Show 20: the thriller author on his latest novel, Not Dead Enough
Crime writer and film producer Peter James was born in Brighton in 1948. He is the son of a Jewish refugee who became a glove-maker to the Queen. He was educated at Charterhouse School and then went on to Ravensbourne Film School, funding himself by working as a cleaner for Orson Welles and earning ten shillings an hour.
Following a couple of years in Canada and the United States working as a screen writer and film producer, he got his first break whilst working as a runner on a TV show for pre-schoolers by stepping into the writer’s shoes at the last minute. He went on to write science programmes, focusing on computing and space exploration.
Whilst living in Toronto in the early 1970s he made a number of low-budget horror films and started a film production company which became Canada’s largest independent film company. He sold it for £8 million, o fortune that he subsequently lost by guaranteeing his girlfriend’s failing business.
The publication of his first novel, Dead Letter Drop in 1981 helped him to recover financially. Unfortunately, it failed to sell, and James has since revealed that he dislike this, and two other of his early books so much that he has since bought their rights and has had them withdrawn from circulation.
His first real success was Possession, published in 1988. With it came the tag of being a horror writer however, and a few books later, James bit the bullet and bought his way out of his publishing contract to get the chance to write crime novels instead. Dead Simple, published in 2005 was the first of Peter’s page-turning crime novels featuring detective superintendent Roy Grace and set in Peter’s native Brighton.
He doen’t stick to the writing however. In 2001 he co-founded Movision Entertainment and went onto executive produce 13 films including the 2204 Bafta winning adaptation of The Merchant of Venice starring Al Pacino, Joseph Fiennes and Jeremy Irons. And in 1993, whilst researching a novel about a computer scientist, he started up an internet service provider company along with a couple of friends. They sold it to Easynet five years later, each netting three million pounds.
His main interests are science, medicine and the paranormal. He is passionate about cars, and motor racing is a favourite hobby. He also used to own a Second World War Mitchell B25 bomber.
He and his partner Helen divide their time between his Georgian home in Sussex and a flat in Notting Hill. Believing their Sussex home to be haunted, they hired a medium who told them the house is built on an ancient burial site and that the reason Peter was finding it hard to concentrate whilst writing in his study was that the grave of a disturbed spirit lies below.
His books have been translated into 29 languages. The Roy Grace novels have sold over two million copies worldwide. Three of his earlier novels, Prophecy, Host and Alchemist have been adapted for television.
Not Dead Enough
On the night Brian Bishop murdered his wife, he was sixty miles away, asleep in bed at the time. At least, that’s the way it looks to Detective Superintendent Roy Grace who is called in to investigate the kinky slaying of beautiful young Brighton socialite, Katie Bishop.
Soon, Grace starts coming to the conclusion that Bishop has performed the apparently impossible feat of being in two places at once. Has someone stolen his identity, or is he simply a very clever liar? As Grace digs deeper behind the facade of the Bishops’ outwardly respectable lives, it starts to become clear that all is not at all as it first seemed. And then he digs just a little too far, and suddenly the fragile stability of his own troubled, private world is facing destruction.
This is the third outing for Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of the East Sussex Police Force (he previously appeared in Dead Simple and Looking Good Dead). Grace is a modern police officer: a down-to-earth dedicated professional. But he is forever haunted by the disappearance of his wife Sandy nine years previously. He uses ever method available to investigate his cases and to trace Sandy’s whereabouts, from high tech to old fashioned police slog, from forensics and pathology analysis, and is open to input from psychics.
The buzzing city of Brighton, where Roy Grace is based, forms the backdrop to all his investigations. Behind the elegant regency facades and tacky seaside attractions lies a darker, seedier underbelly, inhabited by all forms of low life: drug dealers, crooks fencing stolen goods, premier league criminals and dropouts.