Q&A: Ten for The TEN with Peter Berry

Crime solving oldies for the win!

If you were a pop culture journalist in the UK in the Nineties and beyond, the name Peter Berry loomed large. He was one of the most prominent celebrity publicists, the number you simply had to have in your contacts book, and someone I crossed paths with professionally many times.

So naturally, when I discovered that his first novel, the cosy crime thriller Lunch with the Deadly Dozen, had just been published, I knew I had to talk to him for The TEN.

Despite his protestations that he was ‘deeply uninteresting’ nothing could be further from the truth.

His journey, from premise to print, shows how tenacity and a willingness to edit, edit and edit again can pay dividends. Every writer’s story is different and to illustrate this, Peter’s also features a lot of rowing machine action. See below for more on that.

As we were going back and forth Peter let me know that the book was currently charting on Amazon, and was at “No.1 in espionage thrillers despite the lack of any discernible espionage”, which made me laugh.

Lunch with the Deadly Dozen is a great read. I urge you to take it with you on your holidays this summer (and on holidays during other seasons). I verily whizzed through it when I was recovering from Covid recently.

On the cover, his publishers Bloodhound Books, call it a ‘cosy crime’ thriller, which I’ve now learned is an actual genre, but what it ultimately means is that the reader is in for a good time. I adore older characters in films and books - especially ones that get up to no good - and Peter’s book delivers.

Here’s what he has to say about it all…

Lunch With the Deadly Dozen, from Bloodhound Books, is now available to buy from Amazon, Waterstones and other outlets.

“If anyone wants to make the film, Bill Nighy or Sir Ian McKellen please” 

I’ve already touched on your former career but can you tell readers of The TEN a little more about your background and what fills your days now?

I don't have a day job because I retired early on health grounds. I didn't want to become one of the government's 'economically inactive' statistics so I thought I'd try writing stories and see if anyone liked them. Before that, I was a celebrity publicist for 35 years.

I started out working on US imports for Channel 4 so I loosely helped launch Friends and ER and stuff like that in the UK. We also looked after a few actors so I used to get Christmas phone calls from Jimmy Stewart in the early 1990s.

After that, I spent ten years in the music industry working with everyone from Steps to The Who, and then in 2001, I started working with Jamie Oliver. I ended up travelling the world, eating amazing food and staying in the best hotels. I'm not sure where it all went wrong, to be frank.

Congratulations on the publication of Lunch with the Deadly Dozen! Can you tell us what it’s about?

Merci! When I was writing it, I was often confused about whether it's a crime story with a love story inside it or a love story with a crime element. Actually, it's neither.  It's about the universal human desire to belong to a group of mates, especially in later years. It's about a bunch of mostly outsiders who finally find their tribe.

The original idea is about twenty years old and came from me wandering around the streets of London going to meetings and stuff. I'd amble into places like Clarges Mews, in Mayfair, and wonder what might be behind the nondescript doors. From that point, I imagined these amazing meeting rooms where a secret organisation could meet and plot. 

Of course, in reality, they're just fire escapes and the like but let's not completely destroy the idea that they might just possibly conceal something more interesting. 

In the case of the Twelve (or the Deadly Dozen if you prefer), behind the doors are a group of retired experts - a cabbie, a surgeon, a plumber, a chemistry professor, a journalist, etc. - meticulously planning to assassinate criminals. One of the original titles was The Twilight Assassins, which I still prefer but I'm not the sort of person to argue with publishers who know best. Maybe they'll use my title for the TV series. *Wink face emoji*

What inspired you to write a crime novel where the main protagonists are mostly all retired?

I'd started the novel many times from about 2010 and never got further than three or four chapters. I used to get stuck. It was always retired people but I couldn't get the characters right. Then in 2019, I'd been chatting to some friends with Indian heritage and had this idea for the Monica character and the more I thought about her, the more fully formed she became. And that was quite quick, like when Paul McCartney always says that Yesterday came to him in a dream. It was a bit like that except I was awake. 

Once Monica was there, the rest of it fell into place relatively quickly. I started writing it in November 2019 and then in early 2020, Richard Osman announced his first book about a bunch of people solving crimes from their care home. I was furious! (I wasn't really. And they're very different).

It’s a wonderful ensemble of characters; who is your favourite and why? 

I've got a soft spot for all of the main characters although Monica is the most like me. She's complex but also very strong. She can be vulnerable but also she won't think twice about doing what needs to be done to achieve a successful assassination. There's that line in Josephine Hart's book that says, “Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive.” 

That's Monica's mantra and mine too in a way. There are two moments in the book that always bring a tear to my eye and they both involve Monica.

Lexington is also a favourite - if anyone wants to make a film, Bill Nighy or Sir Ian McKellen, please. Patrick Stewart at a push. And the brilliant but underrated Michael Maloney to play Chris.

Well, Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley have just signed up for Richard Osman’s movie adaptation, so you never know!

How long did the book take to write?

I started in November 2019 and gave myself a year to complete it. Then in March 2020 the world shut down so I had more time. I finished the first draft in June 2020 and thought it was great. I didn't know at that point that almost every first draft is terrible so I sent it off to loads of literary agents and keenly awaited the tsunami of offers. Three years and eighteen drafts later, lovely Bloodhound Books took a crazy leap of faith. I'd bought one of their books (A Most Unusual Demise, by the wonderful Katharine Black) and thought they might consider mine.

If there is one, can you describe your typical writing routine? 

Here's my usual weekday schedule, purely to annoy everyone reading this. Wake up. Breakfast. Rowing machine. Maybe read for a bit. Write for an hour or two depending on where I am in the process. Lunch. Rowing machine. Potter about listening to music. Have a nap. Watch Pointless. Make dinner for everyone. I'm not the world's biggest Hemingway fan but he did help with one trick which is to always finish the day's writing in the middle of a sentence. That way it's easy to pick it up again the following day. Because if you finish in the middle of a sentence then...

Haha! Very good. Do you have any specific rituals or habits that help you get into a creative mindset before writing? 

Not really but I'll give you another Hemingway quote, which I look at from time to time for inspiration (I’m NOT obsessed by Hemingway by the way).

“It's your object to convey everything to the reader so that he (or she) remembers it not as a story he (she) has read but something that happened to himself. That's the true test of writing.”

What role did research play in writing Lunch with the Deadly Dozen? I pictured you travelling endlessly on the London Underground…

Well, I've been surfing the Underground for forty years and in the old days before social media and Candy Crush, this would have been the perfect book for reading on the tube but we digress. Most of the research is about the details like the poisons which is either through reading books on poison or Googling. Or reading Crime Monthly. At the moment I'm writing something that requires some quite dark dives into the internet so I keep expecting a knock on the door from the police asking why I'm searching the web for ways to jam CCTV. 

Can you tell us about how the manuscript found its way to Bloodhound Books and how you found your agent, if you have one? And what that relationship is like? 

I was having no luck getting an agent but via a brilliant organisation called Byte the Book, I had a couple of inspirational chats with other authors and via those I found my way to Reedsy and a fabulous editor named Dominic. For a small fee, he read my entire manuscript and thankfully loved it, which gave me the push I needed to keep going. 

Crucially, he also made some really helpful suggestions which I took on board before submitting it direct to some independent publishers including Bloodhound. I'd researched the best indie publishers in the cosy crime space and, as I mentioned, I'd read Katharine's fab debut novel, so I sent off my submission and hoped for the best. 

I wasn't looking for any advance or anything like that. My only desire was to have something out in the world that I’d created. Holding in your hand a book that you've written is an amazing feeling. I didn't actually mind if only three people bought it.  As it's turned out, a few more lovely people have spent their pennies for which I am truly humbled and grateful. 

I love small indie publishers like Bloodhound, and Bluemoose and Eye Books, and I loved the editing process.

I agreed with pretty much all the changes that the Bloodhound editors wanted - they shaved about 10,000 words off because it was far too flabby. It was 92,000 words originally. Almost Proustian. I pushed back on only two small changes. There were six paragraphs that were edited out - a flashback scene where Lexington recruits Monica to the Twelve - and I still miss those desperately. Maybe they'll make it into the Director's Cut. 

Will there be a sequel, and if so, what stage are you at? 

I hope so. I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to think that Bloodhound will definitely want one but Book 2 is nearly finished. It'll be ready to submit in June. I think it's better than Book 1. It's darker, sexier, funnier and more of an ensemble piece so you learn a lot more about David and Martin and Anna and Belinda and Veronica.

Book 3 is also beginning to solidify. At the moment, if Book 2 were a planet then it would have land and sea and creatures but still some minor tectonic and atmospheric issues whereas Book 3 is just a swirling mass of rocks and gas. But if Bloodhound say yes to Book 2 then I'll start work properly on Book 3 in August. My current plan is a trilogy and then I've got three ideas for what comes after Book 3. 

But that's a couple of years away and at the moment I'm perfectly happy being No.90 on the Kindle Store chart for an hour or so.

Lunch With the Deadly Dozen, from Bloodhound Books, is available to buy from Amazon, Waterstones and other outlets.

My well-thumbed copy enjoying the bank holiday sunshine.

For more good reads click here for the Ten for The TEN archive.