“These are my dead friends”: Peter James on Dead Like You

Dead Like You is the sixth book in the Roy Grace series. Detective Superintendent Grace is a professional whom a lot of readers can probably relate to: he’s decent and dedicated. But he’s suffered tragedy in his life – his wife’s disappearance – and also uses some quite unusual methods. Where did the idea for Roy Grace come from?

Roy Grace was inspired by a real life police officer, Dave Gaylor. The first time I met him was 15 years ago, when he was a Detective Inspector in Brighton. I went into this office and the floor was covered in piles of blue and green crates crammed with manila folders. I asked him if he was moving and he replied, deadpan, “No, these are my dead friends.” I thought, great, I’ve just met the only weirdo in Sussex CID! He then went on to explain that he just been put in charge of reopening unsolved cases – what we now call ‘cold cases’ – for Sussex Police. He said that each crate contained the principal case files of an unsolved homicide. Then he said something that had a big impact on me: “I am the last chance the victims have of justice, and the last chance the families have for closure.” I thought these were incredibly human words, and when my publishers asked me some years ago if I would like to create a new detective character, I immediately remembered this.

The great thing is that Dave Gaylor, who rose to the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent, knows he is the career model (but not physical model) for Roy Grace and loves it! He and I have become very close friends over the years. He reads each book as I go along, normally in 150 page chunks and we talk through all aspects of the police activity in the story and who in the force it would benefit me to talk to, and we travel overseas to police conferences together and meet other police contacts around the world – most recently to New York, and to the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

I wanted to make Roy Grace different to other fictional detectives. I thought really hard about what it is that detectives actually do, and I realised that first and foremost what they do is to solve puzzles! Every major crime, whether a murder, a rape, a big robbery or a fraud, is a puzzle, to be solved in steady, painstaking steps. I thought it would be intriguing to create a detective who had a personal puzzle of his own that he could not solve, and I came up with the idea that Roy Grace has a missing wife. Almost nine years before we meet him, we learn that he came home on his 30th birthday to find his wife, Sandy, whom he loved and adored, had vanished. And he has not had any sighting of her or word from her since.

Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice

When it comes to genre, I’m usually more True Blood than true crime. But it’s a wrench to resist Jake Adelstein’s story, as told in his book Tokyo Vice: Jewish-American kid applies for a job at a Japanese newspaper (and not just any newspaper; it’s the Yomiuri Shimbun, which has the highest circulation of any newspaper in the world) and despite his Japanese language score being in the bottom ten, he’s called in for an interview and he gets the job, only to end up sitting opposite a member of the biggest organised crime group in Japan, who is relaying a death threat from his boss. Just another day in the life, really.

Adelstein’s first posting is in half-rural, half-suburban Urawa, a ‘place considered so uncool by urban Japanese that it had spawned its own adjective, dasai, meaning “not hip, boring, unfashionable”’. But, as unfashionable as it is, Urawa is where he cuts his teeth as a police reporter. Navigating the complex spatial politics of the Yomiuri’s office (“Who the hell told you could sit down here!”) and getting up to speed with the house style (“I’ll expect you to know it within a week.”) are small tasks compared to learning how to update the office scrapbooks.

Starting out in any profession is a big ask in any case, but being an American who works for a Japanese newspaper has its own challenges. Adelstein’s first kikikomi (interviews related to a crime) are comedic adventures, with potential interviewees mistaking him for a salesman. The cultural differences serve him well, too, sometimes; “dumb gaijins” can get quite handily behind police tape.

Adelstein is a chummy and deft translator of Japanese culture: from the Japanese reverence for language, as exemplified by the concept of kotodama – the spirit of language that resides in every word; to the underbelly of Japanese culture, which makes our Underbelly look like Play School. Eventually, Adelstein scores a post at the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, where he begins to cover the extraordinary crime syndicates of Japan – the legendary yakuza.

As Adelstein explained in an interview on WNYC, the yakuza are more Wal-Mart than West Side Story. On one end of the spectrum, there are the members who ‘own’ the illegal immigrants peddling counterfeit wares on the street. On the other end, you have the supremos who launder money through their innumerable – and legitimate – loan businesses and hostess bars.

It would be hard not to admire the seemingly unassailable extent of the various yakuza enterprises, except that, unavoidably, regular people get hurt or disappear. Adelstein’s career path takes a turn when he becomes involved in the story of Lucie Blackman, a British girl who went missing while working as a hostess in Tokyo’s infamous Roppongi district. In this quest, Adelstein straddles the line between impartial observer and passionate truth seeker. And it wasn’t to be the only time he came face to face with the ugly side of Tokyo.

Jake Adelstein will be a guest of the 2010 Melbourne Writers Festival. He will appear in conversation on September 4 (free event), The Real Life of Crime with Robert Richter QC and Mark Dapin, and Worldwide Crime with Malla Nunn and Louise Welsh, both on September 5.

It’s Goo Time

Imagine: evening last Tuesday.

I’ve wandered a few tram stops along St Kilda Rd to the JWT offices where I’ve been promised a glimpse into the creative marketing process. After tours and introductions I’ve been lead down to basement level of the building to a dark corner of the carpark.

Waiting for us is a group of people with cameras, costumes and make-up, all busy and intent. Between them lies a still body just beginning to ooze green blood; a man in trench coat and a gun to his side stands with his back to the crowd. I felt like a hardened police officer at a crime scene; all I needed was a cigarette hanging from the corner of my mouth, cooling sour coffee in a styrofoam cup and a look of contempt for the world. Instead I crouched down and tried not to giggle from the pure joy of witnessing the aftermath of my very first alien murder. I’m a simple girl with simple tastes.

JWT have been working extremely hard for us the last few months to create a spankingly impressive marketing campaign for 2009. You’ll be starting to notice the tag Where Stories Meet popping up online as we build closer to the program release. As part of the campaign, they’ve been working towards three core images melding genre; the scene above is Crime Meets Science Fiction. There’s anticipation in the air for the final images; with the program almost finished, these images will be the final touch for the shape of the program. It’s almost full go time! Excitement and queasiness are brought in equal measure. Still, how often do you get to see a dead alien body? We’re a lucky bunch here, I tell you.

Lastly, a few lessons from last Tuesday:

• The JWT board room has a spectacular view of night Melbourne, and is almost as large as our whole office.
• Green blood is part dishwashing detergent (for pooling effect), part green paint (for vibrancy) and a dab of glow-stick fluorescence if the scene is dark enough for the glow.
• Being Financial Manager doesn’t mean you can’t also be a damn fine alien corpse.
• Puppies should always be brought to photo shoots so that we can play with them afterwards.
• I want to experience more situations that involve the phrases ‘I’ve made up the dead guy’ and  ‘It’s goo time’.

Louise
Festival Administrator