Peter James's Detective Roy Grace makes his stage debut

“There’s too many of them?”

“That’s one way of looking at it, another way of looking at it is, people like them – let’s make some more of them.”

Alan Partridge’s Swallow – a Norwich-based maverick detective who tackles vandalism – may remain on the drawing board from his first famous pitch to Tony Hayers in 1997, but 15 years on it seems the public still can’t get enough of the detective series.

For proof just look at the ongoing success of Midsomer Murders, Sherlock and Lewis, as well as newcomers such as Luther and The Killing. And Brighton-based Roy Grace could be set to join that rank of crime-fighters – with his adventures already topping the book charts for the past decade.

Having been in talks about a TV series over the past few years, a chance meeting at a party with theatre producer Joshua Andrews saw Grace’s creator Peter James take a different tack when it came to making his detective flesh.

The result is The Perfect Murder – based on a short novella penned by James as part of the Quick Reads scheme to encourage adult readers.

“Grace doesn’t appear in the original novella at all,” says director Ian Talbot, who received an OBE for his work with the Regents Park Open Air Theatre.

“What the adaptor [Shaun McKenna] has done is include Grace as a young detective, and taken him a little bit from the other novels.”

It means there’s a certain recognition for Grace fans. The happily married young detective even has a phone conversation with his wife Sandy during the course of the action – naturally unaware of the estrangement that is to come.

“It was Peter’s idea to introduce Roy Grace,” says Talbot. “He felt his fans would be interested to see him at the start of his career.”

Indeed it was during casting of his hero detective that James had the most involvement with the production.

“He let me and Joshua cast who we wanted – the only say he did have was in who played Grace,” says Talbot.

“When Peter came along and met Steven Miller [formerly of Casualty] he said ‘He’s the one’.”

The central focus of the story is the warring couple Victor and Joan Smiley from the original novella.

They have been married for a long time – and the cracks are beginning to show. Victor is enjoying the attention of a prostitute and dreaming of ways to get his wife out of his life forever – unaware that she has similar plans for him.

For Talbot the casting of Les Dennis and Waking The Dead’s Claire Goose was important to add a comedic element to the story.

“In the novel they are both as bad as each other,” he says. “We didn’t want their relation- ship to be like Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf.

“We had to have two actors with a warmth to them – you can’t train anybody to have that, either you have it or you don’t.

“They both have dark sides and play tricks on each other – in the play Victor says Joan has to go into the spare room a lot because of his snoring, and he admits he sometimes pretends to snore just to annoy her.

“They know how to press each other’s buttons. Every Sunday they have rows and bicker a lot. “A lot of the audience will recognise themselves – but I don’t myself, I hasten to add!”

He admits the story has been changed, with extra twists and new elements introduced into the tale.

“Both audiences and Peter himself have said it is much funnier than they imagined,” says Talbot. “In Dartford [where the tour opened] someone said they couldn’t quite believe they were being allowed to laugh.

“The opening is a bit of a shock for Les Dennis’s fans.”

Talbot sees Dennis’s role as Victor as part of the comedian’s gradual move to more serious theatre, having made his name in Family Fortunes, working with Russ Abbott and sending himself up in Extras.

“He proved himself to be a terrific actor in Midsomer Murders over Christmas,” says Talbot. “He’s been nurturing this new side to his career, playing different but big parts around the country.”

The set, by Michael Holt, places all the action between three rooms – the prostitute’s bedroom, the Smileys’ bedroom and their sitting room.

“The piece is quite episodic, but I didn’t want lots of blackouts with somebody changing the scenery around,” says Talbot, who has kept the setting contemporary despite it being an early Grace case.

“There’s a danger it could become disjointed and you lose the momentum of the plot. The three rooms meant we had difficulty in rehearsals with sightlines, but the team has done a great job. “The difficulty on a 16-week tour is to make the set suitable for the different-sized venues, but it should work perfectly in the Theatre Royal Brighton.”

Although he has enjoyed a long and distinguished career – starting work as an actor in 1964 before moving on to directing – Talbot admits he is enjoying the challenge of working with new writing.

“I haven’t done that many new plays, because being at the open-air theatre for 20 years I always directed Shakespeare and musicals,” he says.

“It is exciting and hard work inevitably. You have to make changes and edits. “I had to cut the first act quite a bit because it was quite long. Everybody understood the process, and I tried to be as democratic as possible – but one long speech which an actor had taken a lot of time to learn had to go.”

The story’s creator, Peter James, had paid several visits to rehearsals – attending the first read-through and making observations after the first full run-through following two weeks of rehearsals.

“He said he wasn’t going to come near as he was uncertain about the process of putting on a play,” says Talbot, revealing that James also brought Dave Gaylor, the detective who inspired Roy Grace, to one rehearsal.

“He had a chat with Steven about police procedure,” says Talbot. “It was strange to have the real Roy Grace in the room – he wasn’t at all how I imagined!”

James has been hosting Q and A sessions after performances on the tour – and is set to make an appearance in his hometown on Tuesday night.

As for the future, Talbot is about to tangle with another long-running murder case – The Mousetrap in London. But he hopes he can be involved in future Roy Grace thrillers.

“I hope it does become a big franchise,” he says, revealing there are already discussions about which book should be adapted next.

As for the nature of The Perfect Murder – a subject which has intrigued writers and philosophers for years – Talbot believes they may be happening all around us.

“According to Peter a perfect murder could be achieved,” he says. “In the play it says the perfect murder is never detected – people don’t know it has happened.

“Did you ever have a neighbour who just disappeared and never came back?”

From the page to the stage (and screen)

Sherlock Holmes
It was William Gillette’s portrayal of the master sleuth on stage between 1899 and 1930 which gave the hero one of his trademark props.
Whereas in The Strand Magazine illustrations alongside Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories Holmes had been given a straight pipe, actor and director Gillette opted for a distinctive curved pipe which allowed the theatre audience to see his facial expressions. He also donned the deerstalker and cape which had only appeared occasionally in Sidney Paget’s original drawings. The look has been synonymous with Holmes ever since.
The detective is the most portrayed character on the screen, with Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett and most recently Robert Downey Jr and Benedict Cumberbatch giving life to the king of deduction.

Hercule Poirot
Agatha Christie only put her beloved Belgian detective on stage once in her play Black Coffee.
Christie’s first play, penned in 1929, was apparently inspired by her
dissatisfaction with other stage and screen adaptations of her work.
But although she apparently liked his portrayal by Francis L Sullivan, she never wrote Poirot into a play again – apparently tiring of the character in the 1930s, and replacing him in her stage adaptations of her novels with different detectives. Poirot had first been given life by Charles Laughton in 1928’s Alibi – a play adapted by Michael Morton from Christie’s The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd. Forever to be associated with the role is David Suchet, who this Christmas completed his ambition to star in a television adaptation of every Poirot story.
He even took the lead in Black Coffee in a rehearsed reading at Chichester Festival Theatre as part of 2012’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
A touring version of Black Coffee from the Agatha Christie Theatre Company, starring Robert Powell, is at the Congress Theatre, in Carlisle Road, Eastbourne, from Monday, March 10 to Saturday, March 15, and Theatre Royal Brighton from Tuesday, May 27, to Saturday, May 31.

Sam Spade
With his long trenchcoat and short but snappy dialogue, Humphrey Bogart provided a template for every American gumshoe forever more with his seminal portrayal of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.
The character had been created by Hammett for his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, which had already been adapted for the screen twice before Bogart came along in 1941.

Inspector Morse
In recent years the amateur detective has taken a back-seat to the professional both on screen and in fiction – and Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse was part of that revolution.
Like Roy Grace, he is closely connected to a specific area – the dreaming spires of Oxford – and has a similarly complicated personal life which keeps him wedded to his job.
John Thaw completely inhabited the character in the popular ITV series, which launched in 1987, 12 years after Dexter’s first Morse book Last Bus To Woodstock.
But Thaw hasn’t been the only Morse – a prequel series, Endeavour, starred Shaun Evans as a young Morse, John Shrapnel played him on BBC Radio 4 in the 1990s, and Colin Baker brought him to the stage for the first time in the UK tour of Morse – House Of Ghosts in 2010.
In the wake of Morse came a whole slew of detectives battling against the
odds, including Jack Frost, Spender and Wycliffe.

Wallander
Henning Mankell’s troubled detective has most recently been played on British TV by Kenneth Branagh – mixing Scandinavian scenery with contemporary English dialogue.
But by the time the series aired in 2008, all nine of Mankell’s novels had already been turned into Swedish films, starring Rolf Lassgard as Wallander.
And 13 new stories were created for Swedish TV starring Krister Henriksson in 2005 and 2006.
The Wallander novels heralded a new fascination for Scandinavian crime fiction, as seen with the success of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy, and the revolution in Scandinavian box-set television with The Killing and The Bridge.