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The Only Currency Of True Value

As we head into 2009, all of us are affected in some way by the financial gloom that has enveloped the world. It is a timely moment to reflect on Shakespeare's great and wise words from King Lear: "The worst is not so long as we can say, this is the worst..."

It is all too easy to forget the only thing that actually truly matters in life, which is our health. I have one old, very dear friend and a brilliant researcher for my Roy Grace series, who has recently suffered from a stroke and is fighting bravely to recover. Another friend, not so lucky, who died of an aneurysm last weekend. And my dear mentor Fred Newman, the founder of one of the UK book world's most read publications, "Publishing News", who has supported my writing right from the very start, who died sadly some weeks ago after a long battle with cancer.

I know it is an old cliché, but health ultimately is all that really matters, the only currency of true value. What is the joy of having millions in the bank, but to be too incapacitated to enjoy it, or have only months or weeks to live?

I have often said that one of the cheeriest places I know is also the grimmest, the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, run by the fictitious Cleo, Darren and Walter in my Roy Grace novels, and in real life by the wonderful Elsie Sweetman, Sean Didcott and Victor Sinden. They have to witness and deal with, every day, tragic victims of sudden death - and they have to give comfort to their loved ones. If any one group of people have a true right to feel gloomy all the time it is this remarkable trio. Yet they remain among the most positive and cheerful group of people I have ever been privileged to know. Here is their Christmas card which I want to share with you. If they can keep their humour and keep smiling, in the face of all they have to deal with, then so should we all. Chapeau, Elsie, Sean and Victor!

A Happy, and above all, Healthy New Year to all.

My very best to you.

Peter

Brighton and Hove City Mortuary Christmas Card front cover...

Mortuary Christmas Card inside

...and inside

Christmas Quiz At The World's Best Restaurant

Five years ago, when I wrote Dead Simple, I told Geoff Duffield, the Sales and Marketing supremo of Pan Macmillan, and quite one of the nicest people in the world of publishing, that if he got Roy Grace to No 1 on the bestsellers, I would take him and his wife to any restaurant in the world they wanted to go to. A year later he phoned me and said, "Right, you are No 1 on four lists - now about that restaurant..."

He chose El Bulli, and this September Helen and I took Geoff and his delightful wife, Sarah. This restaurant, accessed by a hairy mountain road at the top of the Costa Brava, just over the French border, is rated by many people as the finest eaterie in the world. It has been awarded this accolade three years running, and is probably the hardest restaurant in the world at which to get a table: It is only open between May - October, and then only for one sitting of dinner.It can take just 54 diners, and has a kitchen staff of 45, as well as a further twenty-plus waiters. Most of the great chefs and restauranteurs of the world have dined there, including Britain's most famous, Heston Blumenthal and the co-owner of London's brilliant Pied-A-Terre.

It is said that two million people apply each year for a table, and almost all of them go into a lottery. At €180 a head for the 38 course (yes, you read it right!) set menu (there is no alternative) it is not cheap -- but actually, for what you get, it is incredible value. With this amount of passion for his food, head chef and co-owner and culinary legend Ferran Adrià could probably charge ten times this amount and still be full every night, but he doesn't.

Nor does he rip you off on the wines. El Bulli has one of the very best sommeliers I have ever encountered. When I asked him to recommend a white, he suggested a wine not only brilliant, but compared to the lists in a lot of fine restaurants, very decently priced at €50. Three bottles later (well we did eat without a break from 8.30pm to 1.30 am) I told him to bring the best red he had in his cellar. He could have tucked me up for a fortune, but he didn't. He produced a stunning red, one of very best I have ever drunk, and by the standards of great wine prices, it was stunningly modest at €100.

For the first half of the meal you don't get sight of the menu, nor do you have knives or forks. You just have a friendly waiter telling you what has arrived and how to eat it - one, two, or three bites!

So now... a signed hardback of Dead Man's Footsteps to the first reader of this blog who can correctly name the principal ingredients in the five courses shown in the photographs below! In the event of no one naming them all correctly, it will be the most number of correct ones! And, a bonus prize of a bottle of champagne to the first reader to correctly name the red wine depicted here and its vintage! The competition closes at midnight on Dec 31st! Email your answers direct to me

Have a wonderful Christmas everyone and tons of good luck - as well as good eating, drinking - and of course, most important of all, good reading - for 2009!

Fan Email Of The Year!

I get many emails every day from you, my wonderful readers here in the UK and around the world. Mostly they are really nice, occasionally they point out an error, just occasionally they are somewhat blunt, like one I received a couple of months ago:

"Dear Mr James, I have just worked out that I am quite a bit younger than you, and I suspect I am probably fitter than you, which means you are likely to die before me. I hope that you have got the resolution to Sandy's disappearance safely tucked away in your publisher's vaults, so that in the event of your sudden demise, we, your loyal readers, are not left in suspense for ever."

Well, I can assure this reader that I am thinking hard about this!

My favourite email of all this year, so far at any rate, is one from a police officer in Brighton, a Detective Constable, who wrote to tell me that he started reading my books after he arrested a suspect earlier this year, and when he was booking him into custody, the suspect turned to him and said, "You know, you're just like a cop in a Peter James novel!"

Straight Into The Charts

I'm delighted to say that thanks to all you wonderful readers, the paperback of Dead Man's Footsteps, which was published on November 27, went straight into the paperback fiction bestseller lists at No 2 on WH Smith and No 6 on the Nielsen Bookscan. I will give a further update next week after its first full week on sale. (Nielsen Bookscan sales figures run from Saturday midnight to Saturday midnight).

If you've not heard of Nielsen Bookscan before, it's the industry standard for measuring book sales - they provide the world’s only continuous retail monitoring service for English-language books in the UK, Ireland, US, Australia, South Africa, Italy and Spain. So for me, it's a real thrill when I hear my book is doing well in their charts!

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