the UK, providing a big market for recreational drugs. It has two universities – so, a big drug-taking student community; a huge number of nightclubs; and a large transient population. Very importantly, and to my great good fortune, it has not been over-written by other writers. The only previous authors to delve into its criminal underbelly – were, first, Patrick Hamilton in The West Pier and then Graham Greene in Brighton Rock in 1938.

I understand that you have done some research with police here in Melbourne. How did this come about?

I had an extraordinary piece of good fortune with the Melbourne Police! When I was researching the fourth Roy Grace novel, Dead Man’s Footsteps, I needed to set a section in Melbourne. My stepdaughter, Lisa, who was then living there, had a girlfriend who was dating a detective and she was going to arrange for us to meet. As a writer it is vital to have “inside” contacts with the police to vouch for you, as in every country in the world the police tend to be culturally suspicious of writers and keep them away from the real juice. But when we arrived in Melbourne, Lisa greeted us at the airport with the bad news that her friend and the detective had split up and her friend did not want to speak to him… I was thrown into a quandary. We checked into our hotel and I logged on to view my emails and there was one from a female fan in Australia. She asked if I ever came to Australia as she would like me to sign a book. I emailed her back to say I was actually in Melbourne – I didn’t know where she was, but if she could get a book to me I would happily sign it. Within two minutes she emailed me back to say that she lived forty miles outside Melbourne but her husband was a detective working in the city!

The next morning her husband and another detective collected me from my hotel and drove me to the Police HQ, where the Chief of Police had laid on a whole team of his detectives, of various ranks, to discuss exactly what I needed while I was over and how they could help me. They asked me what role Melbourne played in the story. I explained to them that the novel was about a man, Ronnie Wilson, who uses the fact that he was in New York on the morning of 9/11 as a golden opportunity to fake his disappearance and start a new life in Melbourne. But everything starts to go pear shaped for him a few years later, when the drought in Melbourne causes the level of a local river to drop and the roof of a car is exposed. When the car is recovered from the river, a dead body is found in the boot – that of Ronnie Wilson’s second wife. All the cops peered at me intently, and one of them said, “You know, that happened, two weeks ago! Do you want to see the river where the car was found? Do you want to see the car?”

It was astonishing. I spent the next four days with them, learning about many aspects of Melbourne Police, as well as spending time at the mortuary and Coroner’s office. You can read about this and see some of the photos I took in my January 2007 blog “Bug-eyed in Melbourne“.

Peter James will be appearing in The Thrill of It; The Art of Suspense with RJ Ellory and Peter James, a seminar on writing thrillers; and the free Morning Fix session.