First of all, let me thank all of you who sent sympathy over the “Other Peter Robinson” affair. It was all very annoying, but it seems to be over now. I suppose, to look on the bright side, at least I got some press out of it. Anyway, thank you all.
The big news right now is that Left Bank Productions and ITV are going to start filming Aftermath in April with Stephen Tompkinson as Alan Banks. He’s thrilled about the role and I’m thrilled to have him in the part. He’s an extremely popular actor in the UK – some of you may know him from Ballykissangel and Wild at Heart, and he was terrific in the movie Brassed Off.
With Left Bank and ITV involved, I would also expect the highest standards in production values. At the moment, I have no other details on casting (no more, “Who’s going to play Annie?” please. I don’t know yet.) or on where it’s going to filmed. I can only hope it’s somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales. Aftermath is only a pilot, so anything (or nothing) could happen, but with the screenplay I’ve read and Stephen Tompkinson in the lead, it has every chance of developing legs, as they say, so let’s hope for a long-running series to rival Morse, Frost and Midsomer Murders. The Daily Mirror printed the story here.
The new Banks novel Bad Boy is finished all but the printing and binding, and it should be out in the UK in early August 2010, and in North America a short while later. I will be touring in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada in August and September this year. I’ll post details when I have them. Bad Boy begins when a distraught woman arrives at the Eastvale police station desperate to speak to Banks. Since he is on holiday, Annie Cabbot, steps in. The woman tells Annie that she’s found a loaded gun hidden in the bedroom of her daughter, Erin, and when an armed response team goes to the house to retrieve the weapon, a straightforward procedure quickly spirals out of control. But this is ony the beginning. It turns out that Erin’s best friend and housemate is none other than Tracy Banks, who was last seen racing off to warn the owner of the gun, a very bad boy indeed. Thrust into a complicated and dangerous case intertwining the personal and the professional as never before, Annie and Banks – a bit of a bad boy himself – must risk everything to outsmart a smooth and devious psychopath. But this time it’s not just Banks’s career hanging in the balance, it’s also his daughter’s life.
The paperback edition of The Price of Love is coming out from Hodder in the UK on February 18. I don’t have details on US and Canadian publication yet, but I would guess at late spring or early summer. Even for those of you who don’t like short stories and have complained to me about the lack of a Banks novel in 2009 (Oh yes, people do, you know), it’s worth the price for the Banks novella, “Like a Virgin,” which details his last case in London before heading up to Yorkshire. Look at is as a slightly shorter than usual Banks novel!
I don’t have many events coming up in the near future, but I will be at Sleuthfest, in Florida, February 26-28 and at Bloody Words in Toronto, May 28 to 30. I will also be in Paris for the Salon du Livre on the weekend of March 27, and in Horsens, Denmark, for the annual crime festival on April 10. I may also be doing bookshop events in Paris and Copenhagen, so keep your eyes on your local stores. I also expect to be at the London Book Fair in April.
I don’t get the chance to answer every email and request I get, and for that I apologise. Some of you have asked for signed bookplates recently. As it happens, I don’t have any, but I will get some. You may have to wait a little while, so please be pateient. I also don’t have signed photographs – I’m not an actor or a rock star! – and they may be a little more difficult to come across. Honestly, this business used to be about writing books, really… Oh, and, finally, I’ll have the Bad Boy playlist up very soon. There’s a lot of interesting music on it for those of you who like that aspect of the books. For those who don’t, well, you don’t have to look at it!
Peter Robinson 