I can’t expect my books to remain in a state of Grace forever
Novels should reflect their times, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be updated to account for our changing tastes, insists crime author Peter James, as he finally reveals the truth about what became of his legendary Brighton cop’s missing wife...
ROY Grace author Peter James has revealed his earliest books are being re-edited to ensure they remain acceptable to modern readers. The bestselling author of the Brighton-set detective series – adapted by ITV as Grace, starring John Simm as the dogged cop – has also written 23 standalones since his 1981 debut, spy thriller Dead Letter Drop.
Talking about his backlist undergoing a “sensitivity read” as it is known, Peter insisted it was “pragmatic” to keep abreast of current views, but conceded it could be a tricky issue, as novels naturally reflect the times in which they are written.
“Some of my very early standalone books are being completely re-edited,” he explained. “They’ve been withdrawn to be revised. If you’re a dead writer, everything can stand still, but if you’re a living writer the public expects you to be continually responsible for everything you’ve written in the past as well as what you’re writing now.
“It’s not altogether outrageous. I have two views: the first is that books are of their time and language and content reflect that.
“For instance, it’s interesting to look back at a book written in the 1980s and see how different attitudes to something like male chauvinism are now. If you update them too much, you risk losing that sense of the period. But we’ve rightly moved on when it comes to many social issues and it’s entirely reasonable that some of the language of 40 years ago might not now be acceptable today. So there’s a balance to be struck, it’s pragmatic to keep an open mind.”
Along with the introduction of so-called “trigger warnings” on film, TV and books – used to denote potentially distressing material – the issue of editing to remove content that could be deemed offensive has proved highly controversial in recent years.
There was an angry backlash last year and claims of censorship after it emerged that hundreds of changes had been made to the beloved children’s books of Roald Dahl, who died in 1990 aged 74.
Among others, the “Cloud-Men” in James and the Giant Peach had become “Cloud People”; “You’ve gone white as a sheet!” in The BFG had been changed to “You’ve gone still as a statue!”; and the word “fat” had been entirely exorcised from every book.
The revelations sparked an outcry from, among others, the Prime Minister, Steven Spielberg and Queen Camilla, of whom more later, who told a gathering of authors at her book club: “Please remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination.”
PETER, 75, condemns such “posthumous editing” entirely. “The fact people read means they’re intelligent and intelligent people don’t like to be patronised,” he says. “If you pick up a Roald Dahl book, you expect to read the language of the time. It’s dangerous to edit history.
“They used to joke about the Soviet Union being the only country where the past was less predictable than the future, but we’re getting that way too if we’re going to start editing every book. It’s dangerous.
“And who’s not to say that in another 20 years things will be different again? But there’s a difference between making the odd tweak so someone reading a Roy Grace book isn’t offended, and a major re-edit as happened with Dahl where, in some cases, they were radically changing the books and inserting new lines.
“My favourite author is Graham Greene and some of the language in his books would make people cringe, but that’s how it was.” I wonder if, given all this, Peter has given much thought to his own legacy? He has, by my count, published 43 novels, and at least two non-fiction books, since 1981 – an incredible output of slightly more than one a year. “Not really,” he chuckles. “If you look back at writers who’ve stood the test of time like Charles Dickens, he was very much a chronicler of his era but he also wrote great characters. I think it’s great characters that will endure the longest.
“In the crime genre, you’ve got Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie who are still read widely, and loads of others have fallen off the radar despite being really good. It would be lovely to think I’d still be read in 100 years’ time.
“But we’re very much a neophiliac society – we like new things all the time.And you’ve got to wonder if people will even be reading in 100 years’ time?” One can only hope so. And the fabulously prolific author – “If I retired, I’d only write a book,” he jokes – certainly deserves to endure.
Today we’ve met in a stunning restaurant, Perch, on the end of Worthing Pier, in the West Sussex seaside town where the author has a flat, to talk about his astonishing 44th novel, They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s
Story. It’s fair to say it’s the book many of Peter’s fans have been waiting nearly two decades for, since it wraps up a plotline begun in the very first Grace book in
2005, Dead Simple – the mystery of the murder detective’s long-lost wife. “I wanted to create a detective who had a personal puzzle he was unable to solve,” explains Peter. “Roy Grace is a very effective homicide detective, great at solving other people’s puzzles, but he can’t solve his own. I thought I’d set the mystery up in the first book, Dead Simple, then reveal what happened in the second book.
“So when we first meet Roy, we learn that his wife Sandy, who he loved, adored and worshipped, vanished on his 30th birthday. When he came home, she was gone. “And for nine years he’s been looking for her. He doesn’t know if she was murdered, ran off with
another person, took her own life, suffered an accident…”
In fact, it is as if she disappeared off the face of the earth. But when Dead Simple was published, Peter, who also has a home in Jersey with wife, Lara, and a menagerie of animals, was inundated with emails and letters from readers speculating on what might have happened to the missing Sandy.
“I thought, ‘We can keep this going’,” he smiles. “I think as a writer you can have fun with your readers as long as ultimately you’re honest with them. I seeded a little bit of information up until book 14, when I gave the big reveal that she was in Germany.
“They even passed on a moving walkway at one point. Roy bends down and she’s gone and they didn’t see each other. I kept getting emails from readers saying, ‘Why don’t you tell us the real story’. So with this book, I’ve written the real story.”
Typically, They Thought I Was Dead is a brilliantly fast-paced thriller with more twists and turns than a Tour de France descent. No doubt it’ll be eagerly read by fans, including perhaps his most famous.
Peter, whose research involves frequent patrols with the police and meetings with criminal justice professionals, got a pleasant surprise during lockdown when the then Duchess of Cornwall was photographed working from her delightfully cluttered, homely study at Birkhall in Aberdeenshire.
Mementoes, photographs and letters jostled for space with a jumble of pens, papers and cards. But it was Camilla’s “shelfie” – the image of her packed book shelves – that attracted most attention. Among the hardbacks on display were several of Peter’s distinctive thrillers.
Having first met when he chaired the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate in 2016, the author and the Queen have remained in touch, sharing warm letters.
“When she started her online book club in 2021, now called The Queen’s Reading Room, I was one of the early guests on it,” says Peter. “She came down to interview me on the set of Grace. Jokingly, I said, ‘Maybe you’d like to be an extra’, and she replied, ‘I could be a dead body’. What’s amazing is so often you get high-profile people fawning over movie stars or rock stars. Camilla is one of the first really high-profile people in the world who is championing authors. I always send her an early copy and she inevitably replies with a warm, chatty letter.”
Her Majesty’s backing of authors and reading is clearly important.
“The Queen’s Reading Room recently commissioned a survey on brain activity. If you just read for five minutes a day, there are huge benefits,” says Peter. “Yet the mass of humans have really only been reading for the last 100 years since the invention of the paperback. I do worry that young people are replacing reading with things like TikTok and we really don’t know what the impact will be long-term.”
Although he is not involved, Peter’s family firm makes handmade gloves for royalty, a business founded by his late mother Cornelia and now run by his sister, Genevieve. Having met the late Queen Elizabeth II at a reception in 2012 for the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, he was pleased to see her wearing a pair.
“There were loads of writers there but by sheer luck I found myself face to face with the Queen on our own,” he recalls. “I asked her what she liked to read. She said, ‘I don’t have time because I have all these red boxes. If I get a moment, I like [Rudyard] Kipling’.”
TALKING of anniversaries, next year will be Roy Grace’s 20th birthday – and the 21st book, not including the latest, is due in the autumn, titled One Of Us Is Dead. It opens with a funeral, says Peter, to whet our appetite, where a man is shocked to see a bloke at whose funeral he gave the eulogy. Meanwhile, ITV has just started shooting series five of its critically acclaimed Grace adaptation covering books 12 to 16, with a fourth due this autumn.
“They’re catching up. I’m going to have to write faster,” says Peter. Does he envision a time when the series will be overtaking the books, then? “That’s exactly what I think is going to happen, which I’m delighted about.
“I’ll work closely with them – that’s the plan if the series continues.”
In the meantime, Peter is due to return as a special guest to the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in the North Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate in July, chaired this year by crime writer Ruth Ware and supported by the Express. He can’t wait.
“It feels like the spiritual heart of British crime writing. The epicentre is the Old Swan Hotel where Agatha Christie famously disappeared to and it’s a festival of real passion,” he says. “The Hay Festival took root because it’s such a nice place to visit and Harrogate is the same. It’s a human-sized town. Also, unlike most festivals, Harrogate only has one event at a time so it’s much fairer to writers and visitors. You don’t have to miss anyone.”
Before we leave, we return once again to Sandy’s Story and I wonder aloud if Peter ever considered revealing that Roy himself bumped off Sandy. Unlikely as it might sound, it would’ve provided a shocking twist. Never for a moment, he insists.
“I always joke that if I was unlucky enough to have a murder in my family, I’d want Roy Grace to investigate it,” he adds. “I always wanted him to be the good guy.
“There’s a great Raymond Chandler quote I love to paraphrase, ‘A true hero is a man who walks down mean streets who is not himself mean’. That’s Roy Grace.”
●They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story, by Peter James (Macmillan, £22) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25. For bookings and details on the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, call 01423 562 303 or visit harrogateinternationalfestivals.com