by Louise Penny

(This text appears in the 2014 Soho Press edition of The Last Detective)

Welcome to THE LAST DETECTIVE, a novel that changed the face of detective fiction when it was released in 1991. It broke every template, every tradition, every ‘rule’ of the genre. Indeed, not only does Peter Lovesey break the rules with this book, so does his brilliant new protagonist. To say that Superintendent Peter Diamond, of the Bath Regional Police, is unruly would be a gross understatement.

Peter Diamond is impatient, belligerent, cunning, insightful, foul, laugh-out-loud funny, and so engaging that this wondrous book went on to spawn a series. The Peter Diamond books have won major awards for crime fiction internationally, hit bestseller lists, and inspired a generation of crime writers who saw that a novel can be a police procedural, a traditional mystery, an exploration of social issues. It can be literary, terrifying, funny, comforting all at once.

And it all started with the book that you hold in your hands.

As you’ll discover as you read THE LAST DETECTIVE, Peter Lovesey also plays with perspective, with the trustworthiness of the narrator, with your loyalties as a reader. And he does this by engaging not just your head, but your heart. What is crime fiction, after all, without caring?

THE LAST DETECTIVE is not simply a puzzle to be solved. It delves into why we do the things we do. Our choices. The suspect’s, the victim’s, the detective’s choices.

But at it’s heart, at the core, stands the conflicted, human, unpredictable man who will become our companion through the series. Peter Diamond. Who often seems to have a life independent of what his creator might have planned. And such is the mark of a great creation, and a brave writer. Peter Lovesey lets Diamond live and breathe and head off in unexpected, and endlessly fascinating, directions.

I am so excited for you, to be at the very beginning of this trend-setting, beautifully written, vivid series.

On a personal note, I first met Peter Lovesey at a Crime Writers Association awards gala in London, before my first book had even been published. He was hosting a table and I was so in awe of him I could barely look in his direction, never mind speak. But he made the unknown Canadian and her husband feel like the most important and precious people in the room.

I have long loved Peter Lovesey’s books. That day I fell in love with the man.

He went on to read, and endorse, my first book, which was generous beyond description and made a huge difference to my career. In a profession rich with supportive colleagues, Peter Lovesey manages to be in a category all his own. A creative, courageous and gifted writer, who is also a gracious, generous and kind man. A gentleman.

This is a wonderful book. The beginning of a superb series. It is such a pleasure to introduce you to one of the great (and thankfully not the last) detectives in crime fiction.

A Peter Diamond Mystery

Washington Post, April 28, 2013

‘The Tooth Tattoo’ offers fascinating glimpse into string quartets, by way of procedural
By Patrick Anderson

I have no idea how many string quartet aficionados enjoy crime fiction, but they should hasten to read the veteran British writer Peter Lovesey’s fascinating “The Tooth Tattoo.” Strictly speaking, the novel is a police procedural, but the kicker is that the prime suspects in three murders are the members of a world-class string quartet called Staccati.

I hasten to add that readers who, like me, know little or nothing about string quartets (my musical highlight each year is the Birchmere’s Hank Williams tribute) can still savor this ingenious novel.

At the outset, Peter Diamond, who heads the criminal division of the Bath, England, police, is vacationing in Vienna with his elegant friend Paloma. She wants to visit Beethoven’s home, but he’s more interested in seeing highlights — the sewer, the Ferris wheel — of Carol Reed’s Vienna-based 1949 movie classic, “The Third Man.” As they wander, the couple chance upon a flower-strewn memorial to a young Japanese woman who drowned in the Danube a few years earlier. Paloma is moved by the tragedy, but it’s not Diamond’s case, so he’s indifferent. Naturally, she berates him for his alleged inability to express his feelings. “What do you expect?” the detective retorts. “I’m a bloke.”

In this country he’d say, “I’m a guy,” but it’s all the same. So is the outcome: The argument escalates, he stubbornly defends his right to be a guy, and she dumps him.

Soon the drowned woman in Vienna becomes newly relevant when another young Japanese woman is fished out of a canal in Bath — for that is Diamond’s case. He learns that both women loved string quartets, and that Staccati was playing in both Vienna and Bath at about the time they went missing — and possibly were murdered. One of the women had a “tattoo” on her tooth that featured a musical note, although they really aren’t tattoos but small chips that can be glued on. That’s the source of the book’s title, which is the only thing I didn’t like about it.

We soon learn a lot about the four members of Staccati. Ivan, a dour Russian violinist, co-founded the group with a woman called Cat, who is huge (“the girth of a sumo wrestler”), bawdy and a virtuoso on the cello. Andrew, the second violinist, is brilliant musically, although he rarely speaks and is thought by the others to be autistic. Finally, there’s Mel, the newcomer to the group, who plays the viola, chases girls in his spare time and was recruited to replace Harry, who mysteriously vanished after a concert in Budapest. The four argue a lot and have little in common except their love of music, but that’s enough to keep them together.

Lovesey has won many prizes for his crime fiction; we expect fine writing and devilish plots from him. But the wonder of this novel is how deep he carries us into the world of a string quartet. He knows the music, and he makes clear its beauty, its challenges and the passions it arouses in both musicians and their audiences.

One highlight of the novel is a two-page, all but microscopic description of the quartet’s rendition of Beethoven’s Opus 131. Here’s a small sample: “Toward the middle of the first movement the violins speak to each other with the last six notes of the fugue motif and then viola and cello take up the dialogue in one of the loveliest passages in the entire quartet repertoire.”

This novel will probably teach you more than you ever expected to know about string quartets. Did you know that celebrated players often use instruments on loan from wealthy collectors? Mel is using a rare 1625 Amati viola, valued at more than a half-million dollars, and only too late he discovers that there’s no such thing as a free viola.

You’ll learn of their frustrations, too. Cat denounces what she calls the “music merchants,” of whom she says: “They take second-rate artists with pretty faces, groom them, call them the voice or the player of the century, and turn them into stars. .?.?. The quality of the sound is crap, they’re off-key, and the great gullible public doesn’t seem to notice.”

Eventually, the deaths of the two young women are followed by that of someone close to the group. We agonize over whether one of these dedicated musicians could be a killer — or is the culprit an outsider? — but Diamond sorts things out with his usual aplomb. Lovers of good music and a good mystery should not miss this delightful tale.

Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for Book World.

THE TOOTH TATTOO

By Peter Lovesey

Soho. 348 pp. $25.95

See more information about The Tooth Tattoo here on PeterLovesey.com

[This review originally appeared in the Books section of the Washington Post]

Mystery Writer Peter Lovesey Pays His Dues

BUDGET CUTS FORCE LIBRARY CLOSURES is a headline that sends shivers up my spine. For me as a career writer, libraries are my life support system. I couldn’t have survived forty years in the business without you. I am thankful, of course, for the steady sales of my books, but there is much more I rely on. From the beginning libraries have provided me with happy discoveries, inspiration, guidance, research opportunities, the chance to meet my readers and, in a way I shall explain, the opportunity to travel across America.

I’m a library junkie.

The addiction dates from 1944, when I was eight. World War Two was raging and our house in suburban London was destroyed by a V1 bomb. Miraculously my family survived. My two brothers crawled out of the rubble. My father was away in the army, my mother was out shopping and I was at school. But of course we were homeless and for a long time we had other priorities than books and reading. The time came when we were in temporary housing and I felt the strong need of something to read. At an age when my imaginative life had been transformed by the magic of reading, we didn’t have a book in the house. I joined the junior section of the Whitton branch library and soon appreciated the treasures there, hidden as they were in dreary cloth bindings and printed on wartime economy paper. Richmal Crompton’s William books were an early discovery, funny, anarchic and beautifully written. I have been a regular borrower of books ever since.

Fast forward to the 1960s and the British Newspaper Library at Colindale in north London, the nearest place to a time machine that I know. This was before newspapers were microfilmed, let alone digitalized. I handled real papers more than a century old. I’m not sure how I qualified for a ticket, but there I could travel back to the 1860s gathering material for articles on sports history that ultimately were shaped into my first book, The Kings of Distance.

About the same time, I started a bibliography of all the track and field books ever published in Britain. This took me to Bloomsbury and the Reading Room of the British Library. The staff allowed me access to the card index to fill in gaps in the main catalogue and I passed many hours listing long-forgotten works. The project got into print in 1969 and was updated in 2001 as a British Library publication, An Athletics Compendium, with my co-authors Andrew Huxtable and Tom McNab.

My crime writing career grew out of the sports interest, strongly backed by library research. Wobble to Death (1970), was about murder in a Victorian long distance race and won a £1000 first crime novel prize. The historical basis for this was discovered largely at the newspaper library but also at Islington public library, close to the Royal Agricultural Hall, where the story was set. My policemen, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray, continued into seven books and later a TV series. Each novel and script reflected some aspect of Victorian entertainment researched in my local library or from books borrowed through inter-library loans.

One of the unsung joys of using a library is browsing the shelves and making discoveries impossible in any other situation. I can’t recall why I was looking at books on wine-making one day. It’s not a hobby I’ve ever taken up, or wanted to. I picked one off the shelf and came across a description of the way cider was made on farms in the pre-war era. The farmer would suspend a joint of meat in the keg to assist the process. When the cider was ready, only the bone was left, picked clean by the action of fermentation. This was the inspiration for a mystery of mine called Rough Cider and featuring a human skull discovered in a barrel. That kind of serendipity illustrates the magic of libraries.

By this time I had received my first invitation to speak to a local audience in a library. Daunting, when you haven’t done it before, even in a setting that is your second home. I struggled through and got better at it by trial and error. Some time after, at a lunch organized by the Crime Writers’ Association, several of us happened to get talking about the loneliness of the library lecturer. Wouldn’t it make the ordeal easier to endure if three or four of us got together as a team, gave short presentations and shared any questions? We must have drunk heady wine. We decided to give the idea a shot, found it agreeable and began approaching libraries looking for gigs. In no time, the “presentation” took on entertainment elements such as a mock radio reading with sound effects, something called “crime mime time” and a re-enactment of the secret initiation ritual of the hallowed Detection Club. We called ourselves Murder We Write.

Now it happened that two of our team, Paula Gosling and Michael Z.Lewin, were American writers living in England. The others, Liza Cody and I, were the Brits. Mike Lewin made a family visit to New York and decided to sound out some American public libraries about the possibility of bringing Murder We Write across the ocean. He’s a persuasive man. He was using the phone, for this was before the internet became a universal tool. Not only did he set up a tour of seven States, but he negotiated fees that more than paid for the trip. The American Bookseller in July, 1990, wrote “What do you get when you combine a Plymouth Grand Voyager, four prominent mystery writers living in southern England, and an itinerary that includes stops in 10 American cities from Massachusetts to Michigan? For three weeks this last May, they became the Murder We Write roadshow. The performances were a far cry from the traditional author tour . . . They mixed dramatic readings, skits and discussions of issues in their works and the genre that was part literary event, part vaudeville.”

A major factor in the success of the roadshow (it continued through the nineties in various incarnations and combinations as Partners in Crime and Wanted for Murder) was that we visited libraries, rather than bookstores. Large audiences, accustomed to attending lectures and talks, enjoyed the performance aspects of our show. We even learned juggling to illustrate the complexities of writing a book.

The web may have changed the way things are done, but there’s a massive difference between sitting in front of a computer and visiting a library. I won’t deny that I use Google for information I need, but there are limits to what a search engine can provide. It can’t offer me the joy of meeting readers in a library or getting advice and expert help from real people who know more than I about resources. Human contact needs to be cherished in this computer age. I’m even wary of computers crowding out the book space in libraries. A few years ago I wrote a competition story for the local paper, called Murder in the Library, with a plot involving a blackmailer murdered, appropriately, in a carrel containing a microfilm viewer. His victims had been paying him with banknotes secreted in returned library books. It’s always worth leafing through the pages; you never what you’ll find.

And what joy there is rooting around in card indexes and files of newspaper clippings. For my latest book, Stagestruck, set mainly in the Theatre Royal, Bath, I asked to see Bath library’s clippings from the local paper. There I found graphic accounts of sightings of the theatre ghost, the grey lady, and of the mysterious butterfly that augurs a success or a death. Of course this had to go into the novel.

Let’s admit I have a vested interest in the future of the library system. I rely on it more than most. But I can see how important it is in the lives of many others: the children who come to listen to stories, the students wanting a congenial place to study, the people seeking information, the audiences enjoying talks and lectures and the older generation glad of a place to sit down and read a magazine or a newspaper. The library is the hub of the community. Every closure diminishes our society.

—

Peter Lovesey is the author of more than thirty mysteries and numerous short stories. His work has been adapted for radio, TV and film. He has won many awards including the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2000. His latest novel featuring Bath detective Peter Diamond is Stagestruck, published by Soho Press.

Master Of Moods, Comic And Grim

[This review of Stagestruck by Tom Nolan originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal on July 2, 2011]

Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond, the series character created by British author Peter Lovesey 20 years ago, may not much resemble the rugby player he once was—the belly bulging over his belt sees to that—but he still knows how to bull his way through a workplace scrum. Though he is sensitive about his appearance, you wouldn’t know it from the way he strides “in warlike mode” through his police department in Bath, England, where the other coppers know not to argue with him when he has his “arms folded and jaw jutting in Churchillian defiance.”

Diamond, who has become a widower in the course of the series, is an old-fashioned policeman: impatient with forensic delays, hostile to computers, less than fanatical about the proper handling of evidence. He even quit the force once because he was unable to adapt to change; he was lured back but remained determinedly uninterested in learning new tricks. He knew that he was “no Sherlock Holmes,” but “his self-respect as a detective wouldn’t let him walk away” from a vexing case.

In “Stagestruck” (Soho, 325 pages, $25), the 11th book in the series, the puzzling events in Diamond’s latest investigation begin with the facial burns suffered by a fading pop singer in the first moments of her debut as an actress, on the stage of Bath’s Theatre Royal. A makeup mishap appears to be the cause—but seemingly no crime is involved. Then one of the theater’s crew is found dead backstage, and the case becomes a priority.

It proves a challenging assignment for Diamond: The gruff detective has suffered a lifelong, inexplicable fear of being inside theaters. The phobia began in childhood, but he hasn’t a clue what caused it. His female boss suggests that he see a psychiatrist (“This is in danger of becoming an obsession”); but the investigator takes a more direct approach, tracking down an old teacher who may be able to shine light on a long-ago trauma.

The book’s title thus serves double-duty: Diamond is struck with panic before the proscenium, while victims are struck by real violence backstage.

Mr. Lovesey’s narrative is swift, but he takes time out for local color and abundant humor, the latter springing from the book’s quirky characters, including the matriarch who opens her estate for charity functions (“They come from miles around for a slice of my famous lemon drizzle cake”) and the Gilbert-and-Sullivan-quoting patrolman whose verbal gymnastics—”Permit me to introduce Constable Reed. Reed can write at speed, so Reed is needed. Oh, yes, there is a need for Reed”—drive Diamond to distraction.

The most engaging character, of course, is Diamond himself: always driving slowly “at his usual steady 40” but quick with judgments. He warns a patrolman: “You’ll soon learn that I’m not easy to work for. Whatever you do, it’s wrong.” But a female friend tells him: “I quite enjoy your grouchy moments. You can be amusing and curmudgeonly at the same time.”

Mr. Lovesey is a wizard at mixing character-driven comedy with realistic-to-grim suspense. And in a writing career spanning four decades, he has created a stylish and varied body of work that includes—in addition to nearly a dozen Peter Diamond titles—eight Victorian thrillers with Sergeant Cribb in charge; three Edwardian comedies of manners and mystery; a Hollywood silent-movie-era caper; a 1920s ocean-liner adventure; two novels of life in the English country and city in the 1940s; and four volumes of short stories. Mr. Lovesey’s sports novel, “Goldengirl” (1977)—published under the pseudonym Peter Lear—was made into a movie, and dramatizations of his Sergeant Cribb series were seen in the U.S. on PBS’s “Mystery!” series in the early 1980s.

The first Cribb thriller, “Wobble to Death,” marked Mr. Lovesey’s fiction debut in 1970 and is still a good introduction to the author’s work. Mr. Lovesey, a former English teacher, wrote the book hoping to win a £1,000 fiction-writing prize (he did). The title derives from the name—”wobbles”—given to six-day walking competitions that were held in Britain in the 1880s. The fatal poisoning of a “champion pedestrian” during such an event introduced readers to Sergeant Cribb—40ish, not eccentric but with a sense of humor all his own—and his diligent assistant, Constable Thackeray.

Maybe the best of Mr. Lovesey’s stand-alone books is “The False Inspector Dew” (1982), a tale set in 1921 mostly aboard the ocean liner Mauretania. A henpecked dentist and his girlfriend (who reads too many romances) have booked passage under assumed names, intent on murdering his wife. The complications and coincidences that ensue among a large ensemble cast range from the bizarre to the hilarious, as if in a film directed in alternate sequences by Alfred Hitchcock and Preston Sturges.

That Mr. Lovesey would make a midcareer transition from period fiction to contemporary police investigations is just as surprising as one of the sudden mood shifts in any of his idiosyncratic works—and just as satisfying.

SARA PARETSKY created female private eye V.I.Warshawski in 1982, changed the face of crime writing and became an inspiration to women (and some men) writers. She was the founder of Sisters in Crime and is the new Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America.

I have been a Peter Lovesey fan since first reading his Sergeant Cribb novels, but my favorite of Lovesey’s characters has always been Peter Diamond, the irascible, technophobic deputy superintendent with the Bath and Avon police. In Stagestruck, the newest Peter Diamond mystery, Bath’s Theatre Royal is the beautifully realized setting for a mystery as intricate as the backstage wings, flies, and dressing rooms of the theater itself.

For writers, the theater has always been a perfect breeding ground for murder. Perhaps because plays strip away the gloss we put on top of ambition or jealousy or even love, actors, directors—and wardrobe mistresses—also give way to intense emotions behind the scenes.

In Stagestruck, a fading pop star takes a leading role in a play at the Theatre Royal. Minutes into opening night, something in her make- up badly burns her face. Suspicion falls on the assistant wardrobe mistress who helped with her make up, but as is always true with Lovesey, things are never what they seem. When the assistant herself is found dead, an apparent suicide, Diamond is pressured to end the investigation. Readers know it was murder, and finally, Diamond’s boss—a wonderful study of a bureaucrat in action—is forced to agree with us, and with the superintendent.

Lovesey is a master of the crime novel. The regulars on Diamond’s team—Ingeborg, Keith Halliwell, the unimaginative John Leamann—are vivid characters in their own right. The dynamic among them, and between them and Diamond himself, is what brings the reader back, as much as Lovesey’s masterful plotting. Lovesey has perfected what I call “the hand is quicker than the eye” school of crime writing. Nothing is concealed from the reader, and we learn the truth along with Diamond, but we also are deceived, like Diamond, through a series of plausible miscues until the awful truth is finally revealed.

As is true of everything Lovesey writes, the history and descriptions of place are not just impeccable, but also are woven so seamlessly into the story that you absorb them along with the mystery and the characters.

I’m jealous of everyone discovering Lovesey and Diamond for the first time—you have a wonderful backlist to catch up on. Me, all I can do is wait for the next book.