Peter James

​In Dead in Three Two One, Brighton Pride becomes the backdrop to something terrifying. What interested you about placing such a dark story against one of the city’s biggest celebrations?

Well, partly I’d never written anything about Pride before, and it’s the biggest Pride in the country. Half a million people come in, and I thought if a criminal wanted to commit a really dark criminal act, Pride would be the best weekend of the year to choose because all the police resources are fully tied up with protecting Pride.

But the idea for the book actually goes back years. I read Arthur Hailey’s novel Hotel, which he wrote in the 1960s, and it blew me away because he’d done such great research. It was about a tired old grand hotel in New Orleans, with an elderly owner who wouldn’t spend any money, and all the big chains circling like vultures. There’s a young, ambitious manager, a career burglar who’s systematically robbing the rooms, and an aristocratic couple who’ve killed somebody in a hit-and-run and are hiding out in the hotel. You also know the hotel’s biggest elevator is going to come crashing down at some point, so you’ve got that ticking clock. But against all that, you really get to know how a hotel works. You get inside the minds of the manager, the owner, the elevator operator and restaurant staff. I thought, wow, if you want to be a successful writer, you’ve got to really do your research. And I always wanted to write a book that, in a way, emulated that one.

Of course, in Brighton we’ve got the history of the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel, and that story has always struck me. Patrick Magee checked into the hotel under a false name several weeks before the Conservative Party conference, with the intention of planting a bomb that would kill Margaret Thatcher. The bomb went off in the early hours of the morning, killing five people and terribly injuring others. Thatcher survived because she was still working rather than being in the part of her suite that was devastated.

In the police investigation afterwards, they went through the guest register and phoned people who’d stayed there. The calls went something like, “Hello, can we speak to Carl Marsh, please?” And the wife might answer, “No, he’s not here. Can I help?” Then the police would say they were asking about his stay at the Grand Hotel in September, and she’d say, “No, he was fishing with his friends!” Apparently, that caused eight divorces! After that, the police changed the way they operated. I’d always had this scenario in my mind of an old enemy of Roy Grace who knows Roy and his wife are going to be staying in a hotel in a week’s time, and wants to check into their room and plant a bomb.

“I really love sitting down and creating stories and characters.”

I wanted to ask you about the villain, Dritan Dervishi. He arrives at the Royal Courteney Hotel with a very specific plan. What makes someone who has patiently planned revenge more frightening than somebody acting on impulse?

I think, from a writing standpoint, if you have somebody who’s got a clear plan and is following through with it, it’s really close to giving you a narrative. I always think it’s kind of fun in writing thrillers to have a kind of ticking clock, so the reader can start feeling, “Oh my God, I know what might be going to happen, and it’s getting closer and closer.” Whereas if it’s just a spontaneous act of violence, you can’t get that tension in the same way.

Roy Grace has been with you for more than two decades. Is there something about him you understand now that you didn’t when you first created him?

Gosh, that’s a really good question. I think there is. One of the things I’ve tried to do with the Roy Grace series is show how police officers change during the course of their careers. They’re impacted by everything they see. I think the statistic is that most people, like you and me, might experience four major traumas in our lives if we’re unlucky. A police officer, I think, might experience something more like 400.

We forget that police officers are no different from us. They’re normal human beings. I remember a police commissioner once saying that police and other emergency service workers are ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and that it does affect their lives. A police officer goes to a terrible accident or a terrible murder, and maybe there’s a child of two who’s been murdered. Then they go home and have to bathe their own two-year-old, put them to bed and read them a story. I’ve seen police officers slowly change. They get hardened. I think their view of human nature gets darker, because not many people go to a police officer because they’re happy. So I’ve tried to show Roy being a very effective homicide detective, but at the same time, he’s had his own family troubles. His wife Sandy vanished, and he didn’t know for nine years what had happened to her. He’s suffered terrible personal losses, including the death of a son and a miscarriage in his family. I try really hard to portray police officers as human beings rather than some smart Alec in a suit or a uniform.

“I had to rewrite half the book because of that.”

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Peter James

Dead in Three Two One

Read the Roy Grace thriller at the heart of this interview, set in Brighton during Pride weekend.

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Has Roy ever developed in a direction you weren’t expecting?

I would say several times, yes. I work very closely with the police, and I’ve studied their work, gone out on patrol and done ride-alongs for 40 years now. He does occasionally surprise me, and I guess I use him slightly as my own mouthpiece too. I’ve had some very upsetting personal experiences involving hospitals, including when my stepdaughter was admitted at the age of 14, and those feelings have come out through Roy. I remember writing a scene where one of his officers is quite badly injured when a stolen van crushes her. Roy goes storming into the hospital, demanding this, that and the other, and I thought, yeah, I love it!

One thing I try to do when I write is have two converging stories. I often start with two completely different storylines, and I love getting my readers to think, “How are they going to converge?” When I was researching the new book, I actually spent a day as a uniformed concierge at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. I got a five-pound tip!

No way!

Yeah! I was standing behind the concierge desk, and this couple were handling their bags. So I stepped out, took the bags, carried them out and put them in the boot of the car. The man shook my hand, and I felt this crinkly sensation in it. I thought, okay, if the writing doesn’t work out, one day I’ll have another career!

I learned so much from the research. I remember talking to a restaurant manager at one of the hotels, and he said hotel staff are always observing the guests. He told me that if you go into a hotel at breakfast time, you’ll see couples sitting there, some on their phones, some reading newspapers, and only a few talking to each other. He said, “You’ll know if they’re talking to each other: either they’re newlyweds, or they’re having an affair.” It’s like that great line that if a man opens the car door for a lady, it’s either a new lady or a new car. I also asked a hotel manager whether he liked having long-stay guests. I thought it would be good, steady income, but he said, “No, hate them.” He said they become nuisances. They stop the hotel from renting the entire place out to a company for a conference, and after a few years they start becoming proprietorial. They sit in the bar and hold court, upsetting the other guests because they think the hotel isn’t like it was when they first came.

I thought it would be fun to have an elderly lady who’s just turned 90. Her husband died 15 years ago, and she’s checked into the Royal Courteney Hotel in Brighton, in the most expensive suite. She’s got two children, a son who’s had two failed businesses and a daughter who’s gone through a horrible divorce and is short of money. Both think, “Mummy is burning through our inheritance.” So they enlist the services of a bent solicitor and a struck-off doctor to try to bring about Mummy’s demise, and the two storylines slowly converge.

“I’m fascinated by human nature and why people do the things they do.”

When you mention long-term guests, it reminds me of Fawlty Towers, with the Major living at the hotel.

Absolutely! Very much so, because they tend to be elderly and quite often cantankerous.

You’re meticulous with your research, but when you’re researching murder and the darkest sides of human behaviour, does it make you more suspicious of people, or has it actually made you more understanding?

That’s a really good question. I think over the years I’ve absorbed, almost by osmosis, that police mantra, ABC: assume nothing, believe nobody, check everything. I’ve definitely become much more wary. As a teenager, I think I was quite naive. I’m fascinated by human nature and why people do the things they do.

I do a lot of talks in prisons because I’m an ambassador for The Reading Agency. I try to encourage literacy in prisons because it’s a big indictment of our education system that so many prisoners have such poor reading skills. So I give talks, try to encourage them to read and write, and answer questions. But the quid pro quo for me is that I then get to mingle with the prisoners afterwards. Quite often I’m doing talks in high-security prisons, and I’m always fascinated by the faces. As I’m doing a talk, I look at each one and think, “What are you in for?” And I always try to tease it out.

I think my favourite character, who became a character in one of my books, came from a talk I gave in a women’s prison about ten or twelve years ago. At the time, some very notorious prisoners were there, including Rosemary West and Anne Darwin. One woman in the audience was very well-spoken, smartly dressed, and asked me quite searching questions about Dickens, Thackeray, Hemingway, and Faulkner. I thought, I’m getting out of my depth here! And I wondered what she was in for because she seemed so posh. I made a beeline for her at the end. I never say, “What have you done?” I have an icebreaker. I said, “How much longer do you have to go?” She glared at me and said, “Nine and a half more bloody years, and it’s just not fair. There’s a woman in London who’s done exactly what I did, and she’s only got six more years.”

I asked what had brought her there, and she said, “I poisoned my mother-in-law, the old bag.” She explained that her mother-in-law had gone into hospital and was expected to die, so she’d embezzled money from her bank account. But the woman recovered and came home. She realised she’d find out what had happened, so she decided to poison her. Then she thought her husband would find out, so she decided to poison him too. And she kept saying how unfair her sentence was because this other woman had done exactly the same thing and got less time. She seemed completely unable to grasp the enormity of what she’d done. Her husband had survived but had permanent brain damage. I thought, “You have to become a character.” So I created a character called Jodie Besley, a black widow who targets rich elderly men, marries them and then poisons them.

“I got a five-pound tip.”

I’ve served in the military myself, and I know how frustrating it can be when television or fiction gets procedures completely wrong. What’s the one thing crime dramas repeatedly get wrong about real policing that drives you mad?

That’s a very easy one! There are so many things, and we try really hard in the Grace television series to get it right, because I know so many police officers. I’m sure, as ex-military, you’re like them and shout at the screen when things are wrong.

The one that makes me shout at the screen every time is when there’s a dead body lying somewhere. Take Broadchurch. There’s a child lying at the bottom of the cliff, there’s a crime scene tent around him, and then David Tennant, the senior investigating officer, walks straight up in his suit and brown shoes. When police go to a crime scene, they have to wear protective clothing. If the first police officer on the scene finds a murder victim, their first job is to protect the crime scene. They tape it off, create a single path to it, and that officer is then empowered to let nobody, and I mean nobody, not even the chief constable, through if they’re not wearing full protective clothing. It’s not to protect them. It’s to stop their hair, skin cells and clothing fibres from contaminating the crime scene. And television and film so often ignore that. I do know that sometimes they have issues with actors who say, “I’m not going to put that white suit on.” But you wouldn’t have a crime scene with everybody standing there in their day clothes.

You see it a lot in American shows and films, don’t you? I’m sitting there thinking, “What the fuck?” I suppose they want the famous actor’s face on screen, but it drives me nuts.

It’s very true, and I’ve heard stories of actors refusing to put the suits on because they say it’ll hide them. The other thing is when they say, “Can we get the DNA back from the lab, please? It’s two o’clock now, so we should have it by four.” It’s not going to happen!

Has a police officer ever corrected something in one of your manuscripts that’s completely surprised you?

Oh yes. I’ve now got a reputation with the police as the guy who gets it right, and I get lots of letters and emails about that. But in the early days, I made mistakes. I started going out with the police back in the 1980s, after I’d written my first two books, which were pretty bad spy novels. We got burgled, and a detective saw the books and suggested I could do with some research help from the police. That’s how it all started.

In 1997, I met a young detective inspector named David Gaylor, who became my real-life Roy Grace. We’ve worked together on every Roy Grace novel, and he helps me enormously with getting the police aspects right. When I first met him, he asked what I was writing, and I said I was halfway through a psychological thriller called Denial. He told me to explain the plot. So I started telling him, and he kept saying, “A detective wouldn’t have done that. Why haven’t you got an outside inquiry looking at this? You’ve got this completely wrong.” One of the big mistakes I’d made was having a house where a murder had been committed, but the family were still living there. He said, “There’s no way. If a murder were committed in your house, you’d have to be in a hotel or staying with friends for several days until we’d completed our examinations.” I had to rewrite half the book because of that.

“I always think it’s kind of fun in writing thrillers to have a kind of ticking clock.”

But that’s part of what makes the books so good. You might make a mistake, but you work through it and make it better. And readers who know about these things will spot it, won’t they?

I think readers are intelligent. Anyone who reads a book can tell immediately if an author knows what they’re writing about or doesn’t. It comes off the page in a sort of alchemy.

Of all the real investigations and detectives you’ve encountered, what’s the most extraordinary true story you’ve heard that you’ve never dared put into a novel?

One of the most horrific, which I haven’t put into a novel yet, although I did write about it in a non-fiction book, is one of the worst murders we’ve had in Sussex, apart from the IRA bombing. It happened in the 1980s, and it involved a man called Paul Teed. His father and stepmother ran a sailing club that also doubled as a drinking club, and he decided to try to bring his inheritance forward. He knew his father and stepmother would be out drinking one evening, and he lay in wait for them. He bludgeoned them to death with a baseball bat. He also killed his young half-brother, who woke up, and the family dog. He very, very nearly got away with it.

I actually met him 23 years later, when he came out of prison. I went somewhere with a senior police officer and talked to him. It was mesmerising as well as chilling, Carl. I remember saying, “What was going through your mind when you were doing this?” He said, “What happens in there is between me and God.” I haven’t written that story into a novel because it’s so gruesome. I love writing dark thrillers, but there’s a borderline between writing entertainment and writing something that would really shock people. I like to try, when I can, to stay on the side of entertaining.

“I think it’s made me realise the importance of living in the moment.”

You’ve sold more than 23 million books and won just about every honour a crime writer could hope for. You’ve also received an OBE this year, haven’t you? Congratulations! But what still frightens you when you sit down to begin a new novel?

I’ve got an OBE for services to literature and charity, which was amazing. But every time I start a new book, I think, “Well, I got away with it last time. They’re going to find out finally that I’m not actually that good.” I sit there looking at that blank page, and I type “Chapter One”, and I think, “This is going to be the one that falls flat.”
But I love it. I think that’s a big part of it. I really love sitting down and creating stories and characters. People ask me, “Are you going to retire one day?” And I say, “Well, no, because if I retired, I’d just write a book, so it’s not much fun!”

Exactly! Although you could always get that concierge job!

Yeah! One of the concierges at the Royal Courteney in Dead in Three Two One was a dentist. He didn’t want to be a dentist anymore, so he changed careers. Not retirement. He was only in his early forties.

Queen Camilla has described Roy Grace as a favourite fictional detective. What’s been the most surreal moment of having somebody from the Royal Family become such an enthusiastic reader?

It’s been amazing. I think meeting her on occasions has been extraordinary. My last book, The Hawk Is Dead, is set around a murder initially involving the Royal Train and then Buckingham Palace. I did a three-and-a-half-hour tour behind the scenes at Buckingham Palace, down in the basement and up on the rooftops. But I think the most surreal moment was when I actually made the King and Queen real characters in the book. I thought it wouldn’t feel authentic to call them King Bert and Queen Doris.

I’d written a scene where the Royal Train is derailed in a tunnel just north of Brighton. The Queen helps get her entourage off the train, and as they come out of the tunnel, a member of the Royal Household standing next to her is shot by a sniper. Because it’s in Sussex, Roy Grace is immediately involved, and everybody thinks it’s a failed assassination attempt on Queen Camilla. But Grace says “No, the sniper missed by four feet. A professional sniper might miss by four inches, but not four feet”. Everybody thinks he’s wrong, and the King demands to see him. I’ve got this scene where King Charles stands up in his office, very indignant, shoves both hands in his pockets and says, “Grace, are you a madman? Of course my wife is the target!” A member of the Royal Household was reading the book and emailed me the next day to say, “That scene, no, no, no. King Charles doesn’t ever put one hand in his pocket.” So I was getting wonderful details like that.

Then, when we were editing the book, I thought, I’ve put all kinds of words into their mouths. There’s a scene where they’re having breakfast and the Queen feeds the dog toast under the table, which she’d helped me with. I thought, I’ve got to make sure she’s happy with it. We had my publisher print an early proof and bind it beautifully, with gold lettering and 001 on it. I had it hand-delivered to Clarence House with a message saying, “Your Majesty, this is the only copy in existence. We’re starting work on the proofs, and if there’s anything you don’t like, now is the time we can make changes.”

I had an agonising week. I thought, “Oh my God, what if she hates it and tells me I can’t publish it?” Finally, I got summoned to Clarence House, and I didn’t sleep the night before. I literally didn’t sleep. I arrived there in the afternoon, and she came striding across towards me with a big smile on her face. She said, “I absolutely love it.” And I said, “Is there anything you’d like me to change?” She said, “Not one word.” That was a pretty surreal moment.

“I love to write dark thrillers, but there’s kind of a borderline between writing entertainment and writing something that would really kind of shock people.”

After all these years exploring how people die, has writing crime fiction changed the way you think about living?

Yes, I think it has. I think it’s made me realise the importance of living in the moment. My wife and I love animals. We have a huge menagerie, and over the years we’ve had alpacas, pygmy goats, giant tortoises and all kinds of creatures. Our day starts with walking our dogs and then feeding the menagerie. You give a handful of popcorn to a pig, and it trots off, finds a ray of sunshine, sits down and lies in it. And that’s its day, and it’s perfectly happy. I think we sometimes have such complicated lives, which can end at any moment, and we should really try harder to be nice to other people and make the most of whatever we have.

I like that. We’ve got four horses, four dogs and a cat, so I know what you mean. Sometimes I prefer animals to people, Peter!

Definitely!

It was great to talk to you, Carl. And thank you for being in the military as well.

Peter James’s latest Roy Grace thriller, Dead in Three Two One, is published by Macmillan.

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Peter James

Dead in Three Two One

Read the Roy Grace thriller at the heart of this interview, set in Brighton during Pride weekend.

Find the book on Amazon ↗ View the Audible offer ↗

For the royal story, find The Hawk Is Dead on Amazon.

Daniel Weyman reads the audiobook. The Audible button opens the general membership offer. Search Audible for Dead in Three Two One and check Amazon for eligibility and terms.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. I also earn commission on eligible Audible sign-ups.

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Interview by Carl Marsh

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Peter James

Dead in Three Two One

Hear the Roy Grace thriller from this interview, read by Daniel Weyman.

View the Audible offer ↗

Opens the general Audible membership offer. Search Audible for Dead in Three Two One. See Amazon for current eligibility and terms.

Prefer to read? Find the book on Amazon ↗

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. I also earn commission on eligible Audible sign-ups.