Meet the most famous crime writer you’ve never heard of | Books | Entertainment

One the door of Peter Grainger’s study is an ersatz Blue Plaque: “Peter Grainger. Best selling author, & pride of Norfolk, lives here.” It was a gift from his eldest son Matthew in recognition of his dad’s long-standing literary endeavours. Now six years on there’s every chance the modest cottage, tucked beside a 17th century levee alongside the River Delph in the heart of the Cambridgeshire wetlands and periodically cut off by flooding, might one day require the real thing.

Its equally modest owner is making coffee as his wife Lynn serves slices of her home-made lemon drizzle cake. Both are delicious, the former meticulously drip-brewed through a paper filter from freshly ground beans, clearly of some pedigree. “I take my coffee seriously,” he smiles, much, he might add, like his “upright, unconventional, awkward” (and fictional) Detective Sergeant David ‘DC’ Smith, a 50-something veteran of Norfolk Police – and the reason we’re here today.

Ushering me into his lounge, the author, whose real name is Robert Partridge, appears very much the retired English teacher he is: trim, with receding hair and spectacles. Like Smith, he strikes me as a small-’c’ conservative. He’s certainly not what you might expect the hottest ticket in publishing to look like. Yet having signed an extraordinary 17-book deal with Penguin Random House after a five-way auction, and an even bigger one in America, that’s exactly what he is. Not bad for a writer who, until now, has been entirely self-published.

Peter’s 16, soon to be 17, books featuring Smith and the Kings Lake Central murder squad, in a lightly fictionalised version of King’s Lynn, are about to launch their author into the first rank of British crime writing after a 13-year slow burn. In fact, Peter Grainger is almost certainly the most famous crime writer you’ve never heard of.

His first novel to appear in bookshops, An Accidental Death, landed earlier this month. But what sets Peter apart from other debut authors is the fact that he’s already sold a million copies of his series in ebook and audio formats.

Smith, a thoughtful widower who, as a young man, served undercover with British military intelligence in Northern Ireland, is a superb creation. Neither superman, nor maverick, he is however a square peg in a round hole and one of the best fictional cops for years. At his heart there’s a sadness – he’s single at the start to avoid distractions, having lost his wife to cancer and, we later discover, killed a man in Belfast to save his own life – but something about him resonated with readers.

“A lot of fictional detectives seem to be dark, dysfunctional heavy drinkers with more problems than the criminals. I thought, ‘Surely there’s an alternative to this?’ So I went in the other direction,” says Peter. “Clearly, police stations aren’t full of maverick detectives so I read a couple of memoirs by former police officers, looking back over their careers, and Smith emerged from that.”

For such an authentically-drawn series, the fact Peter rarely read crime fiction himself seems astonishing – but he believes it was a benefit to his books. “You avoid the clichés and the predictable formulas,” he says. “I wanted to come at it more from the technical side of writing – playing around with point of view and tense.” While he admits to enjoying TV sleuths like Morse and A Touch of Frost (though less so the books on which they were based), he credits Channel 4’s long-running documentary series 24 Hours In Police Custody to Smith’s development.

“Those fly-on-the-wall programmes don’t hide how often they’re going up blind alleys – going through 3,000 number plates or watching 20 hours of CCTV – and finding nothing. It’s routine, it’s not glamorous, and I wanted to capture that,” he explains.

“In one way they’re completely ordinary people, but there’s something special about the best detectives and that’s what I was interested in. I didn’t want one of these officers who can drive 120mph and hit the bullseye at 50 yards with a hand-held pistol. I didn’t want Smith or any of the police to be superheroes. Equally, I didn’t want the people they’re after to be cardboard villains.”

Indeed, while serial killers and implausibly gruesome deaths are rare to non-existent in the books, something about the gentle minutiae of the criminal justice system clicked. Since that first DC Smith ebook – featuring the inquiry into a drowned sixth-form student, whose death had hitherto been written off as an accident – in October 2013, Peter’s written another 15 Kings Lake Investigations. The 17th and latest, Some Sort of Justice, will become his first simultaneous hardback, ebook and audiobook release next month. All of which means new print readers have a ready-made world to immerse themselves in. For a publisher, it’s gold dust!

Even so, he admits the series has lasted longer than he planned. Smith talks about retirement in book one and, spoiler alert, in book eight, A Private Investigation, something happens that puts the onus of the action onto the supporting characters, DCs Chris Water, Serena Butler and John Wilson, and DCI Cara Freeman.

“I didn’t know if the series would survive A Private Investigation,” he admits. “But I thought it would be interesting to continue with the other characters in his team and see how Smith continued to influence them.”

Happily it did, going from strength to strength, winning even more fans. Having spent his life writing for pleasure, commercial success in his 60s and fame – he winces ever so slightly at the word – at the age of 72 is a testament both to his persistence and his talent. “Surreal,” is the word he uses but it’s clear he’s still processing what’s happened.

He grew up nearby in Ely, Cambs, the bright son of working-class parents – his father was an electrician, his mother a housewife and dressmaker – and the first of the family to go to university. After graduating, he eventually settled on teaching English, spending the last 20 years teaching at Cromwell Community College in Chatteris. He had found his forte and was, I suspect, very good at it, but the idea of writing never left him (he previously likened writing to an addiction to cigarettes).

“I retired a year or two earlier than I had to, because they offered me a good deal,” he continues. “I was expensive and, by then, a member of the awkward squad so they were quite happy to see me go. I’d always written. I’d sent things off over the years and had everything turned down as most people do.

“The intention was to invest some of that money in sitting down and making myself write properly, to take it a bit more seriously.” Then his son Matthew, who works as a manager in the tech industry, suggested he go down the self-publishing route using Amazon’s Kindle platform. Once sneered at by traditional publishing, it’s now the preferred route for many authors.

“I didn’t really know what a Kindle was,” he admits. But he was soon making a “few quid” a month from sales and hearing from his readers. It was realising he was finding an audience that proved the “game-changer”. He decided to write a crime series to boost that readership after recognising the commercial appeal of genre fiction.

“Romance is the bestselling genre, not for me, then it’s fantasy, again not my thing, and about third or fourth was crime fiction,” he chuckles. “I thought, ‘Yeah, okay, that’s a possibility’. So I did a bit of research to see what was selling. It’s easy because you can open books and read a few pages for free.”

When he came to publish his first crime novel, it felt very different to his previous work so he decided to use a pen name.

“I’ve had to explain this a number of times to the hundreds or thousands of people who have emailed and Facebooked me over the years,” he admits, then tells the story again.

His first ebook, published under his real name, was a literary novel, titled Afon – Welsh for river. “It’s about a failed English schoolteacher who is trying to write his second book. He’s had some success but he can’t replicate it,” he smiles. “His life’s gone down the toilet and he finds himself in a remote Welsh valley. There, he becomes involved in the lives of the people who run a farm. And his name is Peter Grainger.”

Now that “failed” author is a very successful one indeed. The success of the early books built momentum, which meant Amazon’s algorithms started plugging the books even more, and so on. By my back-of-an-envelope calculations, splitting ebook earnings 70–30% with Amazon adds up to a not inconsiderable sum. “We’re not millionaires,” he insists.

But if his new publishers have anything to do with it, that eventuality might not be a million miles away. For now the million dollar question is why, having been so successful without the help (or hindrance) of traditional publishing, has he changed his mind?

“That’s a good question,” he says. “If my wife was listening, she’d be asking, ‘Yes, why did you do it?’ They offered good advances. At that point, we didn’t need the money, we’ve both got pensions, but I’ve had thousands of emails saying, ‘When are they going to be in print?’ ‘I’d love to give this to my dad but he doesn’t read ebooks’”

Lynn, 72, confides later: “He’s always wanted to see himself in a bookshop.”

In fact, his path to traditional publication came about by chance after a journalist come across his audiobooks and wrote a magazine cover story about him. He recalls: “She said, ‘Look, I need to tell you this, if I write this piece, it could change your life. Are you sure you want me to do that?’”

Even when the big offers started coming in, Peter – who admits he was pursued by a persistent US agent before allowing his work to be turned into now phenomenally-successful audiobooks in 2016, read by the actor Gildart Jackson, whose voice he hears when writing Smith – took some persuading.

In truth, I suspect he thinks carefully about all his moves. One sticking point was the publisher’s insistence the books be revised for publication. After all, he’s never had – nor needed – an editor.

“We’ve had some interesting discussions over what you can say,” he admits. Thankfully, edits have been light.

On his writing desk is a tarantula, which seems an unusual pet. When I look it up, its name is Brachypelma smithi – or Smith’s Red Knee tarantula. Clearly there’s more to the mild-mannered author than first appearances suggest.

• An Accidental Death, the first book in the DC Smith/Kings Lake series by Peter Grainger, is out now, published by Penguin priced £9.99. Some Sort of Justice, the newest book in the series, will be published in hardback on June 4