The real cops behind our LIFE OF CRIME

Where might a dead body wash up? How many years would a schoolboy killer get? Five best-selling thriller writers have a confession to make: they wouldn’t have a clue without their secret police contacts....

PETER JAMES

The author’s Roy Grace detective novels have sold more than 17 million copies worldwide. His latest, You Are Dead, is out now. The next in the series, Love You Dead, is published on May 19. My path to David Gaylor, the inspiration and role model for the fictional character of Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, began 30 years ago when I was burgled and subsequently became friends with the young detective who dusted my house for fingerprints. Knowing I was midway through writing a thriller involving police officers, he told me: ‘There’s this quirky detective you might like to meet...’

I first encountered David in Sussex Police Force’s headquarters. All I could see was his head above a sea of blue and green crates and brown manila folders. I assumed he was moving offices. ‘No,’ he said. ‘These are my dead friends.’ He explained that he was reviewing all the unsolved murders in Sussex. ‘I am each victim’s last chance for justice, and the family’s for closure,’ he told me, and I knew in that instant I’d found an extraordinary policeman.

He began by helping me with the policing aspects of my next three thrillers as well as their plot lines. Then my publisher asked if I would like to create a homicide officer as a central character. I asked David, by then a detective chief superintendent, how he would feel about becoming a fictional cop. He loved the idea, so Roy Grace shares David’s dress sense, his love of good food and even his passion for collecting inkwells. However, unlike Grace, David doesn’t have a missing wife!

When we start a new book together. We meet in a country pub called The Ginger Fox, take the same table, open a new black Moleskine notebook and work through a basic plot and the high points of the next story. I do a rough treatment and David reads it and comes back with his comments.

We’ve become good friends in real life; he was best man at my second wedding and spends a good deal of time at my house.

An amazing 17 million Roy Grace books have been sold, giving me nine consecutive No.1 bestsellers. It would not have been possible without David, so I count the day I met him as one of the luckiest of my life. There, that’s a confession for you.

LYNDA LA PLANTE

The author and screenwriter created Prime Suspect and Jane Tennison as well as other global bestselling books including the Anna Travis novels. Tennison, the prequel to Prime Suspect, is out now. I have always immersed myself in the worlds inhabited by the detectives I create. It doesn’t matter if that takes me to a prison, a mortuary, a brothel or a crown court, I strive for authenticity and accuracy when writing about police, forensic and legal procedures. Countless officers, scientists and lawyers helped over the years. I respect them and what they do and in turn I believe they respect me for portraying the reality of their work.

For my novel Tennison, I spoke to female officers who were probationers in the Seventies just like the young Jane Tennison. They told me how they ate their fish and chip suppers surreptitiously from under their old-fashioned police capes and had to keep spare hairbands and tights at work to ensure they were smart in case of a death knock. They revealed the male chauvinism they encountered in their daily lives and spoke candidly about the dreadful crime they encountered. Theirs are the stories that