Peter's Blog

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PJ Tops Brighton Library Loans!

I was delighted to learn that I was the most borrowed author in Brighton and Hove this past year, with Not Dead Enough hitting No 1 and Dead Man's Footsteps at No 5. Let's hope they all get returned! I had an email from a reader to say she had brought one of my earlier, out of print, novels from Ebay, to discover to her horror there was a library stamp inside! But, perhaps I should take theft of my books as a good sign of passion by my readership! Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have spotted this amusing post from a bookseller two days ago: "Sold 2 copies of Host today, to the same lady!1st one got stolen when she tried shoes in House Of Fraser! Thief of taste?!"

Dead Tomorrow Competition

The excellent Shots crime magazine is currently running a competition where they're giving away 3 signed copies of Dead Tomorrow - all you have to do is answer a simple Roy Grace related question to be in with a chance of winning your own copy! Please see the Shots Magazine Peter James competition page for more info. The competition closes on 1st February and it's open to readers all over the world, not just in the UK.

You can also read an interview I did with Shots Magazine last year if you need help with finding the right answer to the competition. Good luck!

BITING SNOW DUST IN THE NEW YEAR.....

I blame my mate, Arnie Wilson, ski writer for the Financial Times and editor of Ski + Board. He's always trying to find ways to get revenge on me ever since I beat him in a mad off-piste race at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, some years back, in a duel to settle a dispute over carver skis versus traditional ones. (I was on trad ones...) So, when I told him I was going to Meribel, partly on research for a future Roy Grace novel about a death in a ski resort he said, "I'll get my friend Julia Pomagalsky, who is the Press Officer, to show you around..." He omitted to add that (a) she was going to show me around on skiis, and (b) she was two times world snowboarding champion and double Olympiad! Also, as her name might suggest, she is a member of the Poma ski lift family - it was her grandfather who started building ski lifts in 1936 when he decided walking up mountains was too much like hard work. I'm with him on that!

So basically, I spent the entire day chasing a distant red speck on the horizon as we covered what seemed like every run in the famous Three Valleys - I couldn't be sure as conversation was impossible - trying to speak French whilst trying to get your breath back on a chairlift is not easy. The high point of my humiliation was trying to keep her in sight down a steep, mogul-filled black run through a gulley, which she nonchalantly took at twice my speed, ski poles tucked under one arm, deep in conversations on her mobile phone.....

She was, I have to say, in spite of all this, a truly delightful companion for the day, who bought enthusiastically into the idea of a murder in Meribel. I was worried by the gleam in her eye at the end of one run when she started talking enthusiastically about all the different ways to die on skis.... But at the end of a truly shattering day at least I had one compensation for my labours - I got the title for the book.... "Dead Beat."