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.

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.

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.

Peter Lovesey on the rise of the historical mystery novel

Mystery readers watch out. Your favourite bookshops are under seige by ancient Egyptians, conquering Romans, mediaeval monks, cloaked Elizabethans and crinolined Victorians. The rise and rise of the historical mystery has been the dominant trend of the last thirty years. Authors like Ellis Peters, Anne Perry and Lindsey Davis achieved bestselling status. Other high profile writers better known for their modern settings — I’m thinking of Ed McBain, Michael Crichton, John Gardner, Colin Dexter and Ken Follett – could not ignore the trend and produced their own history mysteries.

In the days when there were fewer of them I wrote eight Victorian mysteries between 1970 and 1978 and I am often asked what inspired them. The answer is simple: the lure of money. In 1969 I saw an advert for a crime novel competition with a first prize of a thousand pounds, which was about as much as I was earning as a teacher. The script had to be delivered in a little over four months. Not much time for research and plotting. I’d already published a non-fiction book on the history of athletics, so it seemed sensible to write about something I’d already mugged up, a long distance running race in 1878. Tossing in a couple of murders, some steamy sex and Scotland Yard’s finest, I concocted a whodunnit that was different, if nothing else. The title, Wobble to Death, was catchy, and it won the prize.

In the next seven years I wrote a series using Victorian enthusiasms as backgrounds: prizefighting, the music hall, the seaside, inventions, spiritualism, boating and the waxworks. They were dramatised for the TV series Cribb in 1980 and, together with my wife Jax, I wrote six additional TV scripts using the same characters, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray. I was in serious danger of being pigeon-holed as a history mystery man and nothing else. I started plotting my escape, writing books set rather later in the twentieth century. I suppose they qualified as period pieces, if not what most of us think of as history. One called On the Edge was set in 1946, well within my memory. It took me twenty-one years to break out completely and write my first contemporary crime novel, The Last Detective (1991).

So what is the appeal of the historical mystery? I doubt if I’m qualified to judge. I enjoy writing them, but I don’t read many. I’ve heard it suggested that readers like to escape into the past when so much about the present is depressing. That may be so, but it isn’t obvious to me when I write them. I find I’m more intrigued by things that haven’t changed. It’s amusing to discover that human nature hasn’t altered in thousands of years. The little vanities and the bigger enmities are much the same whether the characters are living in caves or travelling through space.

Take many of today’s hot political topics and you find that people in the past were having to deal with similar problems in their own way. As I write this, the headlines are dominated by drug use in sport. In Wobble to Death, the athletes were taking drugs to improve their performance. The motives were the same, even if the chemistry was different. They pepped up their performance with strychnine; the modern athlete takes something called TGH.

The wider use of drugs in society is not a modern phenomenon. Victorians had their opium dens which were thought iniquitous by respectable people – who took chloral and laudanum as sedatives. The Queen herself was said to have been a cocaine freak, addicted to Marioli’s Cocoa Wine, in which pure coca was the main ingredient.

What else are our newspapers preoccupied with? Terrorism? The Fenian campaign of the 1880s (the basis of Invitation to a Dynamite Party) was quite as serious and scary as the IRA attacks more than a century later. The Fenians succeeded in bombing Scotland Yard, the House of Commons, the Tower of London, Westminster Hall, the Admiralty and Victoria Station.

Another hot topic of today is immigration. Accounts of Irish immigrants being dumped on the English and Welsh coasts by shipmasters after the failure of the potato crops in 1845 and 1846 have a strikingly modern ring to them. And any student of the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 will confirm that the East End teemed with East European immigrants.

Royal scandals? I got to know Bertie, the fun-loving Prince of Wales, quite well when writing three novels based on the assumption that he would have made a not very competent, but unstoppable detective. Bertie’s situation, wanting responsibility and a hand in the affairs of state, yet compelled to wait, appealed to me. There are parallels with modern royalty that I need not labour here.

One of the delights of weaving history into the mystery is that trivia found in memoirs and biographies can be used to bring colour to the characters and their motives. I like the story of Bertie’s brother, Prince Leopold, having such a crush on Lillie Langtry — the Jerry Hall of her day — that he bought a portrait of her by Frank Miles and hung it over his bed. Queen Victoria spied the drawing and was so scandalised that she climbed on a chair and removed it. I read somewhere else that Victoria in old age achieved the perfect symmetry of fifty-eight inches both in height and waistline. Climbing that chair couldn’t have been easy.

I hope I’ve written enough modern mysteries to ensure that my publishers won’t get more enquiries like the one from a Mrs Robinson in 1981:

Dear Mr Lovesey,

I have read two or three of your Victorian detective stories about Sergeant Cribb with immense pleasure, but I have not written to thank you because I assumed that you died many years ago. My husband Frank says he thinks you may still be alive. We had quite an argument about it in bed last night. I suppose it does not really matter, but we would be very pleased to have this question cleared up.

Yours sincerely etc.

PS Just in case, I enclose a stamped addressed envelope.

Crime Writer Peter Lovesey on setting stories close to home

‘We’re talking body parts. Some leg bones, a ribcage and a piece of an arm. The River Wylye, near Warminster.’

‘That’s Wiltshire.’

‘It’s only a half-hour drive.’

‘It’s not our patch.’

‘With respect, sir, killers don’t work to county borders like us.’

This extract from The Vault illustrates a modern crime writer’s dilemma. Readers enjoy stories set in real places. Part of the strength of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels or Ian Rankin’s Rebus series is that Oxford and Edinburgh are so strongly evoked that they make the stories more believable. There is a downside, however, and that is that by blurring fact and fiction the writer risks upsetting the locals. If those body parts had been discovered in some recognizable spot the people who lived there would be (I was about to write ‘up in arms’ but I’ll rephrase it) understandably upset. They might even phone their lawyers.

I lived in Upper Westwood for almost twenty years, and wrote most of my books there. This corner of Wiltshire, above the spectacular Limpley Stoke Valley, yet riddled with subterranean quarries, would stimulate any writer’s imagination. For a number of years I resisted. My first books were set in Victorian London. I was fortunate in getting a TV series for Cribb, the detective sergeant played with wonderful subtlety by Alan Dobie. But I wanted to write a contemporary series and it seemed obvious to create a detective closer to home. He became Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath Police.

Bath was only seven miles from Westwood, and I combined sight-seeing with shopping and called it research. The Last Detective established Diamond in the real police station in Manvers Street and venturing as far west as Chew Valley Lake. These settings made a nice change from the fog-enshrouded streets of Victorian London, but I learned early that if I fixed a real location for a murder I had to be discreet. It wouldn’t do to pick someone’s house and say which number of the street it was. I was constantly reining back my desire to give the total picture.

I didn’t stray into Wiltshire until the third book in the series, The Summons, when Diamond’s sleuthing takes him to Conkwell Woods, to an imagined ‘state-of-the-art recording studio in the wilds of Wiltshire’ in search of information about a murdered Swedish girl. The story reaches its climax in a village with a church where ‘knobbly pinnacles in profusion compensate for the lack of a steeple, removed by a storm in 1670’ — Steeple Ashton. It was ‘the most civilised arrest in the combined experience of all the detectives’, but you must read the book to find out why.

Following the principle that if the crimes originated in Diamond’s area, he could still roam widely to clear them up, I set my locked room mystery Bloodhounds partly on a padlocked canal boat at the Dundas boatyard and partly at Lucknam Park, that plush hotel near Colerne. My daughter Kathy’s wedding reception had been held there and as father of the bride I’d been a regular visitor making arrangements. It was a gorgeous wedding, so I refrained from sullying a good memory by discovering corpses on the premises.

Nearer home, in Upon a Dark Night, one of the characters is a former mayor of Bradford on Avon who has a silver figurehead mounted on his white Bentley, a replica of the gudgeon located above the medieval lock-up that enables the unfortunate prisoner to be ‘under the fish and over the water’. Details like this are fun to weave into a story.

In The Vault, I had Diamond in a mystery involving Frankenstein. I’d read that Mary Shelley wrote much of her famous horror story in a house almost touching Bath Abbey, it was so close. The building was demolished in Victorian times, but I speculated that its basement remained and bones are discovered there. Later Diamond is required to visit the hamlet of Stowford and – just as I did in the interest of research – enjoyed a cream tea in a fifteenth century farmhouse. How we writers suffer for our art.

Naming a real setting was out of the question in The Reaper, a black comedy in which the rector of a Wiltshire village is accused by the bishop of embezzling the church funds and picks up a heavy glass paperweight of St Paul’s and … I’d better not say more. You won’t find Foxford on any map any more than Marcus Glastonbury was a real bishop or Otis Joy a real clergyman. But one thing is true: I’ve had letters from vicars and rectors saying they enjoyed it.

One evening the Bradford on Avon Arts Society had a talk by a remarkable speaker and writer, Joan Moules, who introduced me to the Warminster Writers’ Circle. That putdown ‘You need to get out more’ applies to me and I did with these friends, some published, some just beginners. Out of that has come another book. A writers’ circle is a perfect group of suspects, especially when a publisher promises much and lets them down. After The Circle, appeared in the bookshops I wondered if I would dare set foot in Warminster again, but they were totally forgiving.