Peter's Blog

“ Keep up-to-date with Peter’s regularly-updated Blog ”

Got Shorty

I arrived late at the Savoy Hotel for the recent Crime Writers Association's very smart event, the Cartier Diamond Dagger Prize. It is a lifetime achievement award, awarded annually. Last year's recipient was Ian Rankin. This year's was to be - ah - well - here's the problem: I hadn't read the invite, just had made a note in my diary that the event was on. On the night my beloved Helen arrived on time (a Swedish national trait) whilst I arrived a fashionable half an hour late, without even being able to blame it on traffic congestion, as I've taken to biking in London. (I've got a brilliant Brompton folding bike. It saves a £15 taxi ride from Notting Hill to the West End, or, by car, a staggering £59 last time I drove in: Notting Hill-Wardour Street-Curzon Street-Notting Hill: Parking NCP in Windmill St. (9.30am-2pm) £30.00. Parking in Curzon Street. 2.30-6.30 £16.00. Congestion charge £8. Petrol £5.00. Gulp! Only problem with the bike is that I arrive unfashionably sweaty.

Having forgotten to read the invite, I had also forgotten to brief Helen on the event. 'Just turn up at the Savoy, looking smart, and I'll meet you at the Crime Writers function.' I said. So she turned up there alone, bumped into one friendly face, Geoffrey Bailey, the Greatest Living English Bookseller, once the scion of Hatchards of Picadilly, now lording it over the Pan Bookshop in the Fulham Road. "Who's that little American in the funny hat?" she asked Geoffrey. When he had finished choking on his champagne he whispered back, reverentially, 'Elmore Leonard.'

It was strange being in the Savoy hotel again. I hadn't been back since spending my wedding night here in 1979. Oscar Wilde wrote a wonderful comment about wedding nights: He said, "Sooner or later, every American groom takes every American bride to visit the Niagara Falls. They must surely be the second biggest disappointment in American married life."

So Elmore got his award. The man hailed as the Boss, the Grandmaster, the Chief, the Big Cheese, is a sprightly if diminutive octagenarian. He spoke eloquently, exuding the energy of a man not even half his age. But was he being forgetful, disingenuous, or downright mischievous when he gave all us other writers present (including Ian Rankin, PD James, and most of the rest of the first division of UK Crime Writing) this piece of advice: "Never start a book off talking about the weather."

Later that night, inspired by his pithy talk, I took a copy of Get Shorty to bed and began reading the first sentence:

"When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of their of-and-on cold winters; thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo for lunch at Vesuvio's on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off."

Got you, Shorty!

Sweden - Light Shining In The Dark

Give any Swede a chance and he or she will raise a glass to you, launch into a lengthy toast, and, if you are really unlucky, you will be expected to sing, from a song sheet you have already been handed. I blame it on the long dark nights, the cold, the totalitarian, Kafkaesque rules under which Swedes live... The biggest solecism you can commit is to fail to look a Swede in the eye when you are being toasted. That means bad luck or worse, bad sex, for the next ten thousand years. Yesterday I was at a wedding in Orebro - a town which is part stunningly beautiful, centering around a medieval castle and a fine river, and in part hideously ugly, filled with the worst kind of 1950s concrete jungle architecture - largely in the style of a shopping centre I once visited in Barnsley.

The toasting and speeches lasted from 4pm until alcohol finally came to my rescue and delivered me into blissful, toast and speech-free oblivion some time after 11pm. That's the great thing about Swedish aquavit. One glass and your legs get disconnected; two and your brain starts shorting out... And the next morning it delivers the mother, father, brothers and sisters of all hangovers... To be honest, I prefer funerals to weddings, but that's a long story, for another day's blog....

Don't get me wrong, I really like Swedes a lot. The stoics who resist the temptation to flee to warmer climes, more benign tax regimes, more tolerant societies and remain behind, making up the nation's 9m or so population, are lovely people, generous and warm hearted. Their countryside is beautiful, their prawns the best on the planet, and their towns and cities have an air of calm that I have rarely found anywhere else. Stockholm where I have come to meet my Swedish publishers, is one of the most stunning looking cities of the world. As well as being one of the coldest. It is late May, well into their summer, and the temperature is struggling to hit 10c in the noonday sun. I'm reminded of Mark Twain's immortal words about another great city surrounded by water: "The coldest winter of my life was a summer I spent in San Francisco." He should have gone to Stockholm!

And all those petty rules do little to warm your heart. Cross a road on a red light and you're off to a penal colony. Want to smoke a cigarette with a glass of wine on the balcony of your hotel at 10pm? Forget it. You can smoke your cigarette, or your Cohiba out there all night, but you have to take your glass of wine inside at 10pm and drink it in the bar. Want to buy a bottle of wine on a Saturday? In your dreams. You should have thought about that on Friday, you alcoholic pervert you. System Bolaget, the state controlled liquor shops, with interiors reminiscent of surgical appliance wholesalers, are resolutely shut all weekend.

Stockholm is on the same latitude as my old home city, Toronto, where the drinking laws were equally draconian. Sweden is under an historic Lutheran influence, whilst English Canada has long suffered the privations of a Scottish Presbyterian heritage. Personally I've never quite got comfortable with the hypocrisy of a religion that makes the imbibing of alcohol compulsory in its churches, but a sin anywhere else.

It's a shame, because Sweden really does have a lot to offer. With Emmanuel Swedenborg, they had one of western world's first intellectual mystics and serious researchers into the paranormal, Axel Munthe wrote one of the most magical books of the 1920s (don't miss his awesome house, Villa San Michelle if you go to Capri), Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, two of the greatest actresses the world has ever seen (Ingrid Bergman co-starred with Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, one of my top 10 all time favourite films), Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest, if sometimes bleakest film directors (see The Seventh Seal) , Erik Carlsson, undisputably the greatest rally driver of his era. And of course their famous exports, Abba, Volvo, Saab and, undisputed king of flatpackland, Ikea.

Best of all, Sweden broke the biggest taboos of prurient post-War western society. It both legitimized pre-marital sex and produced some of the best-looking creatures on the planet with which to enjoy it. And to further enhance the experience, Swedish company Duxiana created the best beds in the world on which do it. It may not, now, be the best endorsement, but the first thing Tony Blair did when he got elected for the first time was buy a Dux bed so he would sleep well. Perhaps he should have stayed in it.

In my posts I'm going to give the names of hotels and restaurants - and the odd tourist site - that I've either really liked or really hated. Here goes with Sweden:

Must see sight in Stockholm: The Vasa Museum. The Vasa was Sweden's Titanic. But unlike our own great doomed ship, the engineering behind the Vasa was so crap that it never even made it out to sea. Overcrowded with sailors and gunner crew, this new flagship of the Swedish fleet, intended to be the greatest and most terrifying warship the world had ever seen, capsized and sank on its maiden voyage, in full sight of the Stockholm shipyard that built it. It is now a national treasure, brought to the surface and placed in its own museum. Hauled up from many fathoms down on the seabed, a testament to something I can't quite fathom... But really a great museum to visit, for all ages. Even if, like me, you are not a museum junkie. See this site for more info about the Vasa.

Peter with Elk in Sweden

Peter with Elk in Stockholm's Food Hall: foodie heaven!

Must eat places in Stockholm: The hot dog is the national snack, available on a good street corner near you. To be eaten bent double against the elements, tissue paper flapping, mustard and ketchup spattering over the cream linen jacket you are wearing because some wazzok told you it would be hot.

Eat a seafood lunch in the food hall in Stockholm - it is total foodie heaven. This is their equivalent to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station in New York. Simple ingredients of the very best imaginable quality. Not cheap, but worth it.

For dinner, go to Pontus By The Sea on the Old Town harbour waterfront, sit in the wonderful, spacious room (with covered exterior for smokers), order their Tuna sashimi, and go for a main-course portion of their cured and blackened salmon starter. Drink their Pouilly Fuisse with it, and the world is going to rather a long way north of OK.

My delightful Swedish publisher, Marika Hemmel of Damm Forlag, took me to Sturehof restaurant in Stureplan, one of the oldest and most famous of Stockholm's restaurants, and it was ace. I started with seared scallops then had their seafood ragout. Sublime. Cannot recall the wine, but it was Spanish, yummy and I got very smashed.

I also ate, memorably, in Prinsen. The British/Armenian 1960s industrialist and bon-viveur Nubar Gulbenkian once said "The best number for dinner is two - myself and a good waiter." We had one of the greatest waiters ever in Prinsen. French, of Algerian extract, the man was a model of charm, attentiveness and assessing our tastes. I had the classic, exquisite Swedish caviare starter, löjrom (one of the dishes I would order for my last meal) followed by slow marinated pork. Foodie nirvanah!

Stockholm hotel: Stayed in the Hotel Rival. Co-owned by Abba superstar Bennie, we got off to a shaky start with a room that felt like a monk's cell. After threatening to leave we were given a beautiful room - and one that did actually look like one of the rooms in their brochure and on their website. (Tip: British people are known for not complaining, so tend to be given the worst rooms in hotels. Always demand to see another room if you are not put in the Presidential suite from the get go) After that everything soared. The staff were constantly delightful and helpful and the place is smart, well located and cool. It reminded me of the W on Lexington in New York.

Adolph Hitler's Chair

I sat in Adolph Hitler's chair last week. Not actually his own personal choice of furniture, but one he had been made to sit on at the HQ of Munich Police. As you can see from the photograph it's a bland, dull little chair, hardly worthy of its small and somewhat insignificant role in world history - and in the continuing unfolding world of crime in Munich today. For this is the chair that every suspect arrested in Munich is sat in to be photographed - frontal and both sides - for as far back in time as anyone there can remember.

Hitler's Chair in Munich Police Station

Suspect ID set-up

Hitler was sat and photographed in this chair when he was arrested following the Putch, in 1923 - his disastrous attempt to seize power through a national Nazi revolution (there is fascinating reading about this on many websites - a particularly vivid one is The History Place.) which left sixteen Nazis and three police officers dead, several of Hitler's henchmen wounded and Goering shot in the thigh.

It has long been a boast (and no idle one) of police forensic scientists that if anyone has ever entered a room, at any time in their life, not matter how long ago and for however fleetingly, given enough time they will find the evidence to prove it. It might be a hair follicle, a clothing fibre, or one of the soup-bowl full of skin cells each of us sheds every week. (Separate fact - a lot of household dust is comprised of dead skin) It was an eerie feeling to be in that room, to sit on that drab, inanimate object, and sense that there were floating around in the air, or ingrained in the walls or floor, some tiny particles of that man who affected my family's life and my own in so very many ways.

Hitler's chair

I wondered why they still kept - and used - this chair. The obvious reason is that it is an extraordinary link with history. But it is a history that pretty well every German I have met wants not merely to forget, but to bury in a deep seal vault from which it can never escape. No one boasted to me about this chair when I was at the HQ - I only found out about it afterwards, when my editor, who had accompanied me on the visit, along with Andy and Sabine, who organize so brilliantly the largest crime writers festival in Germany, the Munich Krimifest, whispered it to me in the taxi as we left.

Peter James in Hitler's Chair

Dodgy suspect!

It made me feel I needed a large drink - and I was probably in the best city in the world for that! Beer doesn't come any larger or more abundantly or dangerously moreish than in Munich. A cynic might be tempted to say that people drink so much there in order to drown the memories of their dark past. But one of the big surprises of my life is how I have found the city and its people to be a constant delight. Although I confess to struggling, just a little, with the traditional Munich breakfast of weisswurst sausage, sweet mustard and a pretzel the size of a tractor tyre, washed down with a stein of weissbeer. And it has to be breakfast - tradition dictates that weisswurst may not be eaten after midday! And you need a pretty solid chair after that...

A German Romance

A strange, and totally unexpected thing has happened to me, I've fallen in love. Not with a person, but with a country. Germany. That probably sounds strang, coming from the son of a Jewish refugee who saw many of her relatives end up in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Belsen, and until last year, I would never have believed it was a country I could ever become attached to. It is one of the biggest and most delightful surprises of my life, and it has really changed my perspective on modern Europe.

My mother arrived in Dover in 1938, twenty-two years old scared and alone, with nothing but the clothes she stood up in, a valise full of gloving leathers and Juden (Jew) stamped across her passport. She and her five siblings only escaped because her father bribed their passage out of Austria into Switzerland, and she only got to England because her elder sister got there first, and cajoled someone into offering her a job. Without that job the English would not have accepted her and the Swiss would have sent her back to Austria and certain death. In my family, although anti-German sentiments were never expressed out aloud, growing up as a child I could always sense some underlying family unease about anything German. Except for one thing: My wonderful, deeply human and principled mother had always coveted a Mercedes SL convertible! But she had never owned one. In 1998 when she was diagnosed terminally ill with cancer, I procured one for her, telling her, 'You've always wanted one - at least have some bit of joy now.' We went for a short drive in it, then she pulled over and handed me the keys with a wry smile and said, 'I love it, it's the most beautiful car I've ever driven. But...' She made a bunch of excuses about it, saying there was no rear seat, the roof was hard to put up and down, the boot was too small... But I understood the real reason - it was German.

Maybe I'm biased because my novel, Dead Simple (Stirb Ewig) has done so well there - getting up to No 7 in the hardback bestseller charts, but it isn't just that. My publishers have brought me over there seven times in the past year and I've travelled to many towns and cities, including Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Wiesbaden, Mainz, Reutlingen and Munich, with more to follow shortly, and I find the people, of all ages and spectrums of society, universally delightful. The biggest surprise of all is to discover the German sense of humour. Contrary to the common myth, they have the best sense of humour I have encountered anywhere in the world. It is a much broader sense of humour than the Americans, who have no grasp of irony, and broader even than the Australians. In my view our sense of humour is closer to the Germans' than to any other nation.

During a meet-and-greet lunch in London last May, with Peter Lohmann, the CEO of Scherz, my publishers, and the editorial director, Julia Schade (who bought, for her previous publishing house, Dan Brown's books when he was unknown and was therefore responsible for bringing the Da Vinci Code phenomenon into Germany), I asked Peter how modern Germany was. He replied that it was very interesting, and for the first time since the war there was a smash hit comedy play in Germany, written by Germans. He went on to say, "You know, our nation has a reputation for not having a sense of humour. It is because we got rid of so many of the people who bring humour to a nation. Now they are returning and it is all changing."

Peter Lohmann was right, in part - it is the Jewish people who have perhaps the most wonderful and certainly the warmest and most philosophical humour of any race. But it is more than that, more than just the humour We really are very similar to the Germans in so many ways, socially and culturally - far more so than with any other nation in Europe. But here is the strange thing, despite their reputation as being hard workers and aggressive, they are a damned sight more relaxed in many ways than us Brits. They have a word for it, Gemütlich - the nearest British translation is "laid back" but it is more than that, it implies tolerance as well as being relaxed. Something we seem to have forgotten in the nasty, intolerant, tyranny-of-the-majority ban-everything, British Isles that the Blair government has turned us into, with horrid town councils like Campden who hound decent citizens in cars into the ground (more of that later), yet care more about the human rights of criminals than their innocent victims.

In Germany, unlike England, almost all pavements have lanes along them for cyclists to ride in safety. They have a health service that works. A brilliant education system. Great food. Best of all, for a petrol head like me, you can still drive a motor car on many stretches of road without fear of a camera or a laser gun. And, interestingly, Germans buy more books per annum than any other nation on the planet (not per-capita - that is Iceland - but total volume!) despite a population of 80m against the USA's 200m+

But despite my eulogy, the shadow of WW2 is always there in some way or another. I asked my editor, Andrea Diederichs, who is 47, what they taught her about the War at school. She replied, "Nothing... until about a week before we left when they said "Oh - by the way, there was a war and we lost." But her parents, she told me, have been traumatized ever since the War. They have never recovered - firstly from the terror of being in a city during all the bombing raids, and subsequently from the guilt about what their nation did.

But it is very different for today's youngsters, where today the War forms a major part of the school curriculum. When I do readings in Germany, often youngsters in their late teens or early twenties come up to me and say things like, "Do you still hate us?" or "Do you still call us Fritz?" I think that all Germans carry something deep in their psyche that they want both to understand and forget, and cannot quite do either. To paraphrase one of their great philosophers, Nietzsche, they are a nation that went to the abyss, and seven decades later it still stares back at them. I deeply admire so much about this country, about the energy of its people and the kindnesses they have shown to me. And about the way they are trying to deal with their past. One of the most powerful images, for me, is the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin - a vast, stunningly sculpted site, with clever use of perspective filled with grey, unmarked tombs as far as the eye can see.

Berlin Holocaust Memorial

My best example of the present trying to come to terms with the past happened a few months ago, when I was one of the guest speakers at a crime-writing festival in Kassel, a stunningly sited hill town to the north of Frankfurt, where the Brothers Grimm lived and wrote. We were given a tour of the sights by a bunch of civic dignitaries, avoiding much of the town centre itself, which looks like Croydon, concentrating on the old parts, which are very fine. Standing high up outside the Grimm house, with spectacular views across 30-40 miles of countryside, I said to the mayor "What a very beautiful town you have." He replied, in a guttural accent, quite politely and a little sadly, "It voz a lot more beautiful until 1943 ven your country flattened it." After a few somewhat awkward moments, he then did go on to say, "I suppose we did start it." "You could say that," I replied.
.
No one can ever forgive or reduce what Hitler and his henchmen did. But there is a danger if we just focus on Germany. Both history - and our modern world, sadly - are blackened with nations engaging in genocide. My own, England, was one of the first - we deliberately gave the Canadian Indians blankets infected with smallpox to try to wipe them out. The white settlers in the USA successfully destroyed the native Red Indian communities. Under Mao there was utter terror in China. Under Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia.

LP Hartley was wrong, when he famously said, "The past is another country, they do things differently there." Tragically, they don't.

15 Seconds Of Fame With Anthony Horowitz

Outside the recent London Book Awards, I bumped into my friend, the phenomenally successful children's book and television writer Anthony Horowitz (The Alex Rider series of books, Midsomer Murders, Foyles War...) who is married to the equally phenomenally successful, multiple award-winning television producer, Jill Green (Foyles War among many others). (Some years back we worked together when she made the four-hour miniseries of my novel Alchemist - which got the highest ever television ratings on Channel Five (all three of their viewers watched it, probably because BBC and ITV were blacked out by strikers, all the other Sky channel signals were down, and the police had issued a message urging everyone to stay indoors because of a chemical gas cloud hovering over the UK)

Anthony and I walked the walk through the screaming press monkeys, stopping several times to pose for photos, Anthony modestly saying it was me they really wanted the photos of, and I, nice compliment though it was, sensed it was really him they were after and would I get out of the ****g way...

Peter James and Anthony Horowitz. Photo © Susan Greenhill

Later that evening, something happened to remind me of how difficult it can be for husband-and-wife business relationships to maintain harmony. I should know, my parents shared a partners desk in their office for 40 years - and although they loved each other very much, they found it so hard to switch off talking business - it would even come up at Sunday lunch - that they ended up taking a lot of separate holidays together. The event in question at the London Book Awards - the Nibbies, as they are known - was Anthony Horowitz winning the award for Children's Writer Of The Year. When I went over to his table to congratulate him afterwards, he was really looking quite upset, for someone at the peak of his game, who had just won one of the highest awards possible. "I rang Jill to tell her the news," he said, miffed. "All she said was, 'Terrific. Don't wake me up when you get home.'"

The several million television viewers who tuned in on Channel Four to watch the star-spangled event, hosted by Richard and Judy at the Grosvenor Park Hotel saw only the great speeches and the glitz. Although it was fun to be there, and collide - and exchange apologies with - a frazzled looking JK Rowling towards the end of the evening, what the viewers did not see was us, 1,800 or so dinner guests patiently sitting at our tables, not allowed to move, not allowed to eat anything, bar a handful of peanuts, from 7pm until 10.15pm, to allow the production and retakes to go smoothly.

But, as they say, that's showbiz. And a very small price to pay for seeing the world I love, the world of books - and ones that people actually want to read, popular books, rather than the dreary-but-maybe-worthy elitist Booker dross, finally given prominence on British television. Thanks so much to the hard pioneering work of Fred Newman, who started it all, and Tony Mulliken and the Midas team who promoted it into the public consciousness.

Category Select

Blog Articles Interviews