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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