Питер Ловси - The Finisher

But these were heady days for a wannabe athlete. I was commissioned to write the official centenary history of the Amateur Athletic Association, encouraged by Harold Abrahams, the 1924 Olympic sprint champion, who was a family friend, an unofficial uncle to our children. After his death in 1978 I was invited by the actor and writer Colin Welland to supply some memories of Harold for a film project that would become the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire .

Fortune favoured me again when June Wyndham-Davies, a TV producer, read a review of Waxwork , the eighth book in the Sergeant Cribb series, and persuaded Granada to buy the rights and screen it in prime time on the Sunday before Christmas 1979. Starring Alan Dobie as Cribb, William Simons as Constable Thackeray and Carol Royle as the convicted murderer Miriam Cromer, this pilot production was so successful that a series was commissioned using all of the books. I was thrilled when one of the best scriptwriters of his generation, Alan Plater, took on Wobble to Death . The episode was filmed in Manchester Free Trade Hall, an early Victorian building remarkably like the Agricultural Hall, Islington, where the original six-day races had been run. The weird form of entertainment was made believable and compelling by a cast including Kenneth Cranham and Michael Elphick.

Sergeant Cribb’s investigations came to an end with the TV series. Together with Jax, I wrote six original screenplays for a second series and used up the stock of ideas that might otherwise have become novels. Several “stand-alones” followed and then a trilogy featuring Bertie, the Prince of Wales, as an inept amateur detective.

In 1991 I foisted the burly, belligerent Peter Diamond on to the city of Bath’s murder squad in The Last Detective . He resigned straight away and then surprised me by returning in The Summons and staying in the job for nineteen books over twenty-nine years. He was middle-aged in the first, so I don’t like to think how old he must be now. As for his cat Raffles, one thing I have learned as a crime writer is that you can murder anyone, but you never kill the cat.

Writers are often asked where they get their ideas from. Tough question, but the inspiration for The Finisher is clear. The book comes fifty years after Wobble to Death .

Running has undergone seismic changes since the Victorian event I wrote about in 1970. I have mentioned some of the bad practices that plague modern athletics, but there is one development we can all applaud — the rise in popularity of “Big City” marathons. People in the thousands run distances that were regarded fifty years ago as only to be attempted by specialists. The trend began with the New York City Marathon, first run in 1970 with a field of 126. By 1980 this had grown to 14,000 and by 2019 more than 50,000. The figure for the London Marathon, instituted in 1981, is over 40,000.

In The Finisher , the half marathon known as the Other Half is entirely fictional. The real Bath Half is one of the most popular city races in Britain and takes place each March over a fast, flat course attracting almost 12,000 runners. It is always over-subscribed. There is also a full Bath Marathon usually run in August over a demanding course that includes the two railway tunnels described in the book. I couldn’t resist using the tunnel of death in my narrative. I am grateful to the management teams of both races for details of their organisation.

Many accounts of marathon-running have been written by brave people who don’t consider themselves as athletes yet attempt and achieve feats I can only dream about. I found Phil Hewitt’s Keep on Running and Outrunning the Demons particularly helpful. Alexandra Heminsley’s Running Like a Girl and Bryony Gordon’s Eat, Drink, Run give honest and fascinating insights into the challenges they overcame as women runners.

For the Bath setting and the lore of the stone quarries, I did some mining myself, of Around Combe Down , by Peter Addison and “A Brief History of the Stone Quarries at Combe Down,” by David Workman, in the Journal of the Bath Geological Society . The true story of the tunnel of death can be found in Diana White’s Stories of Bath . The map of the course at the front of this book is the work of Saffron Russell and her mother, Jacqui Lovesey. Finally I wish to thank my friends David Dell and Yury Tereshchenko for putting me right on some Russian terminology. Any flaws are my own.

Peter Lovesey

www.peterlovesey.com