A massive treat is looming for Roy Grace fans as Peter James prepares to reveal what really happened to the Brighton-based detective’s missing wife Sandy – a mystery which enthralled millions of readers across the first dozen or so books in the series.
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Now, it's
00:06always a fabulous pleasure to speak to Peter James, and particularly so right now, because
00:11there's a super intriguing book which is on its way before very long at all. Finally,
00:17we are getting Sandy's story, They Thought I Was Dead, is the title, coming out in May.
00:23And this is a book that you wouldn't have imagined yourself writing when you started
00:27on the series 20-odd years ago, that Sandy would become such an important part of the
00:32whole thing, and now you are resolving what happened, to an extent.
00:37No, I created the whole mischief Sandy because I wanted Roy Grace to be a little bit different
00:44to other fictional detectives, and I thought it'd be interesting to give him, as a successful
00:49homicide detective, a private puzzle that he couldn't solve. When we first meet him
00:55dead simple, he's just coming out to his 39th birthday, and we learn that his wife
00:59Sandy, who he loved and adored, had vanished off the face of the earth on his 30th birthday.
01:06He literally came home, looking forward to going out to dinner with her and their two
01:10best friends, and she was gone. And for nine years, he's been continuing to work as a homicide
01:17detective, but almost every free moment he's obsessed with trying to find out what happened
01:22to her. Did she run off with a lover? Did she get murdered, have an accident? And of
01:28course, all that time, he's not able to move on in his own life. He doesn't have a new
01:31girlfriend.
01:32But the fascinating thing is, you've given us such a brilliant detective who solves absolutely
01:38everything that you care to throw at him. Why can't he solve this Sandy mystery? What's
01:43stopping him, do you think?
01:46The old thing of the cobbler's son has no shoes. Maybe he's too close to it, or maybe
01:55Sandy was too clever. What I've tried to show, what's been such good fun writing They Thought
02:04I Was Dead, is that people throughout the Gregory series have been writing to me saying,
02:11you're a bitch, Sandy, aren't you? Roy Grace has always, in his mind, idolised her. She
02:22was the perfect wife, he can't understand, something terrible must have happened to her.
02:28But I show the readers of the series snippet by snippet that maybe she wasn't quite the
02:34perfect wife. It's had this effect of building up real antipathy amongst my fans, saying
02:42they really don't like it. But now, in They Thought I Was Dead, I'm actually showing,
02:47maybe that she'll be a little sympathetic towards her.
02:50It sounds brilliant. It's such an intriguing read. But the fact is, it's built, hasn't
02:55it, so powerful. When did you think that it was inevitable that you had to give her her
03:01own story?
03:02I think it's around the time that I created her exit from the series without any spoilers.
03:13I thought it would be kind of fun to write, and I started getting more and more emails
03:20and letters from fans wanting to know more about her. And I thought, well, I'll write
03:27a short novella, maybe 100 pages, and just explain. And as I started to work on it, I
03:33thought, wow, there's so much here. And I found her really intriguing myself. I realised
03:40that the more I wrote about her, the more she fascinated me. And I thought, I want to
03:45know more about you, and I want to know what happened, where did you go, and how did you
03:54get to go to Munich? And the more I thought about it, the more I realised I had a whole
03:59dense and very rich novel to write.
04:02But it must have felt very strange that you were writing about Roy Grace, but a book in
04:07which Roy Grace wasn't the main character.
04:11It was very strange. She's talking about Roy Grace as a sort of third party, and he's always
04:22been centre stage, even in the first chapter of the book. She says, I've just left my husband
04:29Roy, but he won't have a clue at this moment. He's immersed in his work as ever on a murder
04:33case. It's his 30th birthday today, and we're supposed to be going out to dinner tonight.
04:38We have a reservation at our favourite restaurant, us and another couple, our closest friends.
04:43It's a big deal, your 30th, a milestone. I'd even asked the restaurant to make him a cake
04:48with a marzipan goldfish, just like his pet marlin on top. Bad timing, I know. If I'd
04:54had a choice, I'd have picked any other day but this one. But I don't have that luxury.
04:59Oh, goodness, dot, dot, dot. So it implies it's calculated, it wasn't a spontaneous flit,
05:06presumably. Don't give anything away.
05:09It was precipitated by something.
05:12Fabulous. Well, before long, we will know all, nearly all, won't we?
05:17We'll know quite a lot about it. Yeah, I think anybody who's been intrigued by the sandy
05:24mystery will have fun with this book. We'll learn a lot, and we'll get real surprises.
05:30And it must have been a particular challenge to write, because presumably you had to backtrack
05:35and fit it into the narrative that we know, don't you? Because there are various appearances.
05:40You had to obey that structure that was already there.
05:43It was much harder, Phil, than I realised. You're absolutely right. I had huge help from
05:48both Lara, my wife, and from Dave Gaylor, my real wife, Roy Grace, in literally trawling
05:53back through every book, finding every mention of Sandy, because there's one where she's on a
05:59travelator, I think at Frankfurt airport, and Roy goes the other way. There's all kinds of
06:07little mentions of her. So I had to obviously make sure that we matched everything in the story
06:11to the appearances in the book. So it was a massive jigsaw puzzle.
06:16It sounds absolutely fabulous. Can't wait to read it. It's, as always,
06:20really lovely to speak to you. Thank you. Thank you, Phil. Likewise.