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How can deep research and real relationships bring authenticity to your fiction? How do you keep a long-running series fresh for your readers, and for yourself, after 22 books? Peter James shares his lessons from decades as a successful author, and why he stills loves writing.
In the intro, Saga of Seven Suns by Kevin J Anderson on BackerKit, and The Art of the Long Term Career; Refill with Rachael Herron; Creative Choices, Writing for Fun, and Book Marketing Shifts with Joanna Penn on Write Now Workshop Podcast [Audio, Video]; Vellum automation update.
Plus, Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI by Ethan Mollick, Pan Macmillan publishes human-originated, AI-facilitated book; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars in Dec;
Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io
This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn
Peter James is a multi-award-winning, internationally bestselling crime author with over 40 books, who has sold over 24 million books worldwide in 38 languages. He has recently been awarded an Order of the British Empire by the King here in the UK for services to literature and charity.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
- How a burglary and a police barbecue led to a career in crime fiction
- Building research relationships through curiosity and six degrees of separation
- Keeping a long-running series fresh, and why you should occasionally kill a major character
- How a personal puzzle for Roy Grace kept readers hooked for 14 books
- Why the best book marketing is still word of mouth
- How to deconstruct bestsellers in your genre, and why writers must read
You can find Peter at PeterJames.com.
Transcript of interview with Peter James
Jo: Peter James is a multi-award-winning, internationally bestselling crime author with over 40 books, who has sold over 24 million books worldwide in 38 languages.
He has recently been awarded an Order of the British Empire by the King here in the UK for services to literature and charity, which is a really big deal to all the Americans listening.
So welcome to the show, Peter.
Peter: Thank you, Jo. Thank you.
Jo: I’m excited to talk to you today. Now, you have had a long career as a writer, but I thought maybe you could start by taking us back.
How did you first get into writing and publishing?
Peter: I always wanted to be a writer from the age of seven, but I didn’t really have a lot of confidence.
I kept a notebook by my bed, and I remember when I was seven years old, the first thing I ever wrote was, “Life is a bowl of custard. It’s all right until you fall in.” Haven’t used that line yet, but you never know.
Then when I was about 14, I won my school poetry prize, and I had one teacher at school that really believed in me, and he said, “You really must keep writing.” That’s lovely. We’re still in touch today. He’s in his late 80s, and we have lunch occasionally.
On my 17th birthday, my dad gave me the best birthday present ever, which was a portable electric typewriter, and this real battleaxe of a woman who came to the house every day for two weeks to teach me to touch type.
She’d literally cover the keys up with sticky patches, and she’d have a ruler in her hand, and if I looked down, she’d whack my knuckles with the ruler and she’d go, “Don’t look.”
Jo: That’s not allowed now.
Peter: Probably not allowed now. I learned to type faster than any secretary out of sheer terror, but it has stood me in great stead ever since.
I wanted to go to Oxford to study English, but I never believed I’d ever have any success as a writer. I went to film and television school, because I thought that I might make my career there.
I wrote my first book while I was a film student. I thought it was the great British novel. Luckily, nobody else did, and it never got published.
Although it did get me an agent. It got me an agent in New York, actually, a lovely guy called Kurt Helmer. I’d been turned down by every agent in England, and I thought, “Well, I’ll try America.”
He took the book, and he wanted to make editorial changes, and I made all the changes. He still didn’t get it published.
I came out of film school in 1970, and it was really hard to get a job in England in the film or television industry. There were only two television channels, amazingly, and the British film business was fairly flat.
I had an uncle in Toronto who said, “Come out here. It’s all happening.” So I went out to Toronto, and I got a job on a daily programme for preschool children called Polka Dot Door. It was in its early years. It went on to run, I think, for 20 years.
I was the lowest human life form on the television set. I was a gofer. Literally, “Go for this. Go for that.”
I’d been there about three months, and the producer came in a panic one day and said, “The writer’s sick. We don’t have a show today. I just read your CV. You won your school poetry prize. Could you write today’s show?”
Then they stuck me in a corner with an IBM golfball Selectric, and I wrote the show. They were really happy, and they hired me to write it three days a week. I was 22 years old, and that was how it all started.
Jo: Wow. That’s so cool that you leaned into opportunity there by going to Toronto, by saying yes to that.
How did you lean into opportunity to move into crime?
Peter: Well, what then happened was, I wrote to my agent in New York and I said, “Fantastic, I’ve got this job. I’m writing this daily programme for preschool children.”
He wrote back and said, “You really think you’re going to write fiction? You think you’re going to write television all day long for children and then go home in the evening and write a novel? Forget it.”
He said, “Go work in a factory. Do something where you’re not going to use your brain, and keep that for being creative.” He was quite prophetic, because for the next six years I worked in television and then more in the movie business.
In 1975/76, I wrote and produced a comedy film, a movie called Spanish Fly, which starred the actors Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips. When it came out, the film critic Barry Norman called it the worst British film since the Second World War, and the least funny British funny film ever made.
It came out the same week as Jaws.
Jo: Oh, dear.
Peter: Jaws was slightly better.
Half the backing had fallen over while we were making the film. We were filming it in the Balearic Islands in Spain, and I was stuck there with an enormous film crew, and I had to end up putting in every penny I had, and I had to hock myself up to the eyeballs to get it finished. When the film tanked, I was completely wiped out.
My family have a business making gloves. Primarily gloves, we also made neckwear as well, but gloves was our main business. We made the Queen’s gloves.
My dad was ill, he’d had a triple bypass, and they were going to sell the business unless I went into it. So I thought, “Well, I haven’t sold a book. The movie business has been a disaster.”
I was about to get married. I thought, “I’ll go into the business. At least I’ll earn some money, and I’ll be able to look after my wife, et cetera.” So I went into the business.
My dad said, “You’re going to have to spend the first six months on the factory floor.” So I did, and I was learning how to roll cloth and inspect cloth.
My wife then said to me, “Ever since I’ve met you, you’ve talked about writing a novel. When are you going to write this novel?”
Then two things happened. I suddenly remembered the advice that my agent had given me, which was, “Go work in a factory.” And I read an article that there was a shortage of spy thrillers, and Ian Fleming had just died.
I thought, “Oh, I can write a spy thriller.” So I did. I made it all up. It was a James Bond-esque novel. It was called Dead Letter Drop. I’m only giving you the title to make sure you never read it, because it was terrible.
I sent it to my agent in New York, to Kurt Helmer, eagerly excited. Waited a month, nothing. Six weeks, nothing. Two months, nothing. Then I found out he’d been dead for four years.
Jo: Oh. So you found another agent then?
Peter: I found an agent in England, and to my amazement, he got me a two-book deal. That phone call from him was probably one of the greatest moments of my life at that point.
A year later, one of the worst moments of my life happened when Dead Letter Drop was published. I rushed around all the bookshops, and it wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
I discovered that my publishers, and they’re big publishers, W. H. Allen, they’re American-owned, had printed 1,800 copies of the hardback, of which 1,500 went to libraries, and 300 for the whole of the UK. The book did really badly, and it did badly in paperback. The second book did even worse.
I was at a party, and I had too much to drink, and I poured my heart out to a lady called Elizabeth Buchan, who at that time was working for Penguin writing the blurbs for paperbacks. She became a very successful novelist herself.
She gave me a pitiful look, and she said, “Why are you writing spy thrillers?”
I said, “Well, I read an article. I thought there was a shortage. I thought I could muscle in.”
She said, “Darling, people who read are intelligent. They don’t just want a story. They actually want to learn something. What can you ever tell the world about spies? You know nothing, and you can’t access it to research. You’re up against people like John le Carré, who’ve come out of the security services.
“You need to find something that, A, you’re passionate about, and B, you can access.”
Anyway, I laughed, and I went home very hangdog, tail between my legs. Then two days later, we got burgled, and a young detective came to take fingerprints, and he saw these two books, and he said, “Oh, you’re a writer. If you ever want research help with the police, give me a call.”
He was married to a detective, a guy called Mike Harris, and his wife Renata. My then wife was a lawyer, and we just clicked with these guys, and they invited us to a barbecue at their house that summer.
They had a dozen friends there, all police officers. There was a homicide detective, response, there was a traffic officer, a police diver. Just talking to these police officers, I thought, “Wow, from a writer’s perspective, nobody sees more of human life in a 30-year career than a police officer.”
When they realised I was genuinely interested, not just out to get a story I could flog to the local rag, they started inviting me to go out and spend a day out on patrol with them.
I didn’t start with a crime novel, because I thought there were too many big names, successful names, already in the crime field, but I wrote a supernatural thriller called Possession.
The son of some great friends had just been killed in a horrible car accident in France, when a Frenchman drove the wrong way down the Paris–Lille autoroute, intending to commit suicide, and killed their son in a head-on collision.
They started going to a medium, and believed that they were really getting help, and they asked if I’d write a nonfiction book about their experiences of dealing with their loss and the help they were getting from spiritualism.
I spent about a year hanging around, going to seances, all kinds of stuff. I thought I didn’t have anything new to say. There was a lot that had already been written about that, but it gave me an idea.
I thought, what if a mother lost her son in a car crash, goes to a medium to try to communicate with him, and through the medium discovers that her son was a murderer and had killed his girlfriend?
I wrote that as a novel called Possession, which came out in 1987. Then to my absolute amazement, every single publisher, both in the UK and in America, bid for it.
It was a huge global success, although it actually didn’t take off in America at all. It did nothing in America, largely because my editor left before the book was ever published, and it fell through the cracks. It was Doubleday that originally bought it.
Jo: Then I guess we need to fast-forward because, for people who don’t know you, a lot of listeners are American and might not know, you are now pretty much the top crime writer in the UK.
The book that is coming out around when this goes out is Dead in Three Two One, book 22 of your popular Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series.
So how did that one barbecue turn into 22 detective novels?
Peter: Right. Now fast-forward. What happened was that I started writing supernatural thrillers and then psychological thrillers, and I was meeting all these police officers, so I started putting them in the books, and they really liked the way I portrayed them.
I realised that we tend to see just the uniform or just the sharp suit when we see a copper. I wanted to show what it’s really like to be a police officer.
You turn up to a horrendous crime scene. You maybe see a dead child or somebody mutilated, and then you go home to your family, and you have to bath your own kids and read to them. The impact that being a police officer has on police officers. We tend to forget that.
So I tried to write them really rounded, and the police liked the way I portrayed them, so my relationship with them grew between about ’85 and about ’97.
They’d start phoning me up and say, “Well, we’re going on a raid tomorrow. Do you want to come with us?” And they even smuggled me into crime scenes. I just became treated as part of the family of Sussex Police. I got to know so many officers, and they really fascinated me.
In 1997, I was introduced to a young homicide detective called David Gaylor, and I went into his office, and I’ve never seen an office so untidy before or since. Every single inch was covered in blue and green plastic crates bulging with manila folders, and there was this balding dome just visible at the back.
I said, “Are you moving?”
He said, “No. I’m a homicide detective inspector, but I’ve recently been tasked with reopening all the unsolved murders in Sussex where there’s still a chance of catching an offender, where somebody may still be alive. Each one of these crates is the principal case file of an unsolved murder. I am the last chance each victim has for justice and the family has for closure.”
I love that very human image of him. He said, “What are you writing at the moment?” And I was writing a psychological thriller called Denial. He said, “Tell me about it.”
So I started telling him, and he interrupted me. He said, “No, no, no. Why haven’t you got an outside inquiry team looking into this? Why is your detective not doing that? And that lady, I don’t think she’d do that. Wouldn’t she do this?”
I thought, “Wow, this guy’s got a really creative brain.” And he helped me on that book and on the next book, and we became mates.
Then in 2002, I was on a short holiday in Rome, and I was literally standing outside the Vatican, and my English agent, Carole Blake, rang me, really bubbling with excitement.
She said, “Oh, I’ve just come from a meeting with Pan Macmillan. They’ve lost their number one crime writer, Peter Robinson. He’s moved to HarperCollins, and they want to know if you’d ever thought of creating a detective as a central character.”
I said, “Give me five minutes,” and I phoned Dave Gaylor. I said, “How would you like to be a fictional cop?” He loved the idea.
At this point, he’d risen to become Detective Chief Superintendent, Head of Major Crime for Sussex, and he became my real-life Roy Grace. He doesn’t look like him, but in all other aspects, he’s helped me. We’ve worked together on every single book.
He reads every 100 pages, tells me how Roy Grace and the other police characters would actually think and act, and he’s introduced me to police officers all over the world, and quite a number in the States, in New York and Los Angeles.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time out with the police in America, in quite a few cities. That’s what’s helped me get the authenticity.
Jo: I love that. I think people listening are like, “Well, but I couldn’t do that. How could I develop those relationships?”
Do you think that it is your curiosity, or your networking? You’re obviously a real people person to be able to do that in an authentic way, because you’re not faking it. They’re doing it because you’re genuinely interested, right?
So how can people listening, if they want to go deep into their research, find and foster those kinds of relationships?
Peter: Obviously, to be a writer, you’ve got to be curious. I’ve met you a few times, and I know that you’ve got a lot of curiosity, and I think curiosity is an essential weapon in a writer’s arsenal.
I’m a great believer in that old adage of six degrees of separation. People say to me, “Oh, it’s all right for you going out with the police, because you’re well known.” But I wasn’t when I started.
With that old adage of six degrees of separation, you will know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who’s a police officer. Get an introduction. Get them to like you.
Bear in mind, pretty much everyone who does a job is, to some degree or other, proud of what they do, and they all hate to see it wrongly portrayed in a book or on television or in a movie theatre.
People, I’ve found, will go out of their way to help me get it right, and that includes the police. The police in most countries have public relations teams. They will help you if you ask.
Jo: That’s really encouraging. Well then, another question for those of us who have longer-running series. I have one that’s heading towards book 14, but you’re at book 22.
What are your tips for writers who want to design a character, but also don’t want to get bored? How do you keep it fresh?
Peter: There are quite a lot of ways of doing that, I think. One way to keep things fresh is to occasionally kill a major character. Seriously.
If people don’t think anybody’s ever in peril, then they’ll never believe somebody’s in danger. If they know you’re never going to kill a major character, they’ll never believe somebody’s in danger if you write them in danger. So I do think that’s important.
I liken it, in a way, to writing a soap opera. I never intended to write a long-running series in the first place. When I was first asked if I’d create a new detective, I had a two-book offer, and I thought, “Well, I’ll set up Roy Grace in book one, Dead Simple, and I’ll finish the series in book two.”
What I wanted to do was write a detective who was a little bit different to any of the others out there. There seemed to be a standard cliché of the detective with a drink problem and a broken marriage. The reality in the British police is that no police officer with a drink problem would last 24 hours.
I thought, what detectives do more than anything else is solve puzzles. Every major crime is a huge puzzle, hundreds, sometimes thousands of little pieces that have to be painstakingly put together, but often solved out of clear blue sky thinking.
I thought it would be interesting to create a detective, Roy Grace, who has a personal puzzle of his own that he cannot solve. So when we meet him in Dead Simple, he’s just coming up to his 39th birthday, and we discover that nine years earlier, his wife, Sandy, who he worshipped, vanished off the face of the earth.
He came home on his 30th birthday, looking forward to going out to dinner with her and their best friend, and she’s gone. He doesn’t know. Did she run off with a lover? Did she have an accident? Did she take her own life? Did she get kidnapped?
For nine years, he’s been trying to figure out, in all his free time, what happened to her, trying to find her, whilst continuing in his work to function as an effective homicide detective.
I thought I’d set up the mystery of what happened to Sandy in Dead Simple, in the first book, and I’d give the revelation as to what happened in the second book, and that would be the end of it.
To my happy astonishment, Dead Simple was published in 2005, and it became an instant global bestseller, and we were inundated with emails and letters from around the world, people speculating what might have happened to Sandy.
I thought, “Hmm, I could keep this going.” So I kept the mystery going for about 14 novels, from memory.
What I did with each book was I seeded in a little bit more about her, and I started giving hints that maybe she may still be alive, and also that she wasn’t quite the perfect wife that he thought she was. In fact, far from it.
So I seeded in bits like that in each book, a little bit more about her slightly dark side. I had that going for 14, 15 books, and then the tone of the letters started changing.
I had one which said, “Dear Mr. James, I’ve just worked out I’m a lot younger than you, and I imagine I’m much fitter, which means you’re going to die before me. So I hope you’ve left the secret of what happened to Sandy safely in your publisher’s vaults.”
Jo: Oh, okay. So that took you to book 14 or something.
How did you then come up with something else that would keep people going for another 10?
Peter: Well, I then started giving the resolution to Sandy. In fact, I wrote a standalone book about Sandy. It’s called They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story.
Jo: Ah, wonderful.
Peter: Which was fun. That was published as a standalone, but it’s part of the series. What I then did was, I created that Sandy has a son.
Jo: Aha.
Peter: And when she left, it was just possible that it could be his, just possible that it might not be.
Then, in fact, I don’t want to give a spoiler, but something happens to Sandy that results in her demise. And lo and behold, Roy has to go to Munich to meet this son that he didn’t know he had. I start a whole new strand with the boy, and various ongoing aspects around that.
Jo: That’s fantastic. I think, as you say, it’s about keeping the reader curious as well as you.
I’m also really interested because, I mean, you’re so successful. You’ve written so many books on different things, and I guess you could retire. You could say, “I’m not doing this anymore.”
You’re on this podcast. You’re still doing book marketing. I was like, why do you still do this, Peter?
Why do you still write, and why do you still do book marketing?
Peter: Because I love it. People keep saying to me, “Are you going to retire?” And I say, “Well, if I retired, I’d write a book.” So I might as well keep working. Honestly, I just love learning stuff. I love telling stories.
My happiest time of the day is 6:00 in the evening in England, when I make myself a vodka martini, put on music, sit down at my laptop, and I write for two and a half hours. I just love it.
I love the fact that people luckily seem to enjoy what I write. There’s nothing I particularly want to do if I retired other than that, I think. I seriously would still keep writing, so I might as well get paid.
Jo: Exactly. Well, I love that. I feel the same thing at 51, and it’s so encouraging to me that you say that, a few years later.
I also wondered what you thought of people who you’ve met along the way over the years, some people who were super successful at one point or another and then just didn’t want to do it anymore.
I wondered what your thoughts were on creative longevity, but also in the publishing industry and the business side of things.
Why do people last, and why do people leave?
Peter: I think a lot of the people I know who’ve left have either run out of enthusiasm or ideas, or just got bored.
Jack Higgins, he’s a brilliant writer. I think he just actually had enough and stopped.
I remember seeing Wilbur Smith at the British Book Awards some years ago, and he was being interviewed, and somebody said, “Are you ever going to retire, Mr Smith?”
And he looked and he said, “The day they put me in my coffin, just before they close the lid, my right arm will reach out holding a Sharpie, and on the side of the coffin I will write ‘The End.'”
Jo: I did get a selfie with Wilbur Smith before he died. That was at ThrillerFest in New York. I was so thrilled, because I just love his books.
Peter: I love it. Alfred Hitchcock famously said, and he said it about a man, but it could equally apply to ladies, “There are only three things an old man can do with dignity: conduct an orchestra, direct a motion picture, or write a novel.”
I remember meeting P.D. James. She invited me to tea when she was about 92, and she was just working on, I think, what turned out to be her last novel. She was so sweet. She said, “Everybody thinks we must be related. Why don’t we pretend we’re cousins?” She was writing into her 90s.
I think, on a serious note, something I touched on a little bit earlier, the mere fact that people are reading means they are intelligent, and they want to learn things. Not just about what the author’s writing about, although that’s obviously part of it, but they want to learn what wisdom the author can impart.
Hopefully, most of us, as we get older, get a little bit wiser. So what you have to offer the world at the age of 51, I’m sure, is a lot more than when you were 21.
Jo: Mm.
Peter: And it will be a lot more still when you’re 71. If you’ve got your marbles, you’ve got all that wealth of experience that you can share through your writing.
Jo: Absolutely. That’s so encouraging. I hope that encourages people, whatever age, for starting, let alone carrying on.
I also wondered, you’ve seen a lot of change in the publishing industry. When I came in 20 years ago, it was actually the beginning of the independent author movement, and you’ve always been very open to authors of every kind.
So I wondered what changes you’ve seen in publishing that you feel have changed the author’s job.
Peter: Well, the first big change is that when I was first published in 1981, there were 11,000 novels published in England that year. I have no idea what it was last year. The last time I had the figures, it was 10 years ago, and it was getting on for 300,000.
Now today, we have not just several hundred thousand novels conventionally published a year, we have literally probably several million self-published.
So in a sense, it’s become liberating for anybody who wants to write a book. They can write a book and they can self-publish on Amazon or wherever. The hard thing for them is getting traction and getting noticed in the herd.
Another thing that’s changed is the market itself. Audiobooks have gone from zero to currently being 20% of the book market in the UK. And there’s Kindle.
Not many people know this, but Penguin published my novel Host in 1993. As well as publishing it in print format, they published it on two floppy disks as the world’s first electronic novel.
Jo: Oh. We can’t even read that now.
Peter: I know, because the technology to read it is also in the museum, but there’s a copy in the Science Museum.
I remember when that book came out, it was a couple of students at Sussex University where I’d been doing research. It was a thriller about a computer scientist who wanted to live forever. It was before I wrote crime.
They said, “Why don’t you get your publishers to think about doing it electronically?” And we did.
It caused a furore. I remember being interviewed by somebody saying, “Who on earth would ever read a book on a computer?” Well, quite a few now. So that’s something that’s changed.
So in a way, it’s got much easier for anybody to write a book and publish it, but by the same token, because there are so many more people writing, it has got harder for people to get real traction and get into that critical top 10.
Jo: And from my perspective, it’s a lot more global. We have people listening to this in 228 countries, which is kind of…
Peter: My God.
Jo: Yes, I know. It’s kind of crazy. We’ve even had listeners in Antarctica.
Peter: Ah. Well, guten tag to the Germans, bonjour to the French listeners.
Jo: Oh, you could be there a while.
I think that’s one of the big differences. Not just ebooks and digital audio, obviously, but print-on-demand technology means that if people order a print book in their own country, it can get printed locally and sent to them. So, I guess for me, that’s what’s made it possible to be a global writer.
Also, again, this podcast, it’s global marketing.
So how has your book marketing changed? In terms of what your publisher wants you to do, has that changed?
Peter: I think social media’s been the biggest change. I now have a full-time social media agency doing videos for Instagram, Facebook primarily, and to a lesser extent, but trying hard, on TikTok. That’s become an essential part of my working week.
I think also, obviously, marketing has just exploded in all kinds of different ways. The idea of an author having an advert for a book on television 15 years ago would have been unthinkable, and now that’s pretty much commonplace.
I think the best marketing of all is still word of mouth. The books that really succeed are ones that have obviously come to people’s attention, but then people say, “God, I just read this great book,” and talk to friends about it. That’s really how a book ultimately takes off.
A publisher could throw any amount of money at advertising and marketing. It’s not going to get a book traction if that book hasn’t got the ability to catch fire with readers.
Jo: Yes, absolutely. You mentioned all the knowledge that you learn over the years, and—
I read that you have a book on writing coming out. Is that true?
Peter: It is, yes. It’s coming out on March 28th. It’s called Write the Damn Book.
Jo: Well, I know listeners will be interested in that, so any tips from that we might be interested in?
Peter: One of the biggest tips I can give any would-be author is to read, reread, and reread again, and then deconstruct any huge bestseller in the genre that you would like to write in.
If you were going to be a medical student, you’d be given a cadaver for a year, and you would spend a year dissecting your cadaver to learn how the muscles work, how all the organs work, where they are.
If you’re going to be a car mechanic, you’d take apart a car and the engine and put it back together to learn all the workings of it.
That might be a crass comparison, but I mean it sincerely. You want to deconstruct the book and say, “Well, what made me engage with those characters? What kept me turning the page? How did the author keep my interest going right through all the different parts of the book?”
We all learn from our peers. I’m sure you’re influenced by past writers. I certainly am, both modern and the far distant past. So many would-be writers I meet tell me they don’t really read much.
Jo: I never understand that.
Peter: I had a tennis coach, lovely guy, good mate, in Jersey. He said to me one day, about a couple of years ago, “Oh, I’m writing a book.”
I said, “Oh, great. What novels are your influences?”
He said, “Oh, I don’t read books.”
I said, “Seriously? How?” You can’t be a writer if you don’t read.
Jo: No, absolutely. I did actually want to ask you about changing genres, because obviously you’re very well known in the crime niche, but you’ve mentioned a number of other books that you’ve written, including supernatural, which again is quite different to a British crime detective book.
So what do you think about changing genres and doing different things?
Because your readers really want one thing from Peter James, but you also give them other things.
Peter: Yes, I think it’s a lovely thing at one level, in that if you happen to have any level of success in a particular genre, like crime with me, my readers primarily want crime.
I also enjoy writing other books from time to time, other standalones in the supernatural zone in particular.
Also, I’ve written about designer babies. I wrote a book called Perfect People about a couple choosing the genes of their unborn child. I also wrote a thriller about what would happen if somebody conclusively proved God exists, or claimed to have proof.
There are certain books that won’t work within, if you like, the confines of a crime thriller for me, in which I want to delve much deeper into the subject matter.
I think if you look at a lot of writers, they do move genres. I think Charles Dickens wrote ghost stories. I think that it’s good not to be completely pigeonholed.
Yes, in terms of my core readership, they love crime, but quite a few also love my supernatural stories. They’re constantly saying to me, “When are you going to write another House on Cold Hill?”
So I think it’s really important for a writer to keep fresh too. If you think, “Oh, God, I’ve got to write another crime thriller,” which I don’t, but if you felt that, then try writing something else just to have a change.
Jo: Fantastic. So we’re out of time.
Where can people find you and your books online?
Peter: They can find me on peterjames.com, and everything is on that website, including my latest, Dead in Three Two One.
Jo: Brilliant. Well, that is fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Peter. That was great.
Peter: Thanks, Jo.