lovesey.qxp_Layout 1 24/06/2021 14:56 Page 1
ARTS | BOOKS
On the diamond trail
Peter Lovesey’s award-winning series of Bath-based crime novels is 30 years old this summer. To mark the occasion, we invited Peter to retrace his journey as a writer and talk about how Bath has featured in his books
A
crowd has gathered around a silver-haired man outside the Pump Room extension. He is pointing to the balustrade along the roof. “Up there is where the gunman hid. From there he could pick off the members of the wedding party as they arrived at the abbey.” Tourists joining the group expecting to hear the history of the abbey and its surrounds can be forgiven for wondering what this is about. “That was in Killing with Confetti. And The Vault, inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is located below ground on the site of the same building. Behind us is Stall Street, where Jane Austen’s Aunt Jane was arrested for shoplifting, a true incident used in the first book of the series, The Last Detective.” By now, those tourists have realised what is happening. This is the Peter Lovesey Walking Tour, organised by Topping & Co. bookshop, introducing some of the locations featured in my Bath-based mystery novels. To be honest, I am a little uneasy myself walking the streets of Bath talking about crimes that happen only in my imagination. Growing up in wartime Middlesex, I didn’t expect to earn a living as a writer, let alone a crime writer. I do remember that after our house was demolished by a V1 flying bomb in 1944, I had only two books to read and they belonged to my father. One was The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, about the famous defence lawyer involved in the most sensational murder cases of the early 20th century. The other was Alias the Saint, a crime novel by Leslie Charteris. Short of anything else to read, I devoured them many times over and I am sure they influenced me later. But my passion was athletics. After I was taken to see the 1948 Olympic Games in London, I dreamed of being a runner even though I was hopeless at it. Instead of competing, I became a track ‘nut’, following other people’s achievements, and writing occasional pieces for athletics magazines. Out of it eventually came a book on the history of running called The Kings of Distance. One morning a year later I noticed an announcement in The Times about a first crime novel competition. The prize was £1000. I knew little about crime fiction. I’d read the Saint book and the Sherlock Holmes stories. My wife Jax said, “You’ve written one book. Surely you can do another. Why not use running as a background?” So I concocted a historical whodunit about wobbling, the little-known
Peter Lovesey on his walking tour of Bath
72 TheBATHMagazine
|
july 2021
|
iSSue 221
craze for six-day races in Victorian times. We called it Wobble to Death. It was offbeat, amusing, and the gods smiled because it won the prize. When I went up to collect the cheque, the publisher asked if I’d already started the next one. I was teaching English in a technical college, but a career in crimewriting was suddenly a possibility. I wrote four more before taking the gamble of going full-time. After the eighth, I was approached by Granada TV to adapt them for a series called Cribb. My bowler-hatted detective sergeant was played by Alan Dobie. We had the prime-time ITV slot on Sunday evenings with a regular audience of around 12 million. The show sold to America and more than 30 networks across the world. I wrote six more TV scripts with Jax as co-author. The Bath connection I couldn’t foresee an entire career based on a Victorian crime series, so I plucked up the courage to get modern. Colin Dexter was using Oxford as a background for his Morse books, so why not choose another beautiful city as my location? Thanks to my TV income, we had moved from Surrey to the village of Westwood a few miles south of Bath. It was easy to make trips into the Spa city and imagine dirty deeds among the honey-coloured terraces and crescents. Peter Diamond, my sleuth, worked out of the somewhat unattractive Manvers Street police station. In The Last Detective, he gets inspiration from sitting in front of the Abbey looking up at the stone
Peter Diamond’s Bath Location
Storyline
Book
Pulteney Bridge
Peril in the weir triggers a murder
The Last Detective
Former Empire Hotel
A kidnap victim only Diamond can save
The Summons
St Michael’s Church
Crime readers plotting in the crypt
Bloodhounds
Pump Room
Discovery of a link to Frankenstein
The Vault
Royal Victoria Park
His worst nightmare, murder close to home
Diamond Dust
Lansdown
A battle re-enactment goes too far
Skeleton Hill
Theatre Royal
Phobic fears and murders backstage
Stagestruck
Walcot Street
The fatal shooting of a policeman
Cop to Corpse
Michael Tippett Centre
A deadly string quartet
The Tooth Tattoo
Bath Abbey
Where the wedding sniper waits
Killing with Confetti
Great Pulteney Street
Killing at the halfmarathon
The Finisher
Francis Hotel
A private eye corners Diamond
Diamond and the Eye
