A Clue!

posted by Peter James @ 3:16 PM   3 Comments

Some of you are really hot!!!! :-) However the question you have got to answer is not just what it is, but WHERE it is. Here is your first clue!

Christmas Competition - Win A Bottle Of Champagne!

posted by Peter James @ 3:58 PM   15 Comments

Not Normal In Amsterdam

posted by Peter James @ 4:42 AM   1 Comments

I've just been on a book tour in Holland and Antwerp with my wonderful Dutch publishers, De Fontein.

I had bad memories of Amsterdam from a previous visit 25 years ago. I sailed with my then wife, Georgina, in a dinky-sized yacht with two friends, from Orford Ness (a pretty Suffolk coastal resort with a great fish restaurant - Buttimer's Oystery - though not as great as the truly brilliant Riverside in West Bay, near Bridport in Dorset - in case you are reading this near either and are hungry!) We had a dramatic journey, becalmed in shipping lanes in the North Sea for 40 hours (because the owner of the yacht had forgotten to fill up with fuel), then running out of food and water.

When we finally sailed up the river and entered Amsterdam, it was during a major student riot. Walking down a narrow street along a canal, we were confronted by a surging mass of several thousand people running blind with panic towards us, being driven by mounted police with batons. Suddenly our jolly jaunt turned into one of the worst moments of terror of my life. I realized that if we stood still we would be crushed, and we literally had to climb over the side, and hang above the canal, holding on to the edge of the road with our hands, until the crowds and horses had surged past.

I don't know if it was anything to do with the boat trip, but the couple we went with divorced soon after - and some years later we did also. Maybe the ultimate pre-nuptial test should be to becalm two couples in the middle of the North Sea in a very small boat with no food or water for 40 hours and see how much they dislike each other at the end of it!

Luckily my recent visit was less eventful. It was so busy, with wall to wall interviews, that I never even had time to say hello to my friend Kathy Reichs, who I discovered by coincidence was staying in the same hotel at the same time, doing interviews in the next meeting room to mine!

But I did have time to do some sight-seeing. Something I've learned is that every city has one museum that you really, really, really do not want to visit. Not, at any rate, if you are normal.... Fortunately or otherwise, I'm not normal. Normal as someone once told me, is a setting on a washing machine. N for N is a derogatory term that doctors In Norfolk (a county once unjustly stigmatized with having a higher than average percentage of interbred inhabitants) used to write on patients' notes. It stood for Normal For Norfolk.

The museum in Paris, for example, that you seriously do not want to visit - before lunch at any rate - is the Museum of Surgical Instruments in St Germain. On display is everything a man never wanted to know about having a kidney stone removed, in the 19th century and earlier. A long, thin metal rod, with what looks like a multiple fish-hook on the end that would be inserted through the man's - sorry, cannot go on typing, my eyes are watering too much!!!

In fact there is not much that would have been fun back then, in the days of primitive surgery, and before anaesthetics. Because operations were so painful, surgeons in the mid-19th Century used to advertise on their speed. You would see adverts that read things like, 'Your Gall Bladder Removed In Five Minutes Or Your Money Back!"

The particular museum I visited in Amsterdam was the Torture Museum. It is in semi-darkness and the instruments are all accompanied with sketch drawings, illustrating their use. Here's some photos if you dare to look...

Primitive but effective

Even more uncomfortable than it looks!

Will make sure you don't fall asleep reading

Nipples pierced, anyone?

Curiously the museum is open until 10pm - just the sort of thing to vist before bedtime if you want a truly sleepless night.

And if you don't... there's the city's famous Red Light district. I found it quite bizarre - I had imagined it to be a small concentration of sleazy alleyways - but not a bit. It is open and brazen, in an old and beautiful area, and many of the shop windows - and they really are shop windows - are lined along the canals. Every shape, size, age and race of female, scantily clad, smile out at you like battery-operated animated mannequins, and some rap on the windows to get your attention. I found this whole region fascinating, but about as erotic as walking through the frozen produce section of a supermarket.

But I did eat in a truly wonderful restaurant - very modern, very brilliant food and delightful service, and the owner cooks himself. It's called Restaurant Van de Markt. And the hotel was a gem, converted from a row of historic houses along a canal, it has a reputation as something of a writers' haunt. Hotel Ambassade

Speaking of haunts... I can't get that damned spindly instrument in Paris out of my mind....

Moped Thief

posted by Peter James @ 1:34 PM   6 Comments

My research for my Roy Grace novels has led to my developing some great relationships with a number of Sussex Police officersw, and they frequently tell me stories about incidents they have been involved with. I thought I would share this one with you, which was emailed to me yesterday by a young undercover officer, and really made me chuckle.

"Had the day off and ended up going to a Halloween party late Saturday night, dressed in a kilt, a BRIGHT red flouncy silk fencing shirt, and had my face painted up like a zombie with some rather realistic stage blood all down my face.

So imagine the surprise two 16 year old moped thieves got at 5 in the morning when on my way home, as I staggered up a road (rather tipsy), I lurched out of the darkness and flattened one of them!

His mate took one look, squealed and ran away, and I arrested my prey for attempt theft!
He asked some very pertinent questions though, such as:
"Why are you wearing a skirt?"
"Is that real blood?"
And my absolute favourite:
Thief: "I'll bet this is one of those trap scooters, innit?"
Me: "Mate, if this was a trap scooter, would I be dressed like a fucking zombie?""

Rip Off Avis

posted by Peter James @ 4:38 AM   10 Comments

I used to be a big fan of Avis car rentals. Seven years ago in Los Angeles I was involved in a fairly major car accident, and fortunately in a substantial car, a large Cadillac. I was in Santa Monica on Olympic Boulevard, a multiple-lane dual carriageway, dashing to a meeting, when my mobile phone, which had fallen into the passenger footwell, suddenly rang. I glanced down to see where it was and when I looked up, to my horror, everything in front of me had stopped dead. I slammed into the back of a large Lincoln Continental, shunted that into a large Ford SUV, which in turn was shunted into the back of a small truck, which in turn when into the back of a Lexus. With airbags exploding at me in all directions, it felt like being inside a large bouncy castle.

The guy in the front truck leapt out and started yelling that it was all the fault of some asshole who had made a sharp right turn in front of everyone. I was not going to disagree with him! Luckily no one was hurt, but none of the vehicles were driveable. Twenty minutes later a low-loader arrived, driven by a guy who looked straight out of the A Team, with a big smile on his face and a brand new Cadillac for me, and five minutes later, red as a beetroot with embarrassment, but very, very relieved that I would still get to my important meeting on the far side of LA, I drove off, leaving behind the four other drivers, now stranded, gloomily filling out insurance forms. I could not have praised Avis higher. (There was an interesting postscript -- about ten months later I got a call from a lawyer telling me not to worry, I had been fully insured, but he needed a statement as four different drivers had made claims against Avis totally over $10m dollars, two of them saying they had not worked since the accident. Good old USA kompensation kulture...) .

I do have to say the accident really shook me up. If I had been in a small car, I might have been very seriously injured -- and conversely if it had been a small car, or, say, a motorcycle in front of me, I could have caused serious injury or even killed someone. I can fully see just how dangerous the distractions of mobile phones can be to any driver. I use one a lot in the car -- always on hands free now -- but I know my concentration is less good when I'm on it. On a lighter note, a couple of years ago, I was my Aston Martin Vanquish on an almost deserted German autobahn (on one of the rare occasions the car was actually working) trying to see how fast it would go. I watched the speedometer needle climb past 180mph, then 185mph, and suddenly my phone rang. "Don't answer it!" a very white-faced Helen sitting beside me said, remarkably calmly. I didn't!!!

Back to Avis, who undid all their LA goodwill and got a big black mark from me two years ago in Perth, when I rented a Toyota Landcruiser, which had a very old roof-rack. Helen very slightly dented the front of this roof-rack when she drove into an underground car park (no one had warned us the car would be too high) and despite having full insurance, Avis stung me for £400, debiting it from my credit cards and ignoring my letters of protest afterwards.

Now, in Mallorca a few weeks ago, Avis have made me so mad I am going to return my "Preferred Customer" card to the CEO: I was there for a few days for research, and rented an Opel thing ( I call it a thing, because it was one of my pet hate cars -- a people carrier -- a class of vehicle that Jeremy Clarkson once rather aptly named "vans with windows". He also said that as MPVs were mostly bought by people to transport their children in, the initials "MPV" clearly stood for "My Penis Verks").

When I returned it to Avis at Palma Airport, the rude slimeball employee of Avis insisted that the car was scratched and wanted to dock me several hundred Euros. I pointed out that the car was not scratched, this was dust that had been brushed by stiff grass and to prove my point wiped the "scratches" off with my finger. He then pointed at another. I did the same. This farce went on for about five minutes and he was adamant that some of them, at least, were scratches. I was so angry I was prepared to miss my flight and demanded he call the police. He finally backed off, but it left me with a very bad taste about Avis.

Car returned up to scratch...

This was not improved when the next day I rang Avis's customer service department and told them I wanted a full explanation and apology. I've never heard back from them. They used to have a motto - "We try harder". Clearly they should add on to the end the words "to upset our customers." So beware, if you rent a car from Avis and think you have a bargain, wait until you return it to them...