{"id":40681,"date":"2026-05-23T18:10:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T18:10:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demo4.dedicatedhost247.com\/news\/meet-the-most-famous-crime-writer-youve-never-heard-of-books-entertainment\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T18:10:28","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T18:10:28","slug":"meet-the-most-famous-crime-writer-youve-never-heard-of-books-entertainment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demo4.dedicatedhost247.com\/news\/meet-the-most-famous-crime-writer-youve-never-heard-of-books-entertainment\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the most famous crime writer you’ve never heard of | Books | Entertainment"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\"Peter<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/p>\n

Peter Grainger, AKA author Robert Partridge, photographed at home in Cambridgeshire for the Express (Image: Tim Merry \/ Daily Express)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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One the door of Peter Grainger\u2019s study is an ersatz Blue Plaque: \u201cPeter Grainger. Best selling author, & pride of Norfolk, lives here.\u201d It was a gift from his eldest son Matthew in recognition of his dad\u2019s long-standing literary endeavours. Now six years on there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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. \u201cI take my coffee seriously,\u201d he smiles, much, he might add, like his \u201cupright, unconventional, awkward\u201d (and fictional) Detective Sergeant David \u2018DC\u2019 Smith, a 50-something veteran of Norfolk Police \u2013 and the reason we\u2019re here today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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-\u2019c\u2019 conservative. He\u2019s 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\u2019s exactly what he is. Not bad for a writer who, until now, has been entirely self-published.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Read more:<\/strong> From Ancient Rome to AI cops, SAS heroes and humming birds, 4 new books to read <\/a><\/p>\n

Read more:<\/strong> Introducing 6 rising stars of crime and thriller writing vying for top prize <\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Blue<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/p>\n

The blue plaque on Peter’s study door was a slightly tongue-in-cheek present from son Matthew (Image: Tim Merry \/ Daily Express)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Peter\u2019s 16, soon to be 17, books featuring Smith and the Kings Lake Central murder squad, in a lightly fictionalised version of King\u2019s 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\u2019ve never heard of.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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His first novel to appear in bookshops, An Accidental Death<\/a>, landed earlier this month. But what sets Peter apart from other debut authors is the fact that he\u2019s already sold a million copies of his series in ebook and audio formats.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2019s a sadness \u2013 he\u2019s 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 \u2013 but something about him resonated with readers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cA lot of fictional detectives seem to be dark, dysfunctional heavy drinkers with more problems than the criminals. I thought, \u2018Surely there\u2019s an alternative to this?\u2019 So I went in the other direction,\u201d says Peter. \u201cClearly, police stations aren\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For such an authentically-drawn series, the fact Peter rarely read crime fiction himself seems astonishing \u2013 but he believes it was a benefit to his books. \u201cYou avoid the clich\u00e9s and the predictable formulas,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to come at it more from the technical side of writing \u2013 playing around with point of view and tense.\u201d 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\u2019s long-running documentary series 24 Hours In Police Custody to Smith\u2019s development.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"24<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/p>\n

Scene from 24 Hours in Police Custody \u2013 Channel 4 series that helped inspire DC Smith and Kings Lake (Image: Channel 4)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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\u201cThose fly-on-the-wall programmes don\u2019t hide how often they\u2019re going up blind alleys \u2013 going through 3,000 number plates or watching 20 hours of CCTV \u2013 and finding nothing. It\u2019s routine, it\u2019s not glamorous, and I wanted to capture that,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIn one way they\u2019re completely ordinary people, but there\u2019s something special about the best detectives and that\u2019s what I was interested in. I didn\u2019t want one of these officers who can drive 120mph and hit the bullseye at 50 yards with a hand-held pistol. I didn\u2019t want Smith or any of the police to be superheroes. Equally, I didn\u2019t want the people they\u2019re after to be cardboard villains.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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 \u2013 featuring the inquiry into a drowned sixth-form student, whose death had hitherto been written off as an accident \u2013 in October 2013, Peter\u2019s 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\u2019s gold dust!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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 Waters, Serena Butler and John Wilson, and DCI Cara Freeman.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI didn\u2019t know if the series would survive A Private Investigation,\u201d he admits. \u201cBut I thought it would be interesting to continue with the other characters in his team and see how Smith continued to influence them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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 \u2013 he winces ever so slightly at the word \u2013 at the age of 72 is a testament both to his persistence and his talent. \u201cSurreal,\u201d is the word he uses but it\u2019s clear he\u2019s still processing what\u2019s happened.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He grew up nearby in Ely, Cambs, the bright son of working-class parents \u2013 his father was an electrician, his mother a housewife and dressmaker \u2013 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).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Robert<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/p>\n

At home in Cambridgeshire last week… with his dog Jenna (Image: Tim Merry \/ Daily Express)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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\"An<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/p>\n

An Accidental Death by Peter Grainger is out now in paperback (Image: Penguin)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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\u201cI retired a year or two earlier than I had to, because they offered me a good deal,\u201d he continues. \u201cI was expensive and, by then, a member of the awkward squad so they were quite happy to see me go. I\u2019d always written. I\u2019d sent things off over the years and had everything turned down as most people do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe intention was to invest some of that money in sitting down and making myself write properly, to take it a bit more seriously.\u201d Then his son Matthew, who works as a manager in the tech industry, suggested he go down the self-publishing route using Amazon\u2019s Kindle platform. Once sneered at by traditional publishing, it\u2019s now the preferred route for many authors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI didn\u2019t really know what a Kindle was,\u201d he admits. But he was soon making a \u201cfew quid\u201d a month from sales and hearing from his readers. It was realising he was finding an audience that proved the \u201cgame-changer\u201d. He decided to write a crime series to boost that readership after recognising the commercial appeal of genre fiction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cRomance is the bestselling genre, not for me, then it\u2019s fantasy, again not my thing, and about third or fourth was crime fiction,\u201d he chuckles. \u201cI thought, \u2018Yeah, okay, that\u2019s a possibility\u2019. So I did a bit of research to see what was selling. It\u2019s easy because you can open books and read a few pages for free.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI\u2019ve had to explain this a number of times to the hundreds or thousands of people who have emailed and Facebooked me over the years,\u201d he admits, then tells the story again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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His first ebook, published under his real name, was a literary novel, titled Afon \u2013 Welsh for river. \u201cIt\u2019s about a failed English schoolteacher who is trying to write his second book. He\u2019s had some success but he can\u2019t replicate it,\u201d he smiles. \u201cHis life\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Now that \u201cfailed\u201d author is a very successful one indeed. The success of the early books built momentum, which meant Amazon\u2019s algorithms started plugging the books even more, and so on. By my back-of-an-envelope calculations, splitting ebook earnings 70\u201330% with Amazon adds up to a not inconsiderable sum. \u201cWe\u2019re not millionaires,\u201d he insists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Some<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/p>\n

SoSort of Justice will be Peter’s first simultaneous hardback, audio and ebook release, in June (Image: Penguin)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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\"Spider\"<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/p>\n

Peter’s Brachypelma smithi \u2013 also known as Smith’s Red Knee tarantula (Image: Matt Nixson \/ Express)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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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?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThat\u2019s a good question,\u201d he says. \u201cIf my wife was listening, she\u2019d be asking, \u2018Yes, why did you do it?\u2019 They offered good advances. At that point, we didn\u2019t need the money, we\u2019ve both got pensions, but I\u2019ve had thousands of emails saying, \u2018When are they going to be in print?\u2019 \u2018I\u2019d love to give this to my dad but he doesn\u2019t read ebooks\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Lynn, 72, confides later: \u201cHe\u2019s always wanted to see himself in a bookshop.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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: \u201cShe said, \u2018Look, 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?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even when the big offers started coming in, Peter \u2013 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 \u2013 took some persuading.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In truth, I suspect he thinks carefully about all his moves. One sticking point was the publisher\u2019s insistence the books be revised for publication. After all, he\u2019s never had \u2013 nor needed \u2013 an editor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019ve had some interesting discussions over what you can say,\u201d he admits. Thankfully, edits have been light.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On his writing desk is a tarantula, which seems an unusual pet. When I look it up, its name is Brachypelma smithi \u2013 or Smith\u2019s Red Knee tarantula. Clearly there\u2019s more to the mild-mannered author than first appearances suggest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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