Lynda La Plante: I hope my new female forensic star makes it to the screen

Prime Suspect’s fearless detective Jane Tennison may have gone, but at the age of 82 her creator Lynda La Plante is introducing another crime-fighting female in a new book series which she hopes will stretch to 10.

“I actually love writing and I love creating,” enthuses the award-winning Liverpool-born crime writer and actress who wrote and produced the Nineties hit Prime Suspect, which starred Helen Mirren, as well as TV series Widows, Trial & Retribution and The Governor, and has penned more than 50 novels.

Funny and eloquent, fizzing with energy, the talented octogenarian looks at least a decade younger than her years and is great company, mimicking characters with authentic accents and creating drama in every story she recounts, going off on entertaining tangents at every opportunity.

“I’ve been having these chest pains,” she reveals, “and the cardiologist said, ‘Well, if they continue for more than 10 minutes take yourself off to A&E,’” which she did after 40 minutes, with her son, Lorcan.

“And then it started. I have eight injection sites – four nurses and a doctor couldn’t get a vein,” she says dramatically, showing me the bruises. “I was screaming in pain, saying ‘I’m going home, I’ve had enough’. Eventually on the ninth attempt they managed to get some blood.

“Later on, one of the doctors came by and he said (voice grave, accent clipped), ‘I’m very sorry for the treatment you had but we didn’t realise how old you were’. I thought, thanks! You could have killed me!” It turned out to be a chest virus.

Sparkling company, dripping with dry wit and irony, La Plante is sharp as a knife. Her thirst for knowledge is unrelenting, as she talks as enthusiastically as someone half her age about forensic advances, blood spatters, call tracking, light sourcing, fingerprints and footmarks.

Her new series introduces Jessica Russell, an experienced CSI (crime scene investigation) officer who is chosen to head a team of scientists, experts in blood splattering analysis, fingerprint and data retrieval in the newly formed Metropolitan Police Serious Crime Analysis Unit (MSCAN).

The Scene Of The Crime, the first novel in the series, sees Jessica and her team unravel the mystery of a savage attack on the husband of a notorious barrister, who is left comatose. There are difficult senior officers and mounting pressure for results in the mix, just as you imagine there would be in reality.

She’s hoping to write 10 books in the series.

“I don’t think I could ever retire. If somebody was to stand outside the door when I’m writing, they’d think, ‘I better have the straitjacket ready for her because she’s a lunatic’. I’m in there, talking away to myself.”

La Plante would love her new character to be brought to TV and says she has already had interest.

“I’d like to be executive producer, which means I’m over it, on it and around it but I’m not doing the heavy duty work. I would be clinging to the desk to cast because it’s so important to find someone with the right quality.” She’d also want to write the script.

“The progress (of TV adaptation) is frighteningly slow,” she says candidly, lamenting the huge amount of decision-makers there are in the process these days who haven’t necessarily had the experience needed to bring great writing to life.

She’s had her fingers burnt on numerous occasions, she reveals.

“Scalded, burnt and chopped off!” she declares. It’s no secret she fell out with ITV bosses over ‘creative differences’ on the young Tennison series, Prime Suspect 1973.

“When you are confronted by someone who says, ‘We’re very excited, we’ve got this lovely, wonderful, handsome actor.’ I said, ‘He’s not right for the part at all.’ But you are one little voice with a retinue of other people, some of whom have never produced a thing themselves.”

She’s renowned for being meticulous in her research, talking to top scientists and senior police officers, has visited morgues and mortuaries, attended post-mortems and was the first layperson to be awarded an honorary fellowship to the Forensic Science Society.

Her research helps her create realistic scenarios, often missing in other writers’ work.

“In Silent Witness you’ve got a pathologist investigating crime, going out to locations. You don’t do that. The pathologist is in the laboratory,” she explains.

She watches a lot of TV crime programmes and currently rates the US series The Blacklist and The Waterfront.

“Yes, they (the US) have a bigger pool of actors over there but it’s the standard of the filming and the scripts which are incredible.”

She would prefer to cast an unknown as Jessica Russell in any adaptation which may be made.

“What happens here is they list their actors coming into a new series as ‘ex-EastEnder’ or ‘ex-Coronation Street’, faces that we all recognise and know.

“It’s very hard to fire through with something refreshing, because they hope that putting an actor’s face in it who is well-known will turn on viewers. ‘No!’, I just want to scream, ‘What turns on viewers is how good it is!’”

As well as writing, she co-hosts a podcast, Listening To The Dead, with former CSI Cass Sutherland, exploring forensic science and its impact on solving crimes.

Her forensic details may be accurate, but it is also the characters that set La Plante’s writing apart.

“I didn’t want someone who was like Jane Tennison, I didn’t want another female detective I’ve worked with (her Anna Travis book series). I wanted someone not automatically likeable. Jessica has gained experience by her own life experience. She’s not a policeman. She can’t make an arrest. She is there to tell her experts what to look for.

“I didn’t want somebody alcoholic, you don’t want somebody who’s had terrible marriages, or divorces, or whatever. But what happens in your life marks you for the rest of your life.”

Jessica’s back story includes a childhood in which her father left, taking only her twin brother, her mother suffering aggressive cancer, and a sexual assault early on in her career.“She is on the sidelines of pain and death,” La Plante explains. “She’s slightly unnerving, because of her stillness.”

As the years roll by, divorcee La Plante, whose adopted son Lorcan lives in a garden annex of her home in Surrey with his girlfriend, says she should take more care of herself but she doesn’t.

“I swim every day and I walk in the park and try to eat well,” she offers.

Lorcan also keeps her young, she agrees.

“He’s extraordinary, training to be a pilot. But he does treat me a little bit like the Asda store. I see items disappearing (from her house) under his arm like paper towels or a bottle of milk,” she chuckles.

“But he’s a wonderful chef, so he entertains lavishly over there, often when he’s raided my fridge.”

The deaths of friends such as Bread actress Jean Boht, who died aged 91, and others who have reached their 80s have made La Plante think of her own mortality – but not for long.

“I’m very fortunate to have a happy gene.”

And the writing shows no sign of abating.

“I’ve got bits of paper everywhere, never mind the character’s name, I’ve got bits of paper on who’s talking, which takes an energy level – and then the calm starts when it’s finished.”

The Scene Of The Crime by Lynda La Plante is published by Zaffre, priced £22. Available now