LAST DETECTIVE’S LAST CASE
It’s me invading your inbox again! My newsletter in May announced that the next Peter Diamond novel would be out at the end of the year and I can now show you some covers, from Soho (USA), due 3 December, and Sphere (UK), 14 November.
I’m thrilled with both. If I were in a bookshop looking at a display, I’m sure I would pick them up to read more. But then I would, wouldn’t I?
STARRED REVIEW
Yes, this really will be the last in a series that has kept me busy for 33 years. The first pre-publication review has just appeared in Publishers Weekly, with a coveted star and words that almost brought a tear to this elderly author’s eye:
“Lovesey concludes his long-running series featuring Bath detective Peter Diamond with a bang, delivering an ingenious fair-play whodunit set in the small English village of Baskerville as the annual harvest festival approaches. . . . . . Lovesey derives genuine emotion from Diamond’s potential retirement, and his golden age-style plotting is as tight as ever. This sends the series out on a high note.”
The latest issue of the magazine Deadly Pleasures has a nice summing-up from the editor, George Easter:
“This marvellous 22-book series will sadly end with the publication of AGAINST THE GRAIN. The first in the series, THE LAST DETECTIVE, was published in 1991, the year I first started attending Bouchercon. In 1997 we started the Barry Awards in honor of our reviewing colleague Barry Gardner, who had recently passed.. The first winner of a Barry Best Mystery Award was Peter’s BLOODHOUNDS, the 4th in the Peter Diamond series. With each successive entry in the series I would marvel at Peter Lovesey’s wonderful talents for plotting and characterisation.”
DIAMOND TELLS ALL
Why must Diamond retire? He can tell you himself in a booklet due any day now from the Mysterious Bookshop, New York, in their Mysterious Profiles series and entitled PETER DIAMOND. It’s the first and only account by Diamond himself of his early life and unceasing troubles with an author called Lovesey who libelled him repeatedly for thirty-three years. Better badger the bookshop for a copy, particularly if you live in the Big Apple and can get along to 58 Warren Street. I haven’t seen one myself yet. They want to spare me the pain of reading it.
NEW SHORT STORIES
My own explanation for ending the series is that my doctor called time. Without going into detail, I was told after an operation in February last year that unless I could write my next novel in six months I had better not start. If I had to write at all, short stories were a safer bet.
I took the advice and started on some shorts: a story in verse called KNOX VOMICA for a collection entitled SCHOOL OF HARD KNOX that was published in 2023; a more traditional one called THE ELLERY QUEEN JOB that will appear in the thousandth issue of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, due, I think, in December; and one for the Detection Club to mark Simon Brett’s eightieth birthday next year The story is JUST A MINUTE and the book will be called PLAYING DEAD.
And what’s next? More short stories, I hope, I have always enjoyed writing them. There are plans for a Best of Lovesey’s Shorts which will appear in 2025. It was an enjoyable challenge deciding which to include from six volumes published since BUTCHERS & OTHER STORIES OF CRIME in 1985.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
Some of you will know I also write on athletics history and I must confess to devoting a lot of my time to researching a project of limited interest to fiction fans, called BLACK BRITISH ATHLETES: THE PIONEERS. It tells the true stories of the unknown athletes of colour who competed for two centuries before the sport became as inclusive as it is today. It’s planned as a booklet to appear from the NUTS (National Union of Track Statisticians, in case you suspected this was a send-up) in October this year, which is Black History Month.
HEALTH BULLETIN
As for my medical diagnosis, I’m happy to report that I have outlived my D-Day by a full year and I feel the same as ever! A proper fraud, in fact, because everyone makes a fuss of me. When Phil’s son Olly, and his wife, Savanna, came from New Zealand, we had quite a gathering here, including our great-grandchildren, Logan and Bonnie, The New Zealanders are to the right of the picture, in pink and black, You’ll have no trouble spotting Olly’s brother Oscar. That’s Jax, the Matriarch, seated, and redhead Thomasin, our other Grandchild, immediately behind her next to Oscar’s girlfriend, Morgan. Phil and Jacqui are at either end of the group.
And when Kathy and Nigel came from America a couple of weeks ago, my hedge was clipped, my roses dehipped and my shed cleared out and swept, with not a spider left to tell the tale.
My oncologist, too, is a good support. She sounds as if she is puzzled how I am still here when she phones me every couple of months. She asks whether my weight is the same (it is) and whether I still have an appetite (I do). As proof, here’s a new picture of me about to see off a roast dinner I cooked. I must send her a copy.
Looking forward to sending you more news of AGAINST THE GRAIN and other things in November,
PETER