Like me, the Bath detective, Peter Diamond, has reached the end of the line. He made his debut as far back as 1991 in The Last Detective, an odd title for a series that would last 33 years. It didn’t seem odd at the time, because the book was supposed to be a one-off, about a middle-aged rebel out of sympathy and out of touch with modern policing. He tackles one last challenging case and by the end of the book he has quit the force and become a department-store Santa Claus – another unsuitable job, because his last act as a cop was shoving a twelve-year-old against a wall and putting hm in hospital. But as a civilian he still managed to solve the case and inform the right people how it was done. For all his failings, he was second to none as a sleuth.
So what changed my mind about writing a series? The Last Detective was my nineteenth novel in twenty-one years of trundling along as a mid-list author. To my great surprise, this one had an outstanding reception. The critics lavished praise on it. Julian Symons in the Times Literary Supplement wrote the longest review I had ever had, calling it a brilliant performance. Marcel Berlins in The Times, noted that this was my first modern whodunit, “and a terrific job he makes of it”. The American connoisseur of crime fiction, Allen J Hubin, called it a marvellous achievement; Tom Nolan in the Wall Street Journal rated it as “a perfectly realized murder mystery”; and Josh Rubins in the New York Times described it as “a bravura performance from a veteran showman.” At the Bouchercon, it won the Anthony award for the year’s best novel. Closer to home, the chair of the Dagger judges, F E Pardoe, gave me an earful for not allowing the book to be submitted. I was chair of the Crime Writers Association that year and might conceivably have presided over an awards dinner in which I presented the main award to myself.
Reeling from it all, the “veteran showman” was persuaded to rescue the last detective from his latest job as a night-club bouncer and relaunch him as a series. I had no idea how long it would last, but over the next two books I found a way of getting Diamond back into the Bath police and there he has remained until the end of this year.
A long series brings its own problems and the most immediate was Diamond’s age. In The Last Detective, he was 41. The books were supposed to keep up with the times. He would be 74 by now. In the new one, Against the Grain, there is talk of his retirement – and no wonder. I have to hope my loyal readers will suspend disbelief and allow him to be forever middle-aged.
The challenge for me as the writer was to find a way of allowing this dinosaur to have a believable role in a modern police force. He has the deductive skills to solve crime, but I had cast him as a loner, uncomfortable working with a team who are partly in awe, partly in shock at his disregard of policing theory and protocol. By good fortune, his deputy is Inspector Julie Hargreaves, intelligent, brave and empathetic. She smooths the way for him, with the team and with his superiors. When there are murmurings in the ranks, Julie comes to his defence. But she is not afraid to let hm know when he is out of order. People like Julie deserve to be cherished. All too often, their value goes unappreciated. Diamond values her, but there comes a point, in the sixth book of the series, Upon a Dark Night, when his bull-in-a-china-shop attitude goes too far. He doesn’t understand why Julie takes offence and puts in for a transfer. His wife Stephanie has to explain why. By then, Julie has gone.
After six books, I tired of Diamond and he was probably sick of me. I knew too much about him, his home life with his wonderful wife, Steph, his work with the murder squad in Bath, his clumsiness, his dislike of fast cars, his short fuse with troublesome colleagues and the men in white coats. I took time off from the series and wrote a book called The Reaper about a murderous rector called the Rev Otis Joy. I still believe Joy was an inspired creation, but most readers didn’t agree. They wanted more Diamonds.
I decided the only way to rescue the series from tedium was to give Diamond a life-changing experience and find out how he coped with it. In Diamond Dust, his beloved Steph is murdered at the start. ‘How could you do that?’ I am asked whenever I give a talk or meet a reader. I try to explain, but I am not forgiven. Steph was the love of his life. She understood his deepest insecurities and helped him deal with them. Earlier in her life she had made a disastrous marriage that ended in divorce. A new relationship was the last thing she wanted when this overweight, overbearing policeman made a mess of a talk he was giving on safety first to the brownie group she led. After that, he kept finding excuses to come back. In the end, she saw the positives in his personality. The turning point was the summer camp when he turned up unexpectedly with two donkeys called Bradford and Bingley. The brownies were overjoyed and Stephanie changed her mind about getting married again.
I was learning that a series can be much more than a number of artfully plotted stories linked by a main character. As the books progress, so do the lives of the people in them, the main protagonist, his family and colleagues. The killing of Steph was cruel and catastrophic. No way could the book be called cosy and predictable. How would Diamond channel his grief?
It
sounds calculating, but Steph’s murder gave me the impetus to continue. In Diamond
Dust, he is barred from investigating his own wife’s killing. Typically, he ignores
the ban. In the books that follow, he is a changed man, mentally scarred. He
recovers his bluff exterior, but we know he will never get over his loss. His
good fortune is that in time two other women help him to function.
The first is Ingeborg Smith, a journalist he meets at press conferences. She isn’t good news herself. Not for Diamond, anyway. She asks penetrating questions and won’t take evasion. Highly intelligent, she is a formidable adversary. However, Diamond, too, is smart. He senses that Ingeborg secretly wishes she were behind the microphones dealing with the questions. Her ambition is to become a detective. For him, this solves the problem. He invites her to apply for a job in the police and fast-tracks her into his team, where her brilliant mind is put to positive use. Over the series, she quickly rises in the ranks. She is never officially his deputy, as Julie had been, but she can take up any role from going undercover to dealing courageously with dangerous suspects, to keeping her boss from making a fool of himself. And she takes no nonsense from the team, who understandably have their complaints about Diamond’s rough-and-ready crime-solving. Ingeborg, the thorn in his flesh, has become his protector.
Thanks to Inge, life in the office became tolerable and engaging again. But what of his personal life? For several books in the series, he lives alone in the house he shared with Steph in Weston, her cat Raffles his only companion, a comfort, but a daily reminder of his loss. Then, in one of novels – I won’t say which – he meets Paloma Kean, who suffers a traumatic shock through no fault of her own. Diamond is sympathetic. By degrees a friendship is formed and eventually a relationship. Paloma invites hm to move into her large house on Lyncombe Hill, where she has a successful business providing images of costume for period dramas on TV, film and the stage. Raffles approves, and the deal is done. Paloma becomes the fourth woman who understands Diamond better than he understands himself. She can never replace Steph, but she has some of Steph’s insights and often sheds light on work problems that baffle him.
In the last of the series, Against the Grain, Julie Hargreaves, retired and living in a Somerset village, contacts him out of the blue and invites him to stay, bringing Paloma and, of course, Raffles. A week in the country has no appeal, he tells Paloma. He is a townie, through and through. And he doesn’t tell her that he is uneasy about these two women from quite different stages in his life meeting for the first time. Persuaded that Julie must have a good reason, he agrees to go. A huge shock awaits him, not to mention a village murder to investigate. There I must stop. I want you to read the book and I may have given away too much already.
Four remarkable women. Between them, they span the entire series. Where would Peter Diamond have been without them?
Against
the Grain by Peter Lovesey (Sphere, Little Brown Publishers)
When
his former deputy, Julie, invites Detective Peter Diamond and his partner
Paloma to spend a week at her home in the depths of rural Somerset, Diamond is
horrified. What could be worse than seven days in the back end of nowhere with
nothing to do? But it turns out that Julie has an ulterior motive. A local
woman is doing time for manslaughter after a wild party ended in a tragic
accident: a man suffocated in a silo of grain. Nobody in the village has much
sympathy for Claudia, the unruly daughter of a wealthy local farmer. Nobody
that is, except Julie, who is convinced there's more to this case than there appears
and wants her former boss to investigate. And as Diamond tests his skills as an
amateur sleuth, he soon discovers that the countryside isn't quite so dull as
he'd anticipated . . .
Against the Grain is published by Sphere on November 14 and in America by Soho Press on December 3.
‘The
MWA Grand Master brings his Peter Diamond series to a richly satisfying
conclusion in Against the Grain.’ Publishers Weekly
More information about Peter Lovesey
and his books can be found on his website.
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