Peter Grainger--Two Terrific British Series Reads

DEBORAH CROMBIE: For me, one of the biggest treats of a lifetime of reading is discovering a new series you really, really love and reading all the books straight through. Last year my friend recommended a novel called AN ACCIDENTAL DEATH by Peter Grainger. It's the first of a series featuring Norfolk Detective Sergeant DC Smith, and I liked it so much I immediately read all seven books. DC (short for David Conrad) is a former Detective Chief Inspector in the fictional Norfolk city of King's Lake, and has chosen a demotion in order to do real police work rather than management. DC is such an original voice, and the books are complex explorations of character and relationships. The series is now at the top of my list of British procedurals, and that's saying a lot.

But there's more! Peter has another series, set in Cornwall, featuring widowed, middle-aged Emily Willows and her much younger neighbor, mysterious former London cop Summer Lane. In LANE: A CASE FOR WILLOWS AND LANE, Emily is taken hostage by thugs involved in a case her detective son is investigating, and the two women embark on a terrifying escape. I dare anyone to put this action-packed book down! 

And now there's a new Willows and Lane, ONE-WAY TICKETS, in which we learn more about Lane's intriguing past.

When a local man, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, goes missing, his parents have good reason to be concerned. Emily Willows is a friend of the family and says that she knows just the person to find him – and, as Summer Lane soon points out, the fact that this also fits in with Emily’s plan to set up her very own detective agency is surely just a fortuitous coincidence. But it isn’t long before the former detective inspector finds herself on a train heading back to London, and back into situations that she thought she had left behind. Some old acquaintances are renewed and some difficult memories must be confronted as Lane searches for the missing soldier and discovers the shocking truth about what happened to him five years earlier.

Here's Peter to tell us more about DC and Willows and Lane!

Can you tell us a bit about your background, and how you started writing?

There is quite a lot of background by now, so I won’t go into too much detail. I think I was always a reader and English was my thing at school. I ended up doing a degree in English Literature and Philosophy and then discovered that the author B S Johnson was right in saying that this is a really bad thing for prospective writers to have done. I spent the next twenty years trying to stop putting every word I wrote under a microscope.

Mostly I wrote poetry from my teens and into my thirties – prose always seemed more difficult. Then it became short stories. I sent things away sometimes but no-one ever accepted anything. In the meantime, I had become a teacher of English as well, but this actually helped my writing, I think. In explaining to young people the basics of good writing, one really has to go back to the beginning and this makes you look again at your own work. But I didn’t get serious about writing novels until I was into my fifties.

You have self-published both series. Can you tell us why you decided to go that route? Both series are among the best I've read in crime fiction in a long time.

Thank you. For the answer to the question, see above! I’ve had the usual politely discouraging letters from literary agents, though not as many as Scott Fitzgerald, who is supposed to have papered a room with them. When ‘An Accidental Death’ did better as an ebook than I had ever hoped, I tried it again with some agents but no-one took it up. Since then, to be honest, I haven’t bothered them, other than a recent attempt to get some interest in the series for television; this was because several readers had said they would like to see the books in that format, so I said I would try. The result was the same!

                            

You have great female characters, both the secondary characters in the DC Smith series, and the two female protagonists in Willows and Lane. Did you have any qualms about writing two female leads?

Yes, lots, but one of the novels I epublished under the name Robert Partridge, ‘The Rink’, had been written from a woman’s perspective, and it was surprisingly well received; I had some emails accusing me of being a woman using a man’s nom de plume! I wanted to write something quite different from the DC Smith novels, having produced six in a row, so that was an obvious thing to try. I’m a great believer in the French saying vive la difference, but I’m not sure that in the things that really matter men and woman are as far apart as some seem to think.

 

The DC books are set in Norfolk (I've assumed from the description that King's Lake is King's Lynn) and the two Willows and Lane books in Cornwall and London. Do you have a particular affinity for those settings?

Yes, again. I have lived in all three of them, and after character, getting the setting right is the next most important thing for me when I’m writing. I don’t like description for its own sake when I’m reading a novel – it has to be made significant in some way or it’s just padding. Going back to my academic days, I suppose I’m talking about the pathetic fallacy here. North Norfolk has a beauty and an atmosphere all its own, and there are so many opportunities to make those reflect the emotions and thoughts of the characters. Cornwall is another magical county and I’m already booked up to go there again this summer. One day a sharp-eyed reader will contact me and say that they know where Summer Lane’s name came from!

Your procedural details in both series seem so spot on. Do you have someone you consult? 

It’s a no this time. I am a fan of top-notch crime series on television and have been for years, and sometimes I will make a note of anything that might be useful as far as procedure is concerned. I also get ideas from some of the fly-on-the-wall series about police work. I also read about investigations into actual crimes; some of these can really open your eyes as to what the detectives have to confront. I’ve had three former murder squad detectives write to me saying that they like Smith and that the stories are close to the mark – that has been very encouraging!

Were you influenced by any particular writers?

I will confess immediately that I have not read a huge number of crime writers. When I began to think about moving my writing into a specific genre – ie crime fiction – I did some reading first. Well, quite a lot of reading. I already knew and liked some of Colin Dexter’s Morse novels – having loved the television adaptation – and for the same reason I looked at one or two of the Frost novels. I have certainly learned things from P D James and Ruth Rendell. But I don’t think it would be wise to read a great deal more; there is a danger that one becomes hemmed in by the expectations and rules of the genre, whereas readers are often looking for something that’s a little bit outside the box – but not too much! Beyond that, writers that I admire and re-read are Anita Brookner, Graham Greene and the incomparable Henry James.

Can readers look forward to more books in both series?

That is certainly the plan. Lots of readers assumed that Smith retired at the end of ‘Time and Tide’ but there are some important and unresolved matters to be taken care of, and I am currently listening to them all again, thanks to Gildart Jackson’s excellent recordings, and at the same time puzzling out how those matters can be resolved! I hope to have the eighth story out later this year. And Emily Willows hardly got a word in in ‘One-way Tickets’ – she isn’t the sort to let things rest there!

DEBS: You can find Peter on his Facebook page, and both the DC books and Willows and Lane are available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

Any of the books can certainly be read as a stand-alone, but, personally, since they are all available as e-books, I'd highly recommend reading them in order.

Peter will be stopping in to chat from the UK, and has a question for us to start with:

Why do so many American and Canadian readers like crime fiction set in or from the UK?

Oh, and REDs alert:

The winners of Leslie Wheeler's Rattlesnake Hill are Gigi Norwood and Rick Robinson. Please email lesliewheeler at comcast dot net to claim your books!