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Peter James novelist and film producer talks to Andrew Kay about the art of committing crime fiction to the page

AK:When did you write your first book?
PJ: The first published was a terrible spy thriller I wrote in 1981 called Dead Letter Drop. I really wanted to write crime, but it was a nowhere genre back then. I read an article in The Times that said with Ian Fleming’s death there was a shortage of spy thrillers, I thought I could writeone. To my amazement I got an agent and to my bigger amazement he got it published - to my even bigger amazement still it completely flopped. I wrote a second one and that was called Atom Bomb Angel that flopped too.

Have they been re-published?
I bought the rights back and I keep them out of print, they are really not very good.

So, your first big break was Possession?
Which veered on crime, in that someone actually committed one, but it was not a crime novel. I wrote Possession, kind of a one-off book, and my publishers Gollancz said to me “You know I think we can build your name up if we pigeonhole you as horror” and at that time in 1987, horror was in the ascent. You had Steven King, Dean Koontz, James Herbert and it was the big genre. I was grateful to have a publisher who was enthusiastic and I said yes. It was a poisoned chalice because within five years, four or five books for me, the genre had gone into decline and crime was starting to rise out of the penny dreadful ghetto. Gollancz had done a marvellous marketing job, kind of Britain’s answer to Steven King - but not wanting to be. I moved from the supernatural and wrote a science fiction novel. I moved publishers to Orion hoping to get repositioned as a crime thriller writer but they just did not do it.

Did they want more horror, psychic thrillers?
They said they wanted crime but they kept marketing my ‘horror’ tag, I got very frustrated. I was half way through a two year contract and I changed agents, to the wonderful Carole Blake. She asked if I was brave enough to buy myself out of my contract. I bit the bullet and did it.

Was it an expensive business?
Very, and traumatic - I had to do it before my new agent was able, ethically, to approach anyone else. I had quite a white knuckle ride for about a year - it was the first time in two decades I was without a publisher.

And no crime writing record, was it a gamble?
Yes, it was really, and I didn’t know how, my old horror. Luckily my film career was going well so I could afford to take a risk. It turned out to be the best decision ever.

You had produced films in your twenties.
A raft of horror films and then at the other end of the spectrum we did Spanish Fly which I wrote and produced with Terry Thomas and Lesley Phillips. Barry Norman described it as “The decline and fall of the British family film”.

It didn’t put you off?
It did put me off. I decided comedy wasn’t my thing! Although Barry Norman admitted to me later that his mini cab driver really liked it. I co-produced Biggles too, more successfully.

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Andrew Kay watches the tumbleweed in Newhaven before loitering in Lewes

I’ve just had three glorious days with my brother, his wife and two sons. They are very lovely and very lucky, living as they do right by the river Wye just outside the crazy empire that is Hay-On-Wye, where the brilliant self publicist Richard Booth holds court over a town built on second hand books. Hay is like no other place that I have ever been, except Lewes which has a similarly wayward and rebellious streak. I love Lewes, not that I would want to live there, but to visit I can think of few places locally that hold my attention for as long.

‘‘We ogled the shags as they sat menacingly on wooden piles sunk into the muddy river bed’’

I decided for the family that a trip to Lewes was a topping idea for a day out and so off we went. Only to have our journey interrupted in Newhaven for an emergency tyre replacement and tracking adjustment. I have to say the local tyre man at Arrow was polite, efficient and cheap. We had to wait only one hour for the entire job and I was impressed that the price quoted included VAT. How often have you been caught out by that at a garage?

But what do you do in Newhaven for a whole hour. I took them down the quay to the fish merchants, we ogled the shags as they sat menacingly on wooden piles sunk into the muddy river bed and we went to a camping equipment sale where to my dismay there was nothing new to add to my battery of camping equipment. We then ambled up the high street through a drab market and back to the car.

Lewes was, in contrast, a complete delight. Within minutes I had lured them into Bill’s where we lunched on fine steak sandwiches, smoked salmon and scrambled eggs and pink lemonade. Hay has nothing that comes even close to Bill’s despite it being at the centre of a fabulously foodie region.

After that we did a spot of light window shopping. I can get as much pleasure from window shopping in Lewes as I can from spending money. I love the fact that it retains its gentile hippy quirkiness, that combined with a few truly ‘county’ retail experiences and the always slightly edgy world of antiques. My brother was in search of a pineapple ice bucket. I could do little to dissuade him. In the end he settled for an oversized pink cocktail shaker. There is clearly little to do in the rural borders of Wales as the nights draw in. I now have visions of him shaking toxic concoctions and then spending the evening coming up with silly names for them. Ah, the country life.

All washed up

For the past seven years, I have been lucky enough to possess a dishwasher. Well, not the same dishwasher in that whole period obviously, because they are built to last only about two years before they go horribly wrong, flood the kitchen and cost an entire month’s salary to repair. That is, of course, if the solid gold-plated part (possibly encrusted with the finest diamonds and emeralds) is available in Europe at that particular moment, which it never is.

Strangely enough, I seem to go through dishwashers at roughly the same rate as I go through husbands, boyfriends, etc. Stranger still, both current Boyfriend and dishwasher have withstood the most erratic period of my life so far with few complaints. The current dishwasher makes very strange noises – something like a cement-mixer with jellybeans inside it, but still manages to complete a cycle without flooding the kitchen, or filling it with smoke. This is in spite of the fact that, for the entire past year it has been used by people who were incapable of emptying the kitchen bin, or flushing a toilet. I suspect that they were using it to clean only two mugs at a time and therefore, the dishwasher enjoyed something of a holiday during their occupancy.

“My children might not have A-levels, or be bilingual, but they know how to wash up”

I currently have two temporary lodgers, who are leaving next week. They are both 18-year-old boys, thoroughly charming and bilingual, but seemingly incapable of either using the dishwasher or washing dishes in the traditional manner to a satisfactory level. If they do actually manage to wash any cups or glasses, they leave them to drain the ‘right’ way up, so that the water still sits in them. My children might not have Alevels, or be bilingual (or even be capable of speaking proper English) but they know how to wash up.

It’s no wonder The Boyfriend can’t even look in my fridge without almost having a seizure. He is permanently on a kind of Nazi cuisine duty. As a chef who works at least 16 hours per day, one would imagine that he’d be sick of the sight of food on his days off. One would be entirely wrong. Last week, he had three days off. On the first day, he made a game pie with root vegetable mash. This was in spite of the fact that, the night before, he and I had drunk ridiculous amounts of alcohol and as a result failed to get up until 3pm.

On the second day, I popped round on my way back from yoga, to discover him gleefully hacking three baby chickens to pieces. Breasts and legs were being carefully assigned to separate Tupperware containers, while the precious carcasses had their own special container for stockmaking purposes. Meanwhile, his flatmate – also a chef – lay on the sofa in disbelief, unwilling to have anything to do with food on his day off. On the third day, I had to go to Hastings to get mine and Katy’s flat valued. The Boyfriend phoned at around 4pm – but not to see how, or indeed where I was – but to find out whether I’d washed his chef’s whites. I could hear something spluttering away in the background. It was confit duck, which was to be eaten before he went to play football.

I’m sure most 5-a-side teams aren’t nearly as posh. Which is probably why they always win…

Katie muses on the pros and cons of the art world’s notorious Turner Prize

There Will Be No Miracles Here (2006). Courtesy of the artist, doggerfisher and Haunch of Venison, London. © Nathan Coley. Photography: David Lambert and Rod Tidnam, Tate

A bear walks into a gallery. No, there isn’t a punch line, but there is £25,000 at stake. Is it a joke? Is it an artwork? Who can be sure? This is the Turner Prize.

The honey coloured bear, captured in two and a half hours of film as he prowls the rooms of the Berlin Art Gallery at night, is in fact artist Mark Wallinger. And this film - Sleeper – marks Wallinger’s entry into this year’s Turner Prize.

Sleeper – another name for a double agent – is intended to evoke the history of Germany and the Cold War.

dict, sent by the King of France to a village which had recently experienced a plethora of miraculous events, in which the king demands that no more take place there.

As a work of art, Coley’s piece could mean whatever you want it to, but one interesting explanation is that it is intendedto be taken as a confrontation to the expectations that people have of both modern art and – more specifically – The Turner Prize itself.

Coley tells us, mockingly, that we expect too much of art. And perhaps he is right.

Sleeper (2004-5), Mark Wallinger © Mark Wallinger

Because despite perceptions of the Turner Prize that range from stupid to outrageous, pointless to sublime, perhaps the most significant thing is that we should look to it to be any of these things at all.

Is Wallinger’s Bear art? I’m not convinced that even Wallinger could answer that question, but what is important is that he provoked me into asking it at all.

The Turner Prize 2007 Exhibition is open now and runs until 13 January 2008.