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INTERVIEW GRAHAM BARTLETT/PETER JAMES


13.05.16 www.thebookseller.com


Graham Bartlett and Peter James


5


OF JAMES’ TOP SELLERS


NOT DEAD ENOUGH Pan, £6.99, 9780330446129


239,636 COPIES


LOOKING GOOD DEAD Pan, £6.99, 9780330434201


224,414 COPIES DEAD LIKE YOU


Pan, £7.99, 9780330456791 223,737 COPIES


Bestselling crime author Peter James has teamed up with a former police officer for a foray into non-fiction


BY PHILIP JONES B DEAD SIMPLE


Pan, £6.99, 9781447262480 222,032 COPIES


righton’s underbelly has long provided the setting for author Peter James’ Roy Grace police procedurals, and the city has also been


the backdrop to retired Sussex police officer Graham Bartlett’s career, which during its later years saw him provide insight and advice for James. Non-fiction title Death Comes Knocking (Pan, July) is


DEAD MAN’S FOOTSTEPS Pan, £6.99, 9780330446136


220,594 COPIES


an attempt written by Bartlett, with help from James, to chronicle some of the cases he encountered, while drawing parallels with the Grace books. The prologue sets the scene: “Not long ago, some people would have urged you to buy just a one-way ticket to Brighton rather than bothering with a return—chances were you’d be dead before you could use the homeward part.” Bartlett says that he always had an urge to write, but his work—unsurprisingly—got in the way. He was a Sussex police officer for 30 years, posted to Brighton and Hove, becoming first a detective, then a homicide investigator, then chief superintendent and the city’s police commander—or, as James refers to him, the “Sheriff of Brighton”. Before you ask, Bartlett is not the inspiration for Grace—that was James’ first police liaison, Dave Gaylor—but he does feature in the books as Graham Barrington, the fictional head of the city’s police. When Gaylor retired, Bartlett took on the role of


James’ contact, a position he regarded with some importance. Says Bartlett: “The way in which Peter wrote about the police, and got the detail but also the nuances of policing spot on, did us huge favours, as it gave the public a real understanding of what we go through as police. It’s fiction, but it reflected the reality.” Death Comes Knocking turns this on its head,


Peter James’ YouTube channel launches on 19th May: PeterJames.com/YouTube


presenting the reality and reflecting on the fiction. There are multiple references to how Grace might have dealt with the crimes or situations Bartlett retells. It also provides publisher Pan Macmillan with an obvious marketing hook for the book—the subtitle is “policing


Roy Grace’s Brighton”—making sure the title will appeal both to fans of true-crime and to James’ own readers. “Nobody sees more of human life over a 30-year career than a police officer,” says James, who confides that he is regularly contacted by retired police officers who fancy dabbling in fiction. “The trouble is they write in a sort of ‘plod-speak’—’He was proceeding in a westerly direction . . .’ “ James says he saw something different in Bartlett. “Graham sent me a couple of blogs and I found the writing compelling, but I told him that to interest a big publisher he’d need a handle—if he’d arrested the Krays, for example. But I said a lot of my fans had asked me to write a non-fiction book based on my research, so I suggested we collaborate. That was the starting point.” Yet for all that, the book is Bartlett’s story. It is surprisingly personal—and all the better for it. Bartlett, for example, describes the emotional turmoil he goes through when attending a cot-death at a time when he and his wife were struggling to conceive (they eventually had triplets), the difficulty police have delivering “the death message” to a deceased person’s relative, and the harsh reality of arresting a colleague gone wrong. He is also, at times, deliberately pointed, taking aim


in particular at defence lawyers for getting the guilty off, sometimes on a technicality: “How do they sleep?”; there is an occasional side-swipe at journalists; and criticism aimed at the Reclaim the Street marchers who, in one instance, descend on Brighton Police Station.


COPS AND ROBBERS But at the heart of the book are the crimes, the villains and the cops who deal with it all. Some crooks, such as fallible forgers David Henty and Clifford Wake, are almost Ealing Comedy-like in their ineptitude, while others, such as Paul Teed, who bludgeoned his family to death 30 years ago, are chilling. James is clearly captivated by such stories, while Bartlett says he has learned not to demonise the perpetrators. “I had a road to Damascus moment when I met my old friend Sam, who had become a druggie. I had been looking at the world in a very binary way. It changed my policing philosophy. What underpinned this was the notion that there weren’t really bad people, there were people who did bad things.” In the book, he writes that the chance encounter made him realise that “every villain has a story”. The book has also enabled Bartlett to revisit these characters years on. Henty is now an artist with his own


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