Peter James, British film producer turned best-selling crime novelist, is distinctly charming, well-spoken and precise. And although his subject matter does revel in a sense of chilling horror – the grimy, criminal underbelly, men buried alive, brutal murders, and most recently, human organ trafficking – the way that James talks about his rather macabre subjects is engaging, rather than purely chilling or designed to shock.
James has written over 20 books, been translated into over 29 languages, and ridden high on the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list with his most recent books which feature Brighton-based Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. The books have quickly become one of the world’s most popular detective series, and this is in no small part due to the well thought-out and thoroughly researched plots. James’ latest book, ‘Dead Tomorrow’, focuses on the struggle of a mother whose daughter is suffering from liver failure, who turns to a black market broker to find the vital organ. Meanwhile, Detective Roy Grace follows the grim trail of child traffickers to Eastern Europe. The subject matter is evidently harrowing and shocking, so does James plot his books with this in mind, with topics picked for their scare factor?
‘I write about what I’m intrigued by,’ he tells me as he sits across the table, in a small bar-slash-restaurant-slash-coffee chain, as he drinks alternately from a beer and an espresso. He leans forward with a glint in his eye, ‘Do you know how much your body is worth?’ I become slightly unsure of where is this interview going. ‘On average, about a million dollars. $400k for your liver, the same for your heart and lungs, $60k for each kidney, a bit more for other bits and pieces… You’d make a lot of money, if you could live without your heart.’ I place a protective hand over my liver. Again, athough part of this speech is clearly designed for impact, it is a subject James knows a huge amount about and just wants to share. There is almost too much to take in, as he flits from anecdote to fact, and back again.
‘An English doctor was struck off for buying kidneys from Turkey. I met him and he said to me, ‘You can survive well on one kidney, and there are people dying because they can’t get one. Why would anyone have a problem with it?’ In India, the going price for a kidney is £250. For us to buy it, once it’s gone through the middle men, you are talking £25, 000. China lowers the threshold of the death penalty every year. They get a million pounds a body.’ And why is this happening now? Sadly, what has happened is that as organ transplant techniques have gotten better, the supply of donors has gone down.
‘The big irony is that the biggest cause of the decrease is more people wearing seatbelts in cars. The perfect donor is someone who has a head injury, and dies with his or her body intact. Now with modern cars being stronger, if some is killed in a crash they’re normally pretty badly mangled. But, certain countries have realised that there’s a business to be had. I used to think it was an urban legend, you know, the man who meets a pretty girl in a bar, goes back to a hotel room, and next thing he wakes up in a bathtub short of a kidney. It’s not.’
‘Do you know how much your body is worth? About a million dollars.’
James’ fascination with organ trafficking started almost seven years ago, when James met Kate Blewett, the documentary maker behind Channel Four’s harrowing ‘The Dying Rooms’, who talked to him about her new subject matter. ‘She’d heard about this organ trafficking trade. Kate sent two researchers out to Columbia. They were both murdered. She couldn’t go on with the documentary, but she said that I could have her research. It went on from there. In Columbia there will be two kids begging at an airport, cop arrests them, sells them for £50, and they get a nice upbringing in the countryside, get to the age of thirteen, fourteen and someone in the West, their daughter needs a new liver, and that kid disappears. Their liver sold, heart, lungs. It is going on.’
But, surely it couldn’t be that easy to get hold of, say, a liver? It’s not exactly the type of thing you can type into Google. ‘I actually met a couple who live in England – one of the biggest focuses of my research – and their son from about the age of eleven had progressive liver failure, and they couldn’t get him to the top of the transplant list. And they were told he’d die.
So they went on the Internet, and found a broker, who found them a liver for about £200-300,000, and they started raising the money. Luckily, a liver came through, and they were ok but…’ The ‘but’ hangs in the air, a testament to the tangle of morals around the subject. This is where the tone of our conversation changes, from fact-swapping to something much more emotionally charged. James meticulously researches his stories, and he seems to have a real engagement with the ethical dilemmas behind his plots. ‘Dead Tomorrow’ displays a real knowledge of the human suffering that forces some people to the lengths of buying and selling their own body parts. James spent a lot of time in Romania, just talking with the people who had suffered under the oppressive regime of Ceauşescu.
‘Seeing street kids was heart-breaking. It was really hard, the hardest thing was the sheer desperation, thousands of people living way below the poverty margin, literally in holes in the road, just to be by the central heating pipes. All the youngsters want to get out and their dream is to come to some western country… although I say western, it’s outrageous, Romania is western. It’s in the EU and it shouldn’t be there. It’s a third world country.
You drive one mile out of the city and you’re in slums, and then the slums give way to several hundred miles of rubbish. The first time I went I thought, ‘Hmmm, it’s snowing.’ And then I realised it was just litter.’
‘Hell will freeze over before a crime novel gets onto the Booker shortlist.’
It is clear that his interest in writing stems from wanting to draw attention to things he feels have been overlooked, or unfairly confined to the background – and this applies as much to the British police, who James joins on average every week on their daily rounds from murder scenes to rehabilitation centres, as it does to the harrowing organ trade. ‘I think they [the police] are severely underappreciated. The public have this slightly jaded view of the police; they think they’re not actually out there fighting crime, but in the course of a career, almost every police officer, almost without exception, will have his life endangered.’ And could he be a police officer? He says very simply, ‘I don’t think I’d be brave enough.’
Brave enough, however, to be a crime writer in a literary world that still sneers at the genre. When asked why this is, it seems that James can’t quite answer. ‘I get really annoyed. The chairman of the Booker prize, three years ago was asked, ‘Why is there never a crime novel on the booker shortlist?’ and he said, ‘Hell will freeze over before a crime novel gets on the book shortlist’. So, that means Dickens would never have made it; Deschosky, Shakespeare, Aristotle…so many writers have written what we would now consider to be crime fiction. My point is that people get very precious about literature.’ James made a very brave move to start writing crime – he began when horror was the genre du jour and made the leap of faith to a different publisher who supported his vision.
His final word on the matter? ‘Writers are entertainers; the writers that survive are the popular ones.’ And there is no doubt that James is and will continue to be a popular writer, although he goes beyond the merely entertaing. Advice for budding writers? ‘Is to read. Do not be afraid to say, ‘I love this book’, whether it’s Stephen King, or Rankin, or Trollope, whatever it is that you love, and think, ‘how did that writer make that book so great?” James has achieved prolific status and though he may never make it on to the Booker shortlist, or even the longlist, his crime novels are reviving and revitalising an often pigeonholed genre in a way that he hopes might remove some of the literary stigma.
