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Working Flat Out On The New Roy Grace Novel

Apologies for the absence of a new blog post. I am closeted away trying to finish my new Roy Grace novel, "Dead Man's Footsteps", by August 12th and having to put everything else aside in order to write flat out.

I will resume my blog as soon as possible, and also forgive my tardy reply to many of your emails for the same reason, which I hope you can understand - so please forgive me!

Dead Simple and Roy Grace Television Series

Thanks to all of you who have emailed me about the prospect of a TV series based on my Roy Grace books. There is a lot of work going on behind the scenes about the possibility of a Roy Grace television series, but please do not expect it to happen anytime soon. At the moment I am biding my time until I can be assured that everything about the television adaptation will be just right. I care very deeply about the Roy Grace series of novels and I want to ensure that when the series is made that it is faithful to the books, and that the character of Roy Grace is played but an unknown, rather than having a famous actor play him as just another of the many roles of his career.

I also want to ensure that the accuracy of police procedures that I strive so hard to put into my book is reflected in any series. I find it incredible how poorly researched some of our biggest crime series on UK television are. One particular bête noire of mine -- and any tv writer, producer or director reading this, please take note: For many years now any serious crime scene in the UK is immediately cordoned off with Police tape. A scene guard is posted, who will be a uniform PC or PCSO, who signs everyone in and everyone out. He has authority to refuse entrance to anyone -- and I mean, ANYONE, including the Chief Constable of his county, not dressed in protective clothing. Those white SOCO all-in-ones are not there to protect delicate Scene of Crime officers from getting dirty: They are there to protect the crime scene from outsiders contaminating it. So when David Jason, as Frost, blunders into a crime scene in which SOCOs are at work, in his old brown mac and his brogues it really shows someone hasn't done the most basic of homework -- and I think it is insulting to viewers.

Of course writers of crime novels and of their television adaptions have to take poetic licence. Most of the work of senior investigating officers is deskbound -- it is the minions who go out and about, interviewing people. So I have to make Roy Grace more proactive than would be usual for someone in his position, but I explain why he likes to be hands on.

I certainly plan to write some of the series, and to story edit all of it, and to be on set in a producing capacity. I talked a little more about the possibility of a Roy Grace television series in this interview with Screen International.

I will post information up here the moment there is any progress on the series.

Permanently Out Of Print

I have been getting a lot of emails from readers about why my novels Getting Wired, Dead Letter Drop, Atom Bomb Angel and Billionaire are all out of print. I've now updated this website's Books page with more info about all these books and my reasons for deliberately keeping all four books permanently out of print.

Here's the background info if you're interested:

Getting Wired:
This is the only children's book I have written (apart from doing the English translation for a series of Biggles cartoon books a long time back.)

I enjoyed the experience of writing it and we had some wonderful reviews, and I had intended it to be the start of a series of stories about a group of school children getting into adventures and danger over the internet. I wrote the first one in 1995, in the very early days of the Internet. Yorkshire Television, now part of Granada, approached me, interested to buy the rights. Then some weeks later, they wrote to me, saying that after much deliberation, they had decided that children weren't really very interested in anything to do with computers. I think that remark should go down in history!!!!

Ultimately, although I had fun writing the book, and did in fact complete a second manuscript, I found I preferred the freedom of writing my novels - and still an amazing amount of kids seem to enjoy my adult books - the darker the better!

Dead Letter Drop, Atom Bomb Angel and Billionaire
I wrote these three books in the early 1980s, after reading a newspaper article which said there was a shortage of spy thrillers! I was amazed that my first attempt, Dead Letter Drop got published,an I was even more amazed that it did not do well! It was published in hardback in the UK by W H Allen and in paperback by Star (now part of Virgin Books). My subsequent spy thriller, Atom Bomb Angel, fared no better, and nor did my financial thriller, Billionaire. Although they got some nice reviews, as they saying goes, they rose without trace. And sank without trace, too...

Writing them was a good learning experience, but I feel that my writing has improved a lot since then and that readers who have enjoyed my work since Possession onwards would be disappointed if they read these earlier ones. So I have withdrawn them, and keep them permanently out of print.

Sunday 1st July: A Black Day For Liberty

Sunday was a black day for liberty in England. In my view it is one of the worst days for human rights in England in my living memory. Today there comes into force a total ban on all smoking indoors in public places, in particular the work place and all restaurants bars and clubs, imposed by our fascist ban-everything nanny government. And typically of course where is the one public place exempted? The bars in the Houses of Parliament. Well there's a surprise....

Many of us who are non-smokers will say the ban is great, hooray, now we can walk into pubs and restaurants and all kinds of other places not have to smell foul smoke. Fine. But there are 13 million smokers in England. Not an insignificant amount of people who have suddenly been turned into pariahs overnight, and will have to suffer the indignity of going outside into our vile climate to enjoy a cigarette, or a cigar or a pipe.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that restaurants should be smoke free. People who don't smoke should be able to enjoy a meal in a restaurant without having to breathe in the smoke of other diners. What is totally wrong is the utter intolerance being shown to smokers. No consideration for these 13 million people other than patronizing comments from politicians that now they can give up. Well, a lot of them don't want to give up, thank you.

No distinction is made between the person who mainlines sixty fags a day and the person who smokes one a day, or one cigar a week, perhaps after dinner with a fine cognac. Will they be banning alcohol next, regardless of whether you enjoy one glass of wine a day or two bottles of meths? My late mother enjoyed the occasional cigarette after dinner -- and smoked a total of about ten cigarettes a year. And there are plenty of light smokers like her, for whom a few cigarettes a week cannot possibly harm any more than a walk down a city street ingesting traffic fumes.

What is completely wrong is that people cannot even smoke now in private clubs. You cannot have a cigar club. How ridiculous is that? Even in health-conscious New York and Los Angeles there are cigar bars where a smoker can go, drink, smoke, have a fine meal -- in short, a proper evening out. And the reason private clubs have not been exempted? Because the government thought that would be unfair to pubs!

This legislation is shameful, ill-thought out, hysterical knee-jerk reaction. Weak Tony Blair allowed himself first to be bullied into the Iraq war by Bush, and then bulled into this legislation by our Chief Medical Officer, Dr Liam Donaldson, who threw a tantrum, threatening to resign if there was anything less than a total ban.

And just what is Dr Liam Donaldson's track record like? He tells us that passive smoking kills millions of people, despite there being no evidence to support this and plenty to the contrary. But then we are talking about a man on a mission. They say that truth is the first casualty of war, and I suspect that facts are the first casualty of the zealot. In 2005 this man predicted that 50,000 Britons would die from the bird flu epidemic and that we could be looking at a possible death toll of 750,000 in the UK. Two years on the total deaths from avian flu, worldwide, have been 191. Not a single on in the UK.

One particularly ludicrous aspect of this legislation is the ban on smoking in the work place. I have received two expensive packs (yes, not just one, but two!) of signs I must display in my workplace. So my study is my workplace. If I wanted to smoke in my study does that mean I could not? So no writer in the UK can smoke at his or her desk unless they move it outside? I'm showing a picture of myself in my workplace. I am holding a cigar.

PJ with cigar in his office

Note: Just in case any nasty little government inspector is lurking out there in cyberspace, observe that my cigar is not lit. But of course it might be lit moments after the photo was taken. And then again it might not. Just like the paradox of Schrodinger's Cat, (which is a theoretical cat put in a box, in a scientific experiment with a bottle of hydrochloric acid and a hammer that would break the glass if radioactive decay allowed it to swing. But the way the experiment is set up, radioactive decay may or may not happen. It was Schrodinder's attempt at showing the incompleteness of early quantum mechanics, by demonstrating that until the box was opened and the result known, the cat was both alive and dead at the same time.)

Today in modern Germany, a country I truly love, where I spend a great deal of time travelling on book promotion, I find genuine freedom everywhere. There are still plenty of stretches of autobahn where there are no speed limits and a fast car can be enjoyed. Despite smoking restrictions coming in, there is talk of bars and other comfortable places where smokers can enjoy themselves. Parents can choose their schools for their children. A nation that once had an image of being controlling and uptight is today the most relaxed of any western country I know.
Somewhere along the line in our ban-everything, control-everything England, we have lost the plot. We used to be a nice country. Democracy, which once meant more than just majority vote -- it meant caring for all -- should now be renamed, The tyranny of the majority.

More than ever now in the 21st century we need to be tolerant of each other, and reasonable about things on which we disagree. This sort of blanket enforcement only erodes the very freedoms for which the UK is famous.

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