Peter May's Books | Crime Books

Biography

Peter May was born in Glasgow in 1951. He grew up wanting to write for a living. Unfortunately, his education didn’t match his aspirations.

“One day, my headmaster just grabbed me and said: ‘May, take your long hair and your big furry coat and go home and don’t come back.’ So that was the end of my school career.” (Kirkus Reviews)

Young Journalist of the Year

His first job was a short stint working for National Savings as a clerk. He followed that with another as a trainee car salesman. Neither role enthralled him, so he enrolled on a year-long course in journalism at the Edinburgh College of Commerce. That led to work with a local rag, the Paisley Daily Express. Things started to look up in 1973 when he won the Fraser Award for Scotland’s Young Journalist of the Year. He then landed higher-profile positions at the Scotsman and Glasgow Evening Times.

Write About What You Know

During this time, he wrote his first novel, The Reporter.

“I wrote my first published book, which was about a journalist. They always say write about what you know, so I did.” (Shotsmag)

The BBC asked him to adapt it into a television series, leading to a screenwriting career. May contributed to dramas and soap operas before finally giving up his TV work to concentrate on writing novels in 1996.

May stuck to the advice of writing about what you know, going to great lengths to research his novels.

The Lewis trilogy, including The Lewis Man, is set in the Outer Hebrides. May has spent thousands of hours there shooting 99 episodes of the soap opera Machair.

The China Thrillers

May chose a more exotic location for his six-book China thrillers series. He became fascinated by the country after a day trip from Hong Kong to Shenzhen in southern China in the 1980s. It isn’t easy for a Scotsman to become an expert on Chinese policing methods. Not a man to be discouraged, May contacted an American criminologist who had trained hundreds of Chinese police officers. Using his name as a calling card, he met and interviewed countless members of the Chinese police. He even managed to visit the Shanghai mortuary.

“When I was being shown the mortuary in Shanghai, they wheeled out the newly autopsied body of a young man who had been executed the day before. It makes you feel very human, very vulnerable, to see someone so young, so dead and so totally butchered. His face was screwed up in pain, or fear, or both. In China, they execute you by shooting you in the back of the head, so presumably, that was the anticipation of the moment frozen there on his face.” (pagesperso)

Peter May’s books were so successful that the Chinese Crime Writers’ Association invited May to become an honorary member. He also wrote a regular monthly column for Contemporary World Police, a magazine read by hundreds of thousands of Chinese police officers.

The China Series has notched up several prizes. Perhaps most notable was the Prix Intramuros for Snakehead. Prisoners in French jails award the prize. The judging process included a visit to a French prison. There, a panel of inmates interviewed May.

The Importance of Research

May’s research didn’t stop in China. For Virtually Dead, May became a citizen of the virtual world Second Life. He created an avatar and spent a year in the online world as a private detective, working on cases ranging from infidelity to stalking and fraud. Whilst researching The Enzo Files — a series of novels about a forensic scientist in France — May visited Michelin restaurants and the Paris sewers. He also studied winemaking and became a Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Dive Bouteille (The Order of the Divine Bottle).

The Power of Premonition

Maybe the least well-researched of May’s novels was Lockdown which he wrote in 2005. The backdrop was an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus in London, which he based upon pandemic planning done in the early 2000s. When he sent it to his publishers, they rejected it as unrealistic.

Fifteen years later, he resubmitted the manuscript. This time they were a little more receptive.

“At the time I wrote the book, scientists were predicting that bird flu was going to be the next major world pandemic… It was a very, very scary thing, and it was a real possibility, so I put a lot of research into it and came up with the idea, what if this pandemic began in London? What could happen if a city like that was completely locked down?” (Tribune India)