Wexford
Detective work par excellence
I don’t know about you, but I’m in awe of authors who manage to juggle with characters in whole series of books, developing their life arc and maintaining tension in their personal circumstances, whilst hatching new plot lines and introducing misleading clues and assorted other players, without dropping a ball.
In a recent interview, Jacqueline Wilson talked about reprising some of her teenage characters now as adults and some of the caveats which mean that Tracy Beaker herself was probably not doable. But there are plenty of famous fictional detectives who grow older and grapple with domestic issues alongside their masterful sleuthing – Rebus, Wexford, Dalgliesh, Holmes, Poirot, Miss Marple, spring instantly to mind.
However, I was gobsmacked to pick up the twentieth book featuring famous detective, Roy Grace, only to find Peter James finally, finally answers the big mystery in his character’s life.
When he was creating the character of Roy Grace in Dead Simple back in 2003, James wanted to give his principal protagonist an edge that would set him apart from the clichéd detectives – with a drink problem, substance abuse, relationship issues. Conscious that above all else, detectives solve puzzles, he gave his detective a huge ongoing puzzle.
On his 30th birthday Roy comes home from work and finds Sandy, the wife he adores, has vanished. Her car is found abandoned in the short-term car park at Gatwick airport. Otherwise there is no trace of her. Originally the author had planned to reveal the truth about her in the second book in the series, Looking Good Dead, but he found readers and fans loved to speculate about her fate, and engagement with the mystery of her whereabouts hugely increased sales. So he kept deferring the denouement.
Twenty-one years and nineteen books later he finally tells her story in They Thought I was Dead… twenty-one years!
In the foreword he asks us to try not to be too harsh in our judgement of Sandy. I fear I was. But much more significantly, I am lost in admiration for someone who can keep all those threads and hints and mentions sustained throughout. OK, he had someone else do a consistency check or two as well, but his was the brain and hand behind the enterprise. A bit like the meticulous work of Detective Superintendent Grace himself, huh?