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Sleuthing by the sea Could a contemporary thriller set in Brighton and starring John Simm become ITV’s new Inspector Morse? Matthew Bell investigates
ITV
race was shot under stringent coronavirus protocols but you would never know an epidemic was sweeping the nation from watching ITV’s new Sunday-night drama. This was as the broadcaster and the show’s producer intended – and immensely pleasing for its star, John Simm. “No one wants to see anything about Covid. It was the most depressingly boring year and we don’t want to see it on film,” he says. Simm plays detective superintendent Roy Grace, the eponymous hero of Peter James’s bestselling crime novels. The actor hadn’t read a Grace novel before being offered the part. “It’s not a genre I would read normally,” he admits. “I devoured the first three very quickly and I was absolutely hooked. I’m on book 10 at the moment.” Grace can use strange methods, including consulting a medium, but, says Simm, “he’s not maverick – he’s just a really good police officer”. “In today’s police world, maverick cops don’t have a place,” says James. “In so many television dramas, you see the senior cop being bolshie and shouting at people. “I’ve been going out with the police on my research for well over 30 years and the really good ones are not shouty – they’re calm, methodical and actually very kind. I look at John on television and he is completely that.” Brighton, where the novels are set, offers James scope for his imagination to run wild. “Graham Greene has been the only writer who really understood its dark heart. I was born and grew up in Brighton and, as a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, it was a dark, dangerous and seedy place.” Now, he admits, “it’s one of the coolest places in England”, but the criminals never left. “It’s really fertile ground for me.” James classes himself a thriller writer, not an author of murder mysteries: “The classic British whodunnit starts with a body on page one and the rest of the novel is a puzzle to solve it, whereas I like to have the victim alive but in peril at the end of chapter one.” There have been three previous adaptations of Grace novels, all of which James dismisses as “lame”. He has rejected other proposals, including an odd BBC Scotland proposal to relocate Roy and his team to Aberdeen. For this latest adaptation, he turned
John Simm as Roy Grace