Crime author Lynda La Plante: ‘Emotionally, writing the darkness is hard’

After decades penning books about brutal murders, serial killers and high stakes, it’s perhaps no surprise that Lynda La Plante struggles to sleep.

Crime writer La Plante is best known for her creation of Prime Suspect’s fearless detective Jane Tennison – memorably portrayed on-screen by Helen Mirren from the Nineties.

“I’m very insomniac – I hardly ever sleep,” La Plante tells the Press Association – something she suggests could be down to the content of her books.

“Emotionally, writing the darkness is hard,” she continues – particularly as she’s a committed researcher, often interviewing perpetrators of gruesome crimes as background for her books.

“And yet when I do book signing events, nobody can believe [it’s me]… Writing crime is very hard and I meet all these evil criminals, but I laugh all the time – because if you let the darkness come in and dominate you, it will harm you. You have to keep it away.”

La Plante also credits her inability to sleep to a “brain that is constantly wanting to learn” – and that’s clear in the way she jumps from topics, ranging from her love of Prime Video TV show Clarkson’s Farm to going down a rabbit hole about American novelist Truman Capote. She often satisfies her craving for knowledge online: “I’m a YouTube addict,” she proclaims.

But it’s this thirst for learning that has also kept her so sharp at 83. The author of more than 50 books, as well as TV series including Widows, Trial and Retribution and The Governor, La Plante is a vivacious personality who shows no sign of slowing down.

In terms of taking care of herself, she says: “I swim a lot, I walk the dog a lot – but I think feeding your brain is very, very important.” This is what she prioritises over most things (“I’m not very good with vitamins or diet or anything like that,” she says) – and she doesn’t “drink to exorbitant levels”, instead enjoying “the odd gin and tonic, or a hot whiskey at night”.

Writing can be a lonely affair, but it’s evidently what powers La Plante: “It’s joyful, I love it – I really, really do. But I am solitary.”

At her age, she says she has been lucky to “not actually suffer grief – proper grief” – until a few years ago.

“Yes, my parents died – and it was very sad. Friends have died, but real, consuming horror – horrific grief – I hadn’t touched, it never came near me,” she recounts.

This changed when she was 80: “I had this dog – he was a massive Russian wolfhound, a Borzoi. He was so astonishingly beautiful. I’d never known anything like this breed – I’ve had big dogs, but this white Borzoi stopped traffic.

“He was such a character – he could sing opera, and when he reached the peak of his life – he was three-and-a-half – he was so magnificent. Cars used to stop and say, ‘Is that a llama?'”

It got to the stage where La Plante “knew something was wrong” with him, and then “his heart burst”.

“I have never known grief like it – I didn’t know what to do. You can cry and cry, but it just swamped me completely and utterly, and I just started to write something that didn’t even have a dog in it,” she says.

That became her latest release, Sudden Death. A departure from the forensic-based crime stories she’s known for, it follows struggling writer Michael in Paris, who is hired to chaperone 17-year-old Clara around the city – but soon discovers she’s haughty, rude and on the hunt to untangle some dark family secrets. While there are no Borzois in the tale, there are Russian elements that could have been inspired by La Plante’s late dog – including the hunt for a lost Faberge egg, one of the multimillion pound jewelled objects created for the Romanov family.

“I wrote and wrote and I wrote until the grief subsided… It’s odd to write something totally different to the crime world that I’ve been steeped in for my entire career,” La Plante says.

La Plante now has a new dog – a purchase she made in a “moment of madness”.

She laughs: “I should have been stopped. Me and the internet – I’m hopeless. I clicked on this breed – cross St. Bernard and giant poodle – I thought, now that’s different. It all occurred very fast – I should not be allowed near a computer or near any Pets at Home, because I’m one of those people.

“I bought a racehorse once by putting my hand up by mistake! So there was this advert: St. Bernard cross with giant poodle – and now I have a giant lunatic called Theo. He’s unlike any breed I have ever had in my life.”

Life with a “giant lunatic” of a dog is made somewhat harder because La Plante is currently banned from driving. In August, she admitted breaking the 20mph speed limit near her home in Kingston-upon-Thames five times, and was disqualified from driving for six months.

She says she feels “trapped” by the ban, which is “dreadful” – particularly as it makes it harder to take her dog out for a walk.

But La Plante isn’t entirely on her own – her son, Lorcan, 23, lives in an annex at the bottom of her garden with his girlfriend. She adopted Lorcan when he was a newborn, and reflects: “If I go back over my life and think how cruel I was accused [of being] when I adopted him, it was very hurtful.”

She says she had “everything aimed at me” – namely criticisms that she was “too old” and a “single mother”.

“You have to block it out, because he was the most important thing in my life. At the same time, it’s an uphill battle… What’s happening in the world now is horrific – very frightening.

“If you can actually give peace and happiness to a young man and his beautiful girlfriend, I would encourage everyone [to do] that. When I read that people are heartbroken when they can’t have children and all their IVF has failed – I say you will still feel a bond that you have never felt with anyone else if you adopt.

“There are so many children needing love – I would have had 10, if possible.”

Sudden Death by Lynda La Plante is published in hardback by Zaffre, priced £22. Available now.