Review: RAIN DOGS by Adrian McKinty

Set in Northern Ireland in 1987, Rain Dogs (Serpent’s Tail) is the fifth in Adrian McKinty’s series of novels featuring RUC detective Sean Duffy. When the body of Lily Bigelow is discovered inside Carrickfergus Castle early one morning, it looks as if the young British journalist has taken her own life. Duffy has his doubts, some of which are shared by his colleagues McCrabban and Lawson, but the alternative is that Lily Bigelow was murdered in a place, and at a time, when it would have been impossible for a killer to get in or out of the castle.
  The internal tension of the early Sean Duffy stories (a Catholic policeman viewed with suspicion by his largely Protestant and frequently sectarian colleagues) is no longer a factor in the series, given that Duffy has long since proven himself a capable, if occasionally maverick, detective. Indeed, the Troubles barely intrude on the events of Rain Dogs, even if the story, as is generally the case with the Duffy novels, is rooted in historical events. Duffy’s investigation into Lily Bigelow’s death leads him to a the Kincaid Young Offenders Institution in Belfast, where it appears that young boys in care are being exploited by ‘a paedophile ring operating at the highest levels of British government’ (the Kincaid institution stands in here for the Kincora Boys’ Home, which was engulfed in a sex abuse scandal at the beginning of the 1980s).
  Despite the dark subject matter, Rain Dogs makes for a breezy, blackly humourous read, particularly when McKinty (now living in Australia) has Duffy hold forth on his home town: “Carrickfergus had an embarrassment of abandoned factories that had been set up in the optimistic sixties, closed in the pessimistic seventies and were on the verge of ruin, now that we were in the apocalyptic eighties.” The fact that Sean Duffy finds himself investigating his second locked-room mystery becomes something of a running joke. “Policemen in Northern Ireland do not get two locked-room mysteries in one career,” Duffy declares, which leads his subordinate Lawson to offer Bayes’s Theorem on conditional probability (!) to explain how it might actually be possible; meanwhile, Duffy spends half the story telling us that he is not Miss Marple, Gideon Fell, Inspector Maigret, Hercule Poirot, or any other fictional refugee from the Golden Age of locked-room mysteries.
  He protests too much, although it’s fair to say Sean Duffy is more typical of the conventional hardboiled detective than he is of the Golden Age’s sleuths, a classic anti-authority loner who struggles to sustain any personal relationship other than the one he maintains with the nearest bottle or mind-altering substance. Which is to say, Adrian McKinty is steeped in the crime novel’s lore and traditions; what is equally clear is the pleasure he takes in exploring the parameters of the police procedural, subverting expectations and poking fun at the tropes and conventions (chapters titled ‘Ed McBain’s Notebook’ and ‘Jimmy Savile’s Caravan’ give a flavour of the irreverent approach).
  The most enjoyable aspect of the novel, however, is McKinty’s unsentimental prose, a stark style that employs a terse, brutal poetry to evoke startling imagery. “I walked past the wreck of the Volvo,” Duffy tells us in the wake of a car bomb that has just killed Chief Inspector McBain. “The rear of the vehicle was completely gone and the rest was like some kind of abstract sculpture that Ballard might have liked. A headless torso covered with a blanket was in the driver’s seat.”
  All told, it’s a deliciously readable tale, as McKinty blends a fiendish locked-room mystery into a traditional police procedural and sends Sean Duffy jetting off to London, Finland and Dublin in pursuit of justice on behalf of Lily Bigelow. It may not be the most hard-hitting of this award-winning series (In the Morning I’ll Be Gone won Australia’s Ned Kelly Award in 2014), but Rain Dogs is arguably the most enjoyable Sean Duffy tale to date. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Introduction: BOOKS TO DIE FOR, ed. John Connolly and Declan Burke

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that BOOKS TO DIE FOR (Hodder & Stoughton) is being reissued in paperback; last week, the Irish Times was kind enough to carry the book’s Introduction. To wit:

Why does the mystery novel enjoy such enduring appeal? There is no simple answer. It has a distinctive capacity for subtle social commentary; a concern with the disparity between law and justice; and a passion for order, however compromised. Even in the vision of the darkest of mystery writers, it provides us with a glimpse of the world as it might be, a world in which good men and women do not stand idly by and allow the worst aspects of human nature to triumph without opposition. It can touch upon all these aspects of itself while still entertaining the reader – and its provision of entertainment is not the least of its many qualities.
  But the mystery novel has always prized character over plot, which may come as some surprise to its detractors. True, this is not a universal tenet: there are degrees to which mysteries occupy themselves with the identity of the criminal as opposed to, say, the complexities of human motivation. Some, such as the classic puzzle mystery, tend towards the former; others are more concerned with the latter. But the mystery form understands that plot comes out of character, and not just that: it believes that the great mystery is character.
  If we take the view that fiction is an attempt to find the universal in the specific, to take individual human experiences and try to come to some understanding of our common nature through them, then the question at the heart of all novels can be expressed quite simply as ‘Why?’ Why do we do the things that we do? It is asked in Bleak House just as it is asked in The Maltese Falcon. It haunts The Pledge as it does The Chill. But the mystery novel, perhaps more than any other, not only asks this question; it attempts to suggest an answer to it as well.
  But where to start? There are so many from which to choose, even for the knowledgeable reader who has already taken to swimming in mystery’s dark waters, and huge numbers of new titles appear on our bookshelves each week. It is hard to keep up with authors who are alive, and those who are deceased are at risk of being forgotten entirely. There are treasures to be found, and their burial should not be permitted, even if there are some among these authors who might have been surprised to find themselves remembered at all, for they were not writing for the ages.
  And so, quite simply, we decided to give mystery writers from around the world the opportunity to enthuse about their favourite novel, and in doing so we hoped to come up a selection of books that was, if not definitive (which would be a foolish and impossible aim), then heartfelt, and flawless in its inclusions if not its omissions. What we sought from each of the contributors to this volume was passionate advocacy: we wanted them to pick one novel, just one, that they place in the canon. If you found them in a bar some evening, and the talk turned (as it almost inevitably would) to favorite writers, it would be the single book that each writer would press upon you, the book that, if there was time and the stores were still open, they would leave the bar in order to purchase for you, so they could be sure they had done all in their power to ensure it was read by you.
  While this volume is obviously ideal for dipping into when you have a quiet moment, enabling you to read an essay or two before moving on, there is also a pleasure to be had from the slow accumulation of its details. Reading through the book chronologically, as we have done during the editing process, patterns begin to emerge, some anticipated, some less so. There is, of course, the importance of the great Californian crime writers – Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and James M. Cain – to the generations of writers who have followed and, indeed, to each other: so Macdonald’s detective, Lew Archer, takes his name in part from Sam Spade’s murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon, while Chandler builds on Hammett, and then Macdonald builds on Chandler but also finds himself being disparaged by the older author behind his back, adding a further layer of complication to their relationship. But the writer who had the greatest number of advocates was not any of these men: it was the Scottish author Josephine Tey, who is a crucial figure to a high number of the female contributors to this book.
  Or one might take the year 1947: it produces both Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place, in which the seeds of what would later come to be called the serial killer novel begin to germinate, and Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury. Both are examinations of male rage – although Spillane is probably more correctly considered as an expression of it – and both come out of the aftermath of the Second World War, when men who had fought in Europe and Asia returned home to find a changed world, a theme that is also touched on in Margery Allingham’s 1952 novel, The Tiger in the Smoke. The pulp formula in the US also adapted itself to these changes in post-war society, which resulted in the best work of writers such as Jim Thompson, Elliott Chaze and William McGivern, all of whom are considered in essays in this book.
  Finally, it’s interesting to see how often different writers, from Ed McBain to Mary Stewart, Newton Thornburg to Leonardo Padura, assert the view that they are, first and foremost, novelists. The mystery genre provides a structure for their work – the ideal structure – but it is extremely malleable, and constantly open to adaptation: the sheer range of titles and approaches considered here is testament to that.
  To give just one example: there had long been female characters at the heart of hard-boiled novels, most frequently as femmes fatales or adoring secretaries, but even when women were given central roles as detectives, the novels were written, either in whole or in part, by men: Erle Stanley Gardner’s Bertha Cool (created under the pseudonym A.A. Fair), who made her first appearance in 1939; Dwight W. Babcock’s Hannah Van Doren; Sam Merwin Jr.’s Amy Brewser; Will Oursler and Margaret Scott’s Gale Gallagher (all 1940s); and, perhaps most famously, Forrest and Gloria Fickling’s Honey West in the 1950s.
  But at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, a number of female novelists, among them Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, but also Amanda Cross and, in her pair of Cordelia Gray novels, PD James, found in the hard-boiled mystery novel a means of addressing issues affecting women, including violence (particularly sexual violence), victimization, power imbalances, and gender conflicts. They did so by questioning, altering, and subverting the established traditions in the genre, and, in the process, they created a new type of female writing. The mystery genre accommodated them without diminishing the seriousness of their aims, or hampering the result, and it did so with ease. It is why so many writers, even those who feel themselves to be working outside the genre, have chosen to introduce elements of it into their writing, and why this anthology can accommodate such a range of novelists, from Dickens to Dürrenmatt, and Capote to Crumley.
  But this volume also raises the question of what constitutes a mystery – or, if you prefer, a crime novel. (The terms are often taken as interchangeable, but ‘mystery’ is probably a more flexible, and accurate, description given the variety within the form. Crime may perhaps be considered the catalyst, mystery the consequence.) Genre, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder, but one useful formulation may be that, if one can take the crime out of the novel and the novel does not collapse, then it’s probably not a crime novel; but if one removes the crime element and the novel falls apart, then it is. It is interesting, though, to note that just as every great fortune is said to hide a great crime, so too many great novels, regardless of genre, have a crime at their heart. The line between genre fiction and literary fiction (itself a genre, it could be argued) is not as clear as some might like to believe.
  In the end, those who dismiss the genre and its capacity to permit and encourage great writing, and to produce great literature, are guilty not primarily of snobbery – although there may be an element of that – but of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of fiction and genre’s place in it. There is no need to splice genre into the DNA of fiction, literary or otherwise: it is already present. The mystery genre is both a form and a mechanism. It is an instrument to be used. In the hands of a bad writer, it will produce bad work, but great writers can make magic from it. ~ John Connolly and Declan Burke, Dublin, 2012

This piece was first published in the Irish Times.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Pat Fitzpatrick

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Anything by Ed McBain. I picked up one his books in a second-hand book shop in New York because it was a dollar and I liked the cover. Before that I had no interest in crime novels; after that I had little interest in anything else. So McBain is my first love.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Philip Kerr’s brilliant creation, Bernie Gunther.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I’d have to plead guilty to John Grisham. But he probably knows a lawyer who can get me off.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The first sentence. It tends to get tricky after that.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE. I’m not sure if John Banville meant to it to be read as a crime novel. But that’s how I see it.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I think THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE would make for a great movie.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst is the feeling that everything you write could do with a bit of improvement. The best is when someone reads something you wrote and says otherwise.

The pitch for your next book is …?
The pitch is under wraps at the moment because it is a sequel to my current book and I don’t want to give too much away. But here’s a little taster for now:

He didn’t cry out when Fanta McCarthy hammered the long slender nails into his palms. But he knew it was only a matter of time before he told them everything. And then the killing could begin.

Who are you reading right now?
Would you believe EIGHTBALL BOOGIE by a certain Declan Burke? I know that seems like I’m sucking up to my interrogator, but it happens to be true.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I’d go looking for a new God, one who isn’t so cruel.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Short, Sharp and Entertaining (I hope.)

KEEP AWAY FROM THOSE FERRARIS is Pat Fitzpatrick’s debut novel.

Cold Cold Comfort

I had an interview with Adrian McKinty (right) published in the Irish Examiner recently. It ran a lot like this:

Taboo or not taboo, that is the question. Adrian McKinty’s latest novel, THE COLD COLD GROUND, has for its backdrop one of the most contentious topics in recent Irish history, the IRA hunger strikes of 1981.
  “It is a taboo subject,” McKinty agrees. “In fact, the whole Troubles era is still a taboo. I had a conversation with a BBC NI producer once, we were discussing a potential commission. He was completely aghast when I told him that I wanted to do something about the Troubles. ‘That’s all behind us now, we want to look to the future,’ he said. Well, it isn’t behind me. I’ll never forget those days.
  “It’s also true,” he adds, “that if no one wants to talk about something, then that’s probably the very thing you should be talking about.”
  Born in 1968 in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, McKinty grew up a child of the Troubles.
  “My memories of that time are so vivid that it was pretty easy coming up with material for the book,” he says. “For example, I used to get a lift to school from a neighbour who was a Major in the UDR. Every morning he would get down on his knees and check under his car for mercury-tilt bombs, and when he got the all-clear he would call my little brother, me and his son outside and we would get in the car and go to school. But then one day it was raining hard, and he decided just to skip it and called us out without checking under the car. Every week on the news you’d hear about a copper or a soldier, and sometimes their families, who were killed by a mercury-tilt device. So on that ride to school I literally thought I was going to die.”
  If you’re a writer, there are no such things as bad memories, only experiences to be retro-fitted for the sake of a story.
  “Of course,” he grins, “like the self-consuming novelist I am, I took the memory and put it in the book. But it was really an extraordinary time and the more I probed my own recollections, the more those gates opened. A lot of them were bad memories: the time I got knocked down by a police Land Rover in a hit-and-run, the fight I got into with a paramilitary hood and ended up with 18 stitches in my face, the time I planted a bullet in my sister’s handbag to see what would happen at a police checkpoint, our next door neighbour getting arrested for a triple homicide by seemingly half the British Army, bomb scares, bombs, riots … So, yeah, they sound like bad memories. But in many ways, they’re gold for a writer.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND centres on Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, who investigates a series of murders that appear to be the work of a killer taking advantage of the tensions created by the hunger strikes. As the name suggests, Sean Duffy is a Catholic. Why did McKinty, himself a Protestant, choose a Catholic RUC man for the hero of his book?
  “There were a couple of reasons,” he says. “I wanted Duffy to arrive in East Antrim as an outsider, and as an outsider he could cast a jaundiced eye on the toxic politics and culture of the area. And of course, I knew that as a Catholic Duffy would run right up against all the fault lines of the time, which would be tremendous material for a novelist. I grew up in a working class Protestant housing estate and I loved the idea of putting a cynical intellectual like Duffy in among those people. And as a Catholic copper, Duffy can never be completely comfortable in his own skin or in the company he keeps. His life is literally on the line every single day.
  “That he’s a Catholic in the RUC in 1981 would have been incredibly rare back then,” he says. “The IRA famously had a bounty on Catholic policemen and the RUC was completely distrusted by the Catholic community, so few joined. The force in that era would have been over 90% Protestant. So you’ve got a gifted but conflicted and fractured young man in a very hot-house environment.”
  McKinty has written six adult crime titles previous to THE COLD COLD GROUND (he also writes children’s fiction), but this is his first police procedural novel. Why the change in direction?
  “To be honest, I was never that enthused about the police procedural story,” he says, “but then I got to know Evan Hunter [Ed McBain] a little bit before he died, and I started reading his fantastic 87th precinct books and I gradually saw the possibilities of that type of book. What finally sold me was reading James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, which are fascinating takes on the procedural, and by then I knew that this was a genre I wanted to tackle.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND blends the police procedural with a serial killer storyline, a rare development in the Irish crime novel, which has seen very few serial killer stories published despite the recent boom in Irish crime fiction.
  Is this because, officially at least, we have no record of a serial killer operating in Ireland?
  “I don’t know about the South,” says McKinty, “but in the North, serial killers just get absorbed into the paramilitaries. I knew several clearly deranged individuals who were high ranking paramilitaries. The Shankhill Butchers and Michael Stone are just a couple of examples of psychopaths who probably would have been ordinary, everyday serial killers had they grown up in a non-sectarian society.”
  McKinty currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. Is it the case that he needed to travel to the other side of the planet before he could start writing about home?

  “I’m not sure I completely buy into this exilic notion that you have to leave a place to write about it,” says the author. “At the last stanza of TS Eliot’s Little Gidding, he says, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Perhaps, but William Faulkner did a pretty good job writing about Oxford, Mississippi while living in Oxford, Mississippi his entire life.”
  McKinty’s novels have been very well received to date, particularly, and unusually, as audio books. The Dead Year (2007) won the ‘Audie’ for Best Thriller / Suspense Novel, while Audible.com chose last year’s offering Falling Glass as the Best Mystery / Thriller of 2011.
  “That’s all down to the narrator, I think,” says McKinty. “If you can get a good narrator, you’re in like Flynn. I’ve been fortunate with Gerard Doyle, who is incredibly popular and much sought after. I’m pretty sure if I’d done a Le Carré or a Douglas Adams and narrated the books myself, it would have been a complete disaster.”
  THE COLD COLD GROUND is being touted as the first of a proposed trilogy, and McKinty is looking forward to exploring Northern Ireland in the 1980s through DS Duffy’s eyes.
  “I’ve got so much material about that time and place and there are many more interesting places the character can go,” he says. “I’d love to get him in some kind of confrontation with the Thatcher government, for example, or get mixed up in the DeLorean disaster, or any number of things. And of course, musically, we’ll eventually have to get to his difficult ‘New Romantic’ years …”

  THE COLD COLD GROUND by Adrian McKinty is published by Serpent’s Tail.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Brighton’s Rock

Peter James’ (right) latest novel, DEAD LIKE YOU, just went straight to No. 1 on the UK hardback fiction list. Not that he’s boasting, mind, although there is the small matter of the achievement preventing James Patterson from zipping straight to No. 1 for the first time in 10 years. Anyhoo, here’s an interview with Peter James from last weekend’s Sunday Independent, which kicks off thusly:

Do you know how much your body’s organs are worth? According to Peter James, in the hands of illegal organ traffickers, your parts are worth roughly one million dollars.
  The best-selling novelist is a man of many and diverse interests, including criminology, the paranormal and science. He’s also a movie producer who holds a racing driver’s licence. His late mother was glove-maker to the Queen. He once owned a Second World War bomber plane ...
  In short, James is an interesting man. Articulate, cultured and softly spoken, the 61-year-old divides his time between his homes in Notting Hill, London, and Brighton, which he shares with his partner, Helen.
  “Brighton’s great,” he says of the setting for the Roy Grace series of Dead novels. “I think a sense of place is as important as character. A lot of the great crime novels that I’ve admired, such as Rebus in Edinburgh, Hiaasen’s Miami, Ed McBain in New York, and so on, are very true to their setting. And Brighton for me is perfect ... For nine years running it was the ‘injecting drugs death capital’ of the UK. We lost it last year to Liverpool,” he grins disarmingly, “but we got it back this year.”
  James got his first writing break in 1971, on a pre-schoolers TV programme in Canada called Polka Dot Door. Despite subsequently writing and publishing three spy thrillers, however, commercial success eluded him.
  “The real tipping point for me,” he says, “was when I was pouring my heart out to a friend of mine, who was writing jacket blurb at Penguin. And she said, ‘Why are you writing spy thrillers?’ So I said, ‘Because I read somewhere there was a shortage.’ And she said, ‘You’ll never make money from writing something because you think it will pay. You have to write what you’re passionate about.’ That was the best advice I’ve ever had …”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: ‘The Story Of Crime’ by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Ten titles comprise The Martin Beck Mysteries, published between 1965 and 1975 and co-authored by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.
  The first six have been reissued (with fine cover designs by Gregg Kulick) by the aficionados of crime fiction at Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Press. This imprint also publishes Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, James M. Cain, Ross Macdonald, James Ellroy and Jim Thompson so you know where to go.
  These ten Martin Beck novels were influenced by Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series which started in 1956 – nine years before the first Beck Mystery. In MURDER AT THE SAVOY, the murderer mentions reading McBain’s TILL DEATH, so the authors were aware of McBain and acknowledging his role. The Beck Mysteries went deeper than the early McBain books through Beck’s greater interaction with the ensemble of police colleagues, through delineating Beck’s inner life and struggles in a more obvious and human way and through explicit social commentary (often scathing).
  The detailed plots and meticulous unravelling of clues meshed very well with the socialist dialectic of the Marxist authors and the narrative and integrity of the writing did not suffer. For example, in THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED, in reference to minor disturbances the previous summer of 1968:

“Instead they were handled by people who thought that Rhodesia was somewhere near Tasmania and that it is illegal to burn the American flag, but positively praiseworthy to blow your nose on the Vietnamese. These people thought that water cannons, rubber billy clubs and slobbering German shepherd dogs were superior aids when it came to creating contact with human beings …”

  The story never suffers from these polemics and even in MURDER AT THE SAVOY, which castigates big business, corruption and its fallout among ordinary citizens, the book is one of the most accomplished in the series - taut, rigorous and true.
  Henning Mankell, another Swede, is the natural inheritor of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s tradition. Mankell’s Inspector Wallander, an existential warrior battling crime and his own melancholia, closely resembles Beck.
  The Beck series used the Swedish weather to great effect - grey skies, rain, mist, sleet, snow, wind and hailstones and at the other extreme the scorching summers as a backdrop to the stories. The drab edifices of Stockholm’s public housing, the anonymous urban landscape, the ennui of the population and public servants, and the political and corporate corruption, is the milieu where Beck operates.
  The ten books are collectively known as The Story of Crime, comprising 300 chapters (30 chapters per book). They are all written with aplomb and honesty and set the standard for all police procedurals that followed. – Seamus Scanlon

“Whither The ATOM BOMB ANGEL?”: A Word Or Five From Peter James

I met with Peter James (right) at the Merrion Hotel last week, to interview him for the Sunday Independent, and a very pleasant lunch it was too. Beforehand, I was a little concerned he was one of these robo-writers – we all have our (koff) favourites – who write crime fiction because crime fiction readers are so dim they’ll read any old tat so long as there’s a corpse on every second page. As a matter of fact, Peter James was a charming interviewee – articulate, erudite, self-deprecating and charming, and passionate about the morality of crime fiction and a corresponding attention to detail.
  I don’t usually publish interview transcripts, but I had to leave out so much of the Peter James interview when I was writing it up for the Sunday Indo, and because I think Peter James has quite a lot of interesting things to say, I thought I’d put it up here. I’ve nipped and tucked here and there, but what appears below is roughly how it happened in real time. One other thing that’s delightful about Peter James as an interviewee – he needs very little prompting to get going. And once he gets going, he’s almost impossible to stop …
  I started by asking him about the first three novels he ever wrote, which he currently keeps out of print on the very noble principle that anyone who buys them won’t be getting their money’s worth. Will he ever make them available again, or can I just go ahead and steal the wonderful title, ATOM BOMB ANGEL?

“I think I might republish them some day, under ‘Vintage Cliché’, or something like that (laughs), with a warning on the front, ‘Read these at your own risk’. But I wrote those a long time ago. I’d always wanted to be a writer, this is going back to the ’70s, and I saw this article saying there was a shortage of spy thrillers. So I wrote this kind of pastiche, and to my amazement I got published. And then, to my amazement, it completely flopped (laughs). So I wrote two more … and they flopped too. I nearly gave up writing, I got very despondent.”
  “The real tipping point for me was when I was pouring my heart out to a friend of mine who was writing jacket blurb at Penguin. And I was saying, ‘How do earn a living at this?’ And she said, ‘Why are you writing spy thrillers?’ So I said, ‘Because I read somewhere there was a shortage.’ And she said, ‘You will not make money from writing something because you think it will pay. You have to write what you’re passionate about.’ That was the best advice I ever had. And around that time, the son of a very good friend was killed in an horrific car-crash. Afterwards, his parents started seeing a medium. Now, I’d always been interested in the paranormal, and they were absolutely convinced they were in touch with their son. Anyway, I went along to one of the séances, and decided that, whether or not they were in touch with him, they believe that. And I could see how people could take comfort in that. But then I thought, what if you went to a medium to contact your dead son, and discovered through the medium that he’d murdered his girlfriend?”
  “I’d always wanted to be a crime writer, right back when I was 12 and I read my first Sherlock Holmes story. And then I read Graham Greene’s BRIGHTON ROCK, and it just blew me away. Brighton was my home town … And I thought, One day I want to write a book that’s twenty percent as good as this. That was my dream. But I kept away from writing crime fiction for a long time, and then after POSSESSION I wrote a series of supernatural chillers, and I kept away from the [crime fiction] genre because of what I thought of as the very rigid conventions. You had to have a country house, with a library, and a dead body is discovered … Then I discovered the Americans. Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, and a whole world opened up. And then, about eight years ago, Macmillan asked if I’d ever considered writing a crime novel. And I just said, ‘Yes!’”
  “I had a great relationship with the police at that point. I’d been setting books in Brighton, and I’d been out with the police a lot. And I’d met one guy about 14 years before, who was then a detective inspector in Brighton. I remember going to his office and there were about 20 boxes, big crates, piled up in there. And I said, ‘Are you moving?’ And he said, ‘No, these are my dead friends.’ And I thought, okay, I’ve found the only weirdo in the Brighton police force (laughs). But he then explained that he was in charge of cold cases. They weren’t called cold cases back then, that’s a relatively recent term, but he said, ‘Each one of these crates holds the principal case files in an unsolved murder. I’m the last chance the victim has for justice and the last chance the family has for closure.’ And I loved that rather caring, quiet man alone with these ghosts who were depending on him. In creating Roy Grace I drew heavily on that. And I became very friendly with this guy, and we’re great mates today, he then became detective chief superintendent, and he’s really the role model behind Roy Grace.”
  “I spent a lot of time thinking hard about what would make him different. I like Rebus, but I didn’t want to copy Rebus. And I decided to stay away from the drunk, cynical … you know, the clichés. And about two years before I created him, I got taken with a group from Sussex Police to an organisation called the Missing Persons’ Helpline, an open day run by a charity which basically helps the police look for missing people. And I discovered that over 230,000 are reported missing every year in the UK. Now, most of those turn up within 30 days, but if they don’t turn up in 30 days, they’re not going to turn up. And there are over 11,000 at any one time permanently missing. It’s roughly 60,000 in America, it’s the same, pro rata, all around the Western world. And that’s a kind of a similar situation to an unsolved murder. You have people left behind wondering, Where are they? Are they under Fred West’s toolshed? Are they down in some Austrian cellar? Have they run off with a lover? Have they had an accident and never been discovered? Were they kidnapped by some lunatic? Have they changed their identity? And what detectives do is, they solve puzzles. That’s really what major crime solving is about, putting together the pieces. And I thought it would be interesting to have a detective have a personal puzzle of his own, one he can’t solve. And that was when I decided that, when we first meet Roy Grace, which is in DEAD SIMPLE, he’s got a wife, Sandy, who he loved and adored, but who, when he came home nine years earlier on his 30th birthday, wasn’t there, and he hasn’t seen or heard from her since. And that dogs his life.”
  “In the last book, DEAD MAN’S FOOTSTEPS, a character, right at the end of the book, is on a beach in South America, and is chatting to the woman next to her, who tells her that her name is Sandy. Now, you don’t have to know who she is to read the book, but in DEAD TOMORROW, Roy has his new love, Cleo, and she’s now pregnant. So he’s ready to move on, but the shadow of Sandy is actually starting to lengthen … The book I’m working on now, the sixth one, some of it is set ten years back, when Roy is still with Sandy, so we’re seeing life from her perspective too.”
  “I get really angry at the snobbery against the crime fiction genre. I mean, look at Shakespeare. If Shakespeare was writing today, he’d be writing crime fiction. Most of his plays feature a crime, or a trial. Dickens’ last novel was a crime novel. Dostoevsky. But you had the chair of the Booker prize, three years ago, saying that hell would freeze over before crime fiction would get short-listed. Well, I’m sorry, but I think the crime novel is the way to examine the world in which we live. I go out with the police once a week, and they see stuff, that aspect of human nature, that you’re just not going to get at a Hampstead dinner party. The police see the world warts and all, every possible facet, and the insights into human nature they get, whether it’s arresting an armed robber, or going into some godawful sink estate apartment where there’s a domestic going on … I mean, the police look at the world with what I call a healthy cultural suspicion. You and I, if we were to walk down Grafton Street, and saw two guys looking into a shop window, we’d think, they’re wondering what to buy. A cop looks at them and thinks, Why are they standing there? Are they about to kick off? Rob the shop? Do a drug deal?”
  “There’s a pub [the Chief Super and I] go to, the same pub every time, the same table every time (laughs), and we sit down and I go through the planned storyline, and he gives me his input. And he reads every book as I’m writing it, I send him every 100 pages, and then we discuss the police aspects of it. What I need for a particular situation, what procedure I need to follow … I’ve also got a young copper now too, he’s 28, he does the same thing for me. So I get the younger perspective too, and from a street police officer as well as a chief super. So anything I want to find out, I can. For instance, in DEAD TOMORROW, a dredger pulls a dead body up off the seafloor. So I’m wondering, what would the police do in a situation like that? Well, a police diver would go down to try to find the place where the body came from. So I contacted the diving unit – I’m kind of fairly well known at this stage – and they said, Why don’t you come out with us and we’ll do an exercise for you. So we actually went out, with a dummy called Eric, which actually replicates the human body, and chucked Eric overboard and recovered him. So I spent the day with the diving unit. And similarly, with the dredging ship … So pretty much everything that the police do in my books, I have experienced first-hand – car chases, surveillance, helicopter pursuits, I’ve been on two or three of those. For me it’s really important to get the details right. I get very irritated when reading, or more often seeing on television, people who get the details wrong. The classic example is Frost. I think some of the public must think that the reason SOCO officers wear white suits is that they don’t want to get dirty attending a crime scene. Because they’re all wearing their protective suits, and along comes David Jason with his big brogues and clumps all over the crime scene. The early Rebus did it too. I mean, the reason the SOCOs wear those suits is so they do not contaminate the crime scene. The first police officer at a murder, or a rape scene, his first job is to seal it off, with one exit-entry point. And it doesn’t matter if he’s the most junior police officer in the entire force, he is empowered to prevent anybody, including the Chief Constable, through that tape if they’re not wearing protective clothing. And it’s not just being fussy about detail for its own sake. I think if you get it right, then the story tends to come out better as well.”
  “For me, I could never write something that I hadn’t checked out, and didn’t know was accurate. That’s not the way I want my books to be perceived. And I always find that when I do the research … For example, I went out on the dredger ship for DEAD TOMORROW because I’d never been on a dredger. I didn’t even know a dredger brought up gravel for commercial purposes, I thought they just cleared harbours. And out of that experience came the idea for having the ship’s engineer as the husband of Caitlin’s mother, and gradually the characters started to come together. I really do find that the research tends to inform the story in ways I never expect. For example, DEAD MAN’S FOOTSTEPS was about a guy who fakes his disappearance in the wake of 9/11, and while I was researching it I got friendly with two New York cops, who’d been first on the scene on 9/11. And they became quite major characters in the story. And likewise, for the character of Caitlin’s mum, I wanted to have her working in a debt collection agency, but I didn’t know what that actually entailed. So I contacted a debt collection agency, and as it turned out I had a fan who worked there … (laughs). I just thought that, at the moment, given that the world is in financial crisis, that that would be interesting work to be doing, but how does it work? And I ended up going there and spending a couple of days, and asking questions, and realising that, yes, you could actually steal money from a place like that, if you knew what you were doing. And that turned out to be a very important aspect of her character.”
  “Brighton’s great. I think a sense of place is as important as character. A lot of the great crime novels that I’ve admired, such as Rebus in Edinburgh, Hiaasen’s Miami, Ed McBain in New York, and so on, are very true to their setting. And Brighton for me is perfect. I was born in Brighton, and Brighton’s been known as the Crime Capital of England since 1934. It’s the favourite place to live in England for first division criminals. It goes right back to the razor gangs of the ’30s, protection rackets … It’s got a seaport either side, the largest number of antique shops in the UK, it’s got the racecourse … It’s always had a seedy reputation as a weekend resort. And it does have this undertow of violence. It doesn’t have the kind of inner-city gun violence but it does have endemic criminality. For nine years running it was the ‘injecting drugs death capital’ of the UK. We lost it last year to Liverpool, but we got it back this year.”
  “In terms of how I work … I think, as I was saying earlier, it comes back to the relevance of the good crime writer to the world we live in. But I also tend to take the theme that intrigues me at the time. DEAD MAN’S FOOTSTEPS is about a man who uses 9/11 as an opportunity to fake his own disappearance and get out of debt. My previous novel, NOT DEAD ENOUGH, was about identity theft, which is the fastest-growing crime in the Western world. And with this book, its genesis came one night when I was out a dinner, and this woman was talking to me and she said, ‘Do you know how much you’re worth in bits?’ I said, ‘In bits?’ And she said, ‘In body parts.’ And the answer is about a million dollars. She then started telling me about how, since transplant technology has improved, the number of organ donors has actually decreased. The big irony is that less people are dying in car accidents, because people are now wearing seat-belts. The perfect donor is someone who dies in a car accident by hitting his head off the steering-wheel, leaving the organs intact. Motorcycle accidents are another good source. And she’d been trying to make a documentary about the growth in black market human organs, and she’d tied up with Médecins Sans Frontières. And they discovered that in Colombia, in some areas, the Colombian mafia make more money out of human body parts than they do from drugs. They sent two reporters to Colombia to investigate, and they got murdered. So she was scared off it, but she had all this research, and she said it was mine if I wanted to use it. So I started researching it, and discovered that Manila, for example, in the Philippines, is known as ‘One-Kidney Island’. For forty-five thousand pounds, you can go on holiday and get a new kidney. The Chinese are shooting prisoners, and selling the cadavers for a million-plus to Korea and Taiwan, or they’re harvesting the parts themselves. Places like Romania feed this part of the world …”
  “Wherever I go, I’ll always try to meet police officers from around the world. And I had to go to Moscow last year, for my Russian publishers. I asked if there was any chance of meeting any Russian police officers, so they introduced me to the Chief of Police for Central Moscow (laughs). But I got on really well with him, I ended up going out to dinner with him and about 15 of his colleagues. And his office is full of animal heads, wild boars and what have you, and he has invited me to spend four days hunting with him, at the beginning of September! I just could not say no to that …”
  “I’ve just always been fascinated by human nature, and human beings and why they do the things they do. And the crime genre gives me the chance to explore that to its fullest extent. I’m writing now about a rapist who takes his victims’ shoes, but oddly enough, before I decided to make that the theme … I met and became quite friendly with the governor of our local prison, and he’s a moderniser. He’s quite controversial, because in his prison, sex offenders and paedophiles are not segregated from other prisoners. And his view is that it’s almost politically correct to regard these people as somehow worse. I mean, I’ve been burgled, and it took me years to get over the horrible feeling. So I know what he means when he says that other crimes can destroy people’s lives just as much as a paedophile can. And rape is really interesting … The average clear-up rate for major crimes in the UK is 34%, and for murder, it’s 98%. Very few murderers end up getting away with it, because so much in the way of resources are thrown at it, and because a lot of the time, unless it’s committed by the member of a gang, most murders are committed by a member of family, or the murderer can’t live it. There are a lot of issues that go with it. The clear-up rate for rape, on the other hand, is under 4%. And women who’ve been raped, their lives are destroyed. So I’ve been reading a lot about the psychology of rapists, and the psychology of what happens to the victim, and why people rape … So, with each book, I’m interested in taking an issue, or an area of crime, that impinges on society, hopefully without being didactic.”
  “I do plan my books – perhaps because of my background in film – in terms of the three-act structure. I always think of three high-points as the basic guts of the book. And I do plan the ending, I must know the ending. It might change when I get to it, but I do need to have a vanishing point. And I plan the first 20% quite carefully. But I love the magic that happens, and I’m sure you know what I mean, as a writer, when something pops up that wasn’t originally intended. My best time for writing is six o’clock in the evening, a vodka martini, put on some music, and get in the zone. And then blitz until about ten at night. And when a character appears, who was not there 10 seconds ago, then wow … But then, that happens to me in almost every book.”

  Peter James’s DEAD TOMORROW is published by Macmillan.