With my latest – Against the Grain – I have given my loyal readers 22 Diamonds and that’s the end of it. Ill-health has caught up with me. Peter Diamond, the head of Bath’s murder squad, has brought his last killer to justice. How do you round off a long series? Kill off your detective, as Colin Dexter did with Morse and Agatha Christie with Poirot? Or retire him to keep bees in Sussex, as Conan Doyle did with Holmes after unsuccessfully trying to kill him off in The Final Problem? You wouldn’t want me to tell you my solution before reading the book.
Instead, I decided to share some thoughts in Crime Time about my experience of writing a long series. The funny thing is that it was never meant to become a series. The Last Detective, written in 1991, was planned as a one-off. Up to then, I had written mainly historicals, a Victorian series of eight books and several TV scripts about Sergeant Cribb, one of the first CID officers at Scotland Yard; and a mini-series of three featuring Bertie, the Prince of Wales as a far-from-competent amateur detective. I was nervous of writing anything about a modern policeman. I knew little about police procedure or forensic science. This new book was just a toe in the water. To hide my ignorance, I made Peter Diamond the last of a vanishing generation of Scotland Yard men who beat up suspects, disregarded the rules and despised the men in white coats. He came to genteel Bath, created mayhem, solved a difficult crime in his rough and ready way and was dismissed for overdoing the rough part.
To my surprise, my toe in the water made a big splash. The Last Detective won the best novel award, the Anthony, at the Toronto Bouchercon. Julian Symons, the harshest of critics, called it a brilliant performance and wrote in the Times Literary Supplement. “We will be lucky if we get a more baffling or entertaining crime puzzle to read this year.” There was pressure from many sides for Diamond to get another outing.
Problem: he was no longer a policeman. In Diamond Solitaire, he is a security man in Harrods and is presented with a crime he must solve alone. We see a different side to his character, in which he rescues a lost autistic Japanese girl caught in a plot involving the New York mafia. I was getting to like this man. I needed him back in the police and I had to write another book, The Summons, to make it possible.
I was soon to learn that writing a series can bring its own problems, the biggest of which is that the characters get too predictable. If there comes a point when the writer is working to a formula, he had better give up or make serious changes. Six books in, I knew Diamond far too well. I needed to see how he would react to a life-changing experience. At the beginning of Diamond Dust, his wonderful wife Steph is murdered.
I was inundated with protests from readers. ‘How could you do that?’ If I gave a talk, this was always the first question – and my answer never went down well. Creatively, the series had benefited, but I wasn’t forgiven. I can only plead that I have written another sixteen books and that would never have happened if Diamond’s cosy existence had continued.
I have learned that a long series is, in effect, a saga, with a spread of characters whose lives are developing independently of the main character and the stories he is involved in. Diamond’s team have their stories, too, and readers identify with them more completely than I had appreciated before I brought Steph to centre stage and killed her. I am often asked if it is necessary to read them in the order in which they are written, I used to answer breezily that it doesn’t matter where you dive in. Each book in the series should work as a stand-alone mystery story. After twenty-two books, I’d probably give a different answer.
Against the Grain is released by Sphere in the UK on 17 November and by Soho Press in the USA on 3 December
