Lynda La Plante on crime-ridden Britain: People live in fear. Politicians don't know what to do

Telegraph

2 days ago

Many of us lie awake wondering whether we can pay the mortgage. The night before we meet, Lynda La Plante lay awake worrying whether it's possible to find DNA on a body obliterated by a bomb explosion, including the teeth. The plot of the novel she is currently writing, the sixth and final to feature her sensitive, much-loved detective Jack Warr, apparently depends upon it.
'I got on the phone to a scientist friend this morning and he told me he was pretty sure even very badly charred clothing can retain DNA,' she says cheerfully. 'Particularly the waistband of trousers. So that was a relief.'
The 82-year-old La Plante is sitting in the panelled sitting room of her 17th-century home in Kingston. Her hair is bouffant, her gold earrings sparkle and her bellowing voice is positively aristocratic. The interior of her house is so grand it resembles a baronial castle – enormous fireplaces, stag heads on the walls – the fruit of an estimated £30 million fortune amassed from four decades as a best-selling crime novelist and writer of groundbreaking TV hits such as Widows and Prime Suspect.
At one point, her enormous poodle-wolf hound cross, Theo, wanders in, as tall as the table and almost the size of La Plante, who is tiny. She is the grand dame of British crime fiction and by goodness she looks the part.
Yet if La Plante is sheer glamour, her writing is pure grit. Her novels (there are 50 and she has sold 15 million copies of them) bulge with the painstaking minutiae of behind-the-scenes detective work rather than gun-toting police heroics on the street.
Her current obsession is forensics, and her latest novel, The Scene of the Crime, introduces a new protagonist who is an expert in the field: Jessica Russell, head of the Met's newly-formed and experimental Serious Crime Analysis Unit and a typical La Plante heroine – tough, self contained and, inevitably, the victim of ingrained dinosaur sexism within the force itself. The team's first job involves the attempted murder of a wealthy wine trader, and Russell exhaustively coordinates the DNA analysis and digital forensics data.
'You tend to see all these impossibly young female detectives on TV, running around chasing people and arresting them,' says La Plante slightly sniffily. 'But if you meet the experts, the specialist scientists who today are the ones really solving crimes [through forensics], there is a real quietness and concentration about them.'
That there are women on TV solving crimes at all is arguably down to La Plante, who throughout her career as a crime writer has invariably placed determined, battle-hardened women centre stage. She initially started out as an actress, graduating from Rada in the mid-1960s, and spent several years starring in TV cop shows such as The Sweeney, Z Cars and Bergerac, and also working with the RSC.
Yet in the early 1980s, fed up by the paucity of strong roles available to women in crime shows, she successfully pitched Widows to Thames Television. That show, in which three bereaved wives of armed robbers pull off a bank raid, was an instant hit, attracting a staggering 18 million viewers.
In 1991 she followed it with Prime Suspect, which ran for 15 years on ITV until 2006 and starred Helen Mirren as the indomitable Jane Tennison – the first female character to lead a police force in a prime-time TV crime drama. 'A character like Tennison had never been seen before,' says La Plante. 'A high-ranking female police officer, leading a murder squad, and with all the misogyny and discrimination she faced.'
From the outset La Plante was determined to ensure her books were as realistic as possible, her constables and criminals as gutsy and authentic as their real-life counterparts on the streets. Her novels are always impeccably researched, sometimes at considerable personal risk. For Widows she spent time with drug addicts in Kings Cross and ex-cons in East End pubs, basing her main characters on the people she met.
When she was researching her 1990 novel Bella Mafia, which centres on the fall-out of a mafia mass shooting, she spent a couple of weeks in Italy researching the Sicilian underworld, interviewing various mafia dons. Sensing one morning that someone had been inside her Palermo hotel room while she was out, she placed a hair across her desk. 'And when I came back, it had gone,' she said.
So the mafia were looking through her work?
'Yes, to check what I had written. They didn't want any identities inadvertently revealed.'
She has also interviewed several of Britain's most violent offenders. 'Peter Sutcliffe was pitiful,' she says. 'And Charles Bronson still sends me cartoons. I have literally hundreds. They always have the same line: 'Never walk backwards into a madman's cell'.' She gives a dark little laugh.
'He asked me to be his bridesmaid twice. He's such a showman. Because of the biopic that was made about him [2008's Bronson, starring Tom Hardy] he has amazing kudos in prison. But the prison officer he took hostage in his cell [Adrian Wallace, in 1994] was so traumatised he was forced to retire early from his job.'
How on earth did she keep her cool being around such dangerous people? 'I was able to do it because I'm an actress,' she says. 'I learnt very quickly not to show disgust, not to show anything in fact but enjoyment. Don't take the notebook out. Don't turn on the tape recorder. You have someone turn on you once, and you never forget it.'
Politicians don't know what to do
It sounds a brutalising business. What motivates her is 'the terrible trail of destruction criminals leave in their wake'. She is not remotely hardened to either the consequences of crime or to the social breakdown that often lies behind it. But the day-to-day news cycle horrifies her.
'I hear about the mothers who lose their children to knife crime on the way to school and my heart breaks,' she says, her eyes watering. 'People are living in so much fear, on the Tube, on the streets.'
Moreover, she thinks it's getting worse. 'My driver took the car to the car wash and another car cut in front of him in the queue. He was about to get out to remonstrate when the attendant signalled to him not to. Apparently the driver of the second car had waved a machete. There were three more young men in the back. So what are you supposed to do?'
Does she have any insight into why people are becoming more aggressive? 'I've no idea. I just know that these days it's everywhere. Speeding cyclists almost knocking you down in Richmond Park... '
She's not sure how to solve it, either. 'Politicians seem to have no idea. They don't seem able to cope. And releasing prisoners early is not exactly helping. Those people have committed a serious crime and they should serve their sentence. Imagine being the victim of a domestic abuser, thinking he's been put away for five years and one day being told he's been released early. How would that make you feel?'
She starts talking about the recent pro-Palestinian marches. 'I get terribly upset about the children in Ukraine and Gaza, but the pro-Palestine marches are so confrontational. You want to take them aside and say, why? Why are you here? Vanessa Feltz was attacked by a protester recently, who hurled an anti-Semitic remark at her. You think, 'What is this?'
'People say, 'Be more guarded,'' she continues. 'They say, 'Pull your cuffs down if you have a nice watch.' And you think, 'I don't want to live like that.' So I rarely go into town these days. Soho is terrifying after dark. Instead I invite all my actor friends [who include Richard E Grant and Celia Imrie] to dinner here.'
She has, inevitably, over the course of her career, thought an awful lot about whether people are inherently evil. Much of the time, when she interviews serial killers (she has also talked to Dennis Nilsen and the Kray brothers) she is trying to find out what drives them. She rarely does.
'People often ask if people are born that way,' she adds. 'And they are not. If a boy is taking a knife into school, it's possibly because he is being bullied. Or because there are people at the school gates selling fentanyl and he's got sucked into a gang.
'But then you have to go further back [in that child's life], to the start of primary school where teachers can't cope because children aren't potty trained and they don't know how to behave. So it means you have to put more money into primary schools because there are inadequate parents. And so on.'
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She throws her hands up. 'The problem with getting politicians to solve all this – there is no one above them with any vision. And they keep changing their minds. Their policies keep changing. One minute you are encouraged to get a mortgage, the next it's gone up by £300. People wonder how to map out how they are going to live. And then they think, 'Well, I won't bother, I'll just stay on benefits.''
She's gone a bit off topic. 'Politicians then try and reform the benefits system but find they have to prove who is needy because you can't be seen to be taking benefits from the needy. Of course, it always comes down to money.'
So how would she raise it? Tax the rich more? 'The problem there is that wealthy people are moving out of Britain rather than paying more tax. But it worries me that they don't think they should pay more tax. They don't feel they should contribute. You don't get this in America. Say what you like about Musk and Bezos and that revolting $40m wedding, but at least they give millions to charity.
'People in this country don't. Whereas I'm one of those people who finds it very hard watching TV because I go, 'Dear God, the donkeys'. I'm sitting there on my phone, donating to the starving children, donating to the life boats.'
La Plante grew up in Crosby, in Liverpool. Her father was a salesman and her mother a stay-at-home housewife, and she describes her childhood as 'idyllic' and 'impossibly free'. At Rada, to which she won a scholarship at the age of 16, her peers included John Hurt (who kept nervously and vainly trying to ask her out) and Anthony Hopkins.
Her memoir Getting Away With Murder is stuffed with waspish anecdotes about this time in her life and her later career, including the many celebrities she has rubbed shoulders with: Mick Jagger and David Bowie, who wanted her to write them a film but were too hungover during their first meeting with her to decide what it ought to be about; Paul McCartney, who she dismisses as 'vacuous'. She also, in 1978, got married to her husband Richard (they divorced in 1996; the marriage was childless) who at the time dabbled in property and rock music.
'I finally understood grief when my dog died'
More soberly she writes about her sister, Dail, who was run over by a lorry and died at the age of six before Lynda was born (she also had a younger sister Gill, a casting director, whom she talks to every day, and a brother Michael who has since died).
Her mother was so capsized by the death of Dail she would occasionally disappear for long periods ('Your mother has gone away for a rest', her father would tell Lynda) and, when she died, insisted on being buried with Dail's teddy bear and school hat. Yet La Plante is at pains to stress that, at the same time, both parents made huge efforts to ensure the household didn't collapse into despair.
'My sister was always part of our lives even though she was missing. But they never let her death impede our childhood. The house was always full of laughter.'
It's tempting to wonder if the loss of Dail has motivated La Plante's career, as though, through her crime procedurals, she is seeking to find justice in some oblique way for the sister she never knew.
'No, not really. For decades grief was never something I personally understood. But, and this is almost embarrassing, last year I had this Borzoi dog, Hugo. Beautiful. And one day he died. He was only a few years old. About a month earlier he'd eaten some pampas grass which is terribly dangerous for a dog, and although he survived the operation, we think perhaps there was some internal bleeding, or he had a heart attack because one day he suddenly couldn't breathe.
'Anyway, I broke. I've never known such incredible grief. Ever. And it made me realise, for the first time, an inkling of what my parents went through.'
She's sobbing as she says this, aware on one level that it is madness to compare the loss of a dog to the loss of a child, but at the same time unable to help it. 'The weird thing is I often write about grief, but that was the first time I'd experienced it.'
Pictures of the exquisite Hugo adorn every window sill. She turns to look at poor Theo, who even a dog fanatic would agree is an absurd looking creature. 'We got him a few months ago. I deliberately went for a dog as different to Hugo as possible.'
La Plante leads a disciplined existence, swimming daily in her indoor pool, walking Theo, although given his size this is hard to imagine, and writing every day. She tends to write from 7am until lunch and spends her evenings watching TV. Not that she thinks much of it is any good.
'You do still get terrific TV in this country. I loved Ripley. But the problem is you no longer have people who say, 'This is good, let's do it'. Instead you have a panel. And that panel often don't know good writing and they don't encourage it either. It's very hard as a writer to hear, 'This is a great script, the best we've had in years, but we don't have room for it'. That happens to me all the time.'
La Plante has written many times for TV, including adaptations of her own novels: the Anna Travis books featuring the eponymous London-based detective were adapted into the TV series Above Suspicion starring Kelly Reilly in 2009.
Recently, though, she has struggled to land a new script. In the past she has put this down to ageism within the industry. She demurs on this now. 'I don't know whether it's ageism. I don't know if people look at me and think, 'Well, we've had enough of her'. But if it's happening to me it must be happening to an awful lot of writers, given how much crap gets foisted upon us. More game shows and more dreadful game shows.
'We used to have soaps which were great training grounds for writers and actors,' she adds. 'These days the soaps deal in such horrific story lines, rapes and murder, that they are taking precedence over beautifully cultured drama. I see all these actors coming through and all they have on their CV is EastEnders because that's the only work they can get.'
When she was 57, four years after she divorced Richard, she adopted a baby boy, Lorcan. He is now a trainee pilot and lives in a cottage in her garden with his girlfriend. The pair are extremely close: when, a few months ago, she went to hospital with chest pains (it ended up being a chest infection), he stayed with her all night, terrified she was going to die. 'It was his birthday too, the poor boy.'
He often pops in to cook dinner. 'Partly because I'm such a terrible cook. I can't stand poncy food [this is true; as I am leaving, a delivery driver arrives with a Domino's pizza for her lunch]. Whenever I go to a restaurant, I have fish and chips.'
The newspapers had a field day when she adopted him because of her age, and two decades on she remains very hurt by how they treated her
'Ronnie Wood can have a child at the age of 68, but I was attacked. I had the press rifling through the bins to find out if he was black, white, Chinese. I didn't understand that something that was so beautiful could become so cruel. But I think people didn't realise at the time how many miscarriages I had had [she suffered four with Richard and endured years of failed fertility treatment]. I now realise I've given so much confidence to other women who feel they can now adopt.'
She is not impressed by a recent report detailing a rise in people in their 70s and 80s having children through surrogacy. 'It's not fair on the child. You're going to leave them too soon. Surrogacy can be a blessing for some women, but I have a feeling it's also being misused by women who can't be bothered to become pregnant.
'I fear IVF is another scientific wonder that will become abused. There are so many babies that could be adopted. It's awful to think people are ridiculed for doing it at the age I did it when you can give your son a wonderful life, a wonderful house.'
I look around at her living room again, stuffed with sofas and flowers and ornaments and a hundred photographs of her and Lorcan and yes, it certainly does seem a wonderful life. She is happy, too, not to be sharing it with anyone else. 'God no, I don't date. Having been through it once, I can't be doing with all that. When I was writing my memoir I looked back on my marriage and thought: 'What was I doing?''
Anyway there would be no time. There is her true-crime podcast Listening to the Dead, her next novel to research and write. 'Fortunately I have all these lovely experts I can call on for advice. They pick up the phone and go, 'Oh God Lynda. Not another murder'.'