thrilling reads to give you the summer chills
CRIME writer Peter Robinson is happy to be back in the UK as he celebrates the 25th novel in his hugely successful DCI Banks series.
The Yorkshire-born author can’t quite believe the anniversary, and admits it’s become more difficult to think of new plots for his famous detective, brought to life by Stephen Tompkinson in the popular TV adaptation (pictured), and his sidekick DS Annie Cabbot, played by Andrea Lowe.
“In the last few books, I’ve looked more towards stories that are in the news than I did previously,” Peter explains.
“It becomes more difficult, simply because you use up material with each book.”
The award-winning writer now lives in Toronto, Canada, but also has a cottage in Richmond, Yorkshire. He emigrated in 1974 and for years only wrote poetry and created Inspector Banks to stave off his homesickness for Yorkshire.
“At night, I would write crime just to relax. Before crime fiction, I was writing poetry and had a part-time teaching job, which was enough to get by.”
His wife, Sheila, a lawyer who he met in Canada after giving a talk on writing at a school her son attended, is the first person who sees each new book – and his latest, Careless Love, was no exception.
It’s the first book in his first trilogy, beginning with two suspicious deaths – a university student discovered in an abandoned car on the Yorkshire moors and a well-dressed man found in wild moorland, partially devoured by animals.
“One of the plots involves an old adversary of Banks and Annie’s who escaped and they get some information that he’s around again,” he explains.
“That strand’s going to run through the next two books as well.”
He admits advances in forensic science have made the job of the crime writer more difficult.
“I sometimes wish that I were writing books set in a period before DNA and the internet. It does get very complicated because you have to try to keep up with things.”
His work reached a greater audience thanks to the DCI Banks TV series, which ran from 2010-16, but there are no plans for its return.
Peter says he feels sad the storylines veered completely away from the original books.
“They got a little bit lost there. In the last series, they killed off Annie, one of the major characters. I’ve had emails about that, saying, ‘How could you do that?’ And I have to explain: ‘I didn’t do it – she’s still alive in the books!’
“I knew they were going to kill her off but they didn’t want my input. I think it helped to bring about the end, but it had been a good series.
“I thought Stephen was excellent as Banks, when I got used to the idea of him not particularly looking like my idea of the character. And Andrea was great as Annie.
“There were so many books that they hadn’t done. But one of the problems was that the plots were too complex,” he adds.
Peter, 68, loves catching up with friends at home and getting a blast of the Yorkshire Dales. He often bumps into pals, including Ian Rankin, Michael Connolly, Mark Billingham and Ann Cleeves, on the crime-writing festival circuit.
“We don’t talk about crime, we just complain about publishers,” he says with a chuckle. And he reveals that when he’s writing, he sometimes scares himself.
“Writing Aftermath was one of the spookiest ones, researching killer couples such as the Wests and Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and trying to assume that perspective to some extent,” he says.
“Part of the reason for writing that kind of book is maybe to try to make sense of how those things can happen. I don’t think I ever made sense of it, but you can frighten yourself sometimes, in the sense that you can give yourself a few bad dreams.”
And he reveals: “My biggest fears are political, in the sense of Trump and some of the European populist right-wing governments that we’re getting. In Canada, we’re fairly lucky. Canadians are pretty moderate.”
For now, Peter has no intention of returning to the UK permanently, or of retiring. Completing the trilogy will take at least another couple of years, he reckons.
“Writers don’t usually retire, do they? I’ve still got a way to go to that and, as long as I can do it, I’ll keep on doing it.”