International best-selling crime author Peter James is Sussex's man of the moment right now.
His world-renowned crime-fighting creation, detective Roy Grace, made his on-screen debut to rave reviews and an audience of more than seven million people earlier this month, and his next much-anticipated novel is mere months away.
However, things could have been so very different for the 72-year-old.
Author Peter James, photographed in Jersey.
Though it is now unthinkable that Roy Grace could be anything other than Brighton born and bred, there was once talk of taking the detective's lineage to Aberdeen for a BBC Scotland TV series.
However, Peter was very quick to dismiss this idea.
"With my own personal background as a film and television producer I know just how easy it is to screw something up," he told me, the day after Grace first aired on ITV.
"The producer gets money for getting a film done, so to hell with the source material - that truly happens sometimes.
"And also, if you have a bad adaptation, it can actually hurt your sales."
He said it was the "holy grail" for any writer to have their words transferred to the screen - big or small. But he warned budding authors that a botch job could paint a poor wrong image of their work to millions of viewers.
ITV crime drama Grace, based on the novels of Peter James, was filmed in Brighton and locations across Sussex Credit: ITV/ Second Act Productions/ Vaudeville Productions/ Grace
"I had a direct experience of this," he said, "Before Roy Grace I had three books adapted. I had one made into a television film and two as mini series, and one which I called Host and I wrote in 1993 was made in 1998 in America by ABC television.
"It was a big production, an $11milion production. I remember it was a four-part mini series and it came on while I was at a party in Brighton.
"I was just chatting to this builder, and he asked ‘What do you do?’. I told him I was a writer, and when he asked if he might have seen any of my work on television I told him I had got this one out at the moment based on the novel Host, though they had changed the title to “Virtual Obsession”.
Peter James
"His face honestly looked like he had just fallen off a cliff. He said: 'Don’t take this the wrong way, please, but I watched that and I thought it was so bad that I would never bother to read you as an author'.
"And that was a big lesson for me, because you don’t make a vast amount of money out of television. The real benefit, you hope as an author, is that it will bring your writing to a wider audience around the world."
When Peter published his first Roy Grace novel Dead Simple, upon which ITV's Grace is based, in 2005, plenty of production crews were clamouring for the rights to turn it into a TV series. But he decided to bide his time.
"And thank god I did," he said.
ITV crime drama Grace, based on the novels of Peter James, was filmed in Brighton and locations across Sussex Credit: ITV/ Second Act Productions/ Vaudeville Productions/ Grace
"About three-and-a-half years later, when I had three more Roy Grace novels out, I got this very excited phone call saying, ‘Oh, BBC Scotland want to put up all the money’.
"I wondered, why does BBC Scotland want to finance a crime series set in Brighton?
"They said, ‘No, no, no, they’ve had this great idea about moving it to Scotland’.
"I asked if any of them had read the books, and they said, ‘Yes, yes, we think Roy Grace could be transferred to Aberdeen Police’."
Peter's reply was short and effective. "Foxtrot, Oscar."
In 2015, however, the stars aligned. Esteemed producer Andrew O'Connor invited Peter and his wife to spend a couple of days with him at his Los Angeles home.
The pair had become friends in the late 1990s, and Andrew was a big fan of Peter's work.
They got to talking about the possibility of making a TV series based on the Grace novels, but Peter told him: "I’m just really unhappy with the offers at the moment. The person I would like to do it with would be you."
"I’d love nothing more," Andrew replied.
ITV crime drama Grace, based on the novels of Peter James, was filmed in Brighton and locations across Sussex Credit: ITV/ Second Act Productions/ Vaudeville Productions/ Grace
Over the next few years, Russell Lewis was brought on as the show's writer and a talented team of actors including the likes of John Simm and Richie Campbell was assembled.
Filming began in 2020 and, in Peter's eyes, there was only one city where the series could be shot. Brighton.
The city's piers feature in stunning, sweeping shots of the coastline, while colourful shopping streets, seafront beach huts and Hove promenade also feature prominently.
"It was just amazing to see," Peter said.
"When we lived in the centre of Brighton I used to run along that seafront every morning. But I am passionate about Brighton and Hove, I grew up in the 50s and 60s and it was a very different place then.
"Although it was still beautiful, it was quite a sort of rufty-tufty place. It was quite violent, I’d go out pubbing with my mates on a Friday night and you’d be bl***y careful which pubs you went into and you’d keep a lookout for who came in because there were a lot of nasty people who would create fights over nothing.
"It has changed so much. The biggest change was probably becoming a city. I remember when I went away to boarding school at Charterhouse (in Surrey), when people would ask where you were from I’d say Sussex because if you said Brighton they’d go, ‘No! Really?!’.
"Now it’s the other way around. If people ask where I’m from, I say Brighton. It’s become the coolest city in the UK. I love it, Brighton is in my DNA, and I honestly don’t think I’ve seen it portrayed as beautifully on screen as in Grace. It’s just captured a sort of magic about the city. And, also, its dark side too, which is great."
Indeed, a scene from Grace shows a groom being bundled into the back of a white van in a back alley, just off Bond Street.
Peter believes showing the city's unpleasant underbelly actually attracts visitors, rather than putting them off.
Author Peter James is selling the desk where he wrote many of his famed books in an auction
He said: "I think people are fascinated. There was a Roy Grace walk in Brighton and, it was quite funny, my wife tagged along with it about three or four years back, to see how accurate it was.
"She said it was hysterical because, at one point, they stopped outside a house in Kemp Town where I had written a murder."
A natural raconteur, Peter put on his best northern accent, recalling what the woman had said with a giggle.
"Ooh, in’t it terrible? The things that went on in that ‘ouse. In’t it terrible?"
If Peter is right, and his depiction of Brighton and Hove does draw in a crowd of intrigued visitors to the city, there may be a fair few more tourists on the way soon - ITV's airing of Grace was far from a one-off occurrence.
"I think we’d all love it if it has the longevity of Morse, because I’m now writing the eighteenth book and ITV’s plan is to do three or four a year for the foreseeable future. So I really hope so.
"...We’ve got the next one lined up, Looking Good Dead, and also one of my most popular characters who didn’t appear in Grace because he wasn’t in the original book, he first appears in Looking Good Dead so he will be making an appearance. That’s Norman Potting.
"He will be played by Craig Parkinson (known by many as DI Matthew "Dot" Cottan in the hit BBC series Line of Duty).
"And, hopefully, in terms of ITV, we will be seeing another three or four in 2021 and then annually after that.
ITV crime drama Grace, based on the novels of Peter James, was filmed in Brighton and locations across Sussex Credit: ITV/ Second Act Productions/ Vaudeville Productions/ Grace
"I have got a new Roy Grace novel coming out on May 13 which is called Left You Dead, and also I have got a new Roy Grace stage play which is also, coincidentally, Looking Good Dead. That starts on tour in June and that will be at the Theatre Royal on the week of October 11.
"On June 27 I have also got a Roy Grace novella which is a quick read, part of a government programme to encourage people into reading, and that’s Roy Grace and his family going on the holiday from hell. It’s called Wish You Were Dead."
So, Brighton criminals be warned. It appears Roy Grace is here to stay.
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