Pre-Production: The Protagonist

http://www.peterjames.com/about

Above is the link to the page on his website about him. After looking through the interests tab it occured to me that Roy Grace's character could be loosely based on the author himself. He is interested in Police work and is a patron of Crimestoppers. He is in fact from Brighton. Likes running and is interested in the paranormal.


Roy Grace:

Roy's USP's:
Open to the paranormal, will go to mediums for their advice and expertise.
Photographic memory
Wife missing since 30th birthday.


Peter James says:
"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 realized 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 9 years before we meet him, we learn that he came home on his 30th birthday to find his wife, Sandy, who he loved and adored, had vanished.
My original plan was to reveal the truth about Sandy in the second book. But to my amazement there was such excited speculation by my readers about what might have happened to her, that I decided it would be fun to keep it as an ongoing mystery, and feed a little bit more information about her into each successive novel, so that my readers could start to make their own deductions. In answer to your question, in the first five novels we have tended to see Sandy only through Roy’s rose-tinted memories. There is a snippet of someone who might be her in Dead Tomorrow but very fleeting. In Dead Like You for the first time we see Roy and Sandy together, twelve years back in time, and we see the relationship is not quiet so perfect as Roy had always imagined."- From this badly transcribed interview: http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/interview_view.aspx?interview_id=26