At first glance it’s a monstrous birdlike creature that has difficulty flying and is about to drop out of the sky onto the city of Bath. Closer inspection shows some city locations and a further look at top and bottom reveals numerous running figures. If you’re with me, you may have worked out that it’s the course map of a long distance race known as the Other Half.
I’m often asked why, as a writer with a long series set in Bath, I have never up to now included a map as a help to readers. There’s a good argument that anyone unfamiliar with the city would enjoy the story more if they could follow it street by street. Up to now I’ve resisted because I don’t want my readers breaking off to check precisely where incidents happen. Anything that stops the pages turning, be it a knock on your door, a phone call, dinner, sleep or your house going up in flames, is unacceptable to an author.
So how is it that The Finisher (Sphere, 14 July), the nineteenth in the Peter Diamond series, is the first to have a map at the front? Is this me surrendering? Not really. The story is about a 13.1 mile half-marathon over a route I’ve made up. A real race known as the Bath Half is a well-established event that 12,000 runners join in each March and is watched by almost everyone in the city. It’s so popular that entries have to be in six months ahead. This year the Bath Half was run controversially on 15 March, one of the last mass-participation sports events before the Covid 19 lockdown. About 6,200 diehards competed.
In all conscience I couldn’t make the real Bath Half the setting for a murder mystery, so I invented the Other Half, a fictional race for people too late to enter the real event.
The Other Half starts in Great Pulteney Street where the real race begins, but soon goes out into the country over a far more testing terrain along canal towpaths, over viaducts, up steep climbs and through disused railway tunnels. I couldn’t resist sending my luckless competitors into the Tunnel of Death, a mile-long section that really is burrowed through a limestone hill and gets its name from a terrible railway accident in 1929. Those who get through still have another tunnel, the Devonshire, to endure before crossing the railway and the River Avon and completing the loop where they started.
Luckily for me, I have two artists in the family, Jacqui Lovesey and Saffron Russell, who made sense of my meanderings and produced the elegant map you see above.
I’m sure to be asked where the idea for The Finisher came from. Usually that’s a tough question, but this time I can truthfully say I decided to write about distance running as a nod to my younger self. Fifty years ago, in 1970, my crime-writing career was launched with Wobble to Death, about murders during a Victorian long-distance race. It was a lucky book for me, the winner of a first crime novel prize. It got on TV in a lovely version adapted by Alan Plater and has remained in print for half a century. This year Sphere have reprinted it with a new cover and an afterword from me. And my US publisher, Soho, will bring out a de luxe collector’s edition in October. No surprise, then, that in 2020 I’ve given the unathletic Peter Diamond the job of security officer in a half-marathon.
As a blistered footnote, I must assure my regular readers that the title of The Finisher doesn’t mean that after fifty years I’ve stopped writing. I’m still going, enjoying myself with the twentieth Peter Diamond. In the long run, I’m not out of puff yet.
©Peter Lovesey 2020
