Hot Press meets Peter Leonard

“My father said to me, ‘If you want to write, write fiction. Don’t write movie scripts. Writing scripts is like wanting to be a co-pilot. He shamed me into it!” laughs Peter Leonard.

The eminence of dad Elmore looms large over the career of Leonard, even though he has five celebrated tomes to his credit. His latest, Back From The Dead, is a crime chronicle set in 1971 but rooted in the events of World War II. It showcases his talent for plotting and his efficient, unfussy prose style.
“When I finished (predecessor) Voices Of The Dead I left it open. I didn’t know if I would be able to write a sequel,” he admits. “I had never written a sequel and I kind of underestimated how difficult it would be! So I came up with an idea and wrote about half of Back From The Dead. Then I spent a month with Detroit Police Homicide and wrote half of another novel. I tried to get back into Back From The Dead and got stuck. I didn’t know how I was going to finish it! I was in east France a couple of years ago and rented a house – a villa up in the hills. I thought, ‘here it is, here’s the location right here’. I ended up using that to finish the story. And it was perfect.”
The books were heavily influenced by Leonard’s visit to Dachau extermination camp.
“It really did affect me very strongly. It’s amazing to go there,” he says. “There’s only one barracks left and you see the yard where the prisoners used to come out. The walls are still up, along with the barbed wire and the ceramic insulators which had been used for electricity. It’s very haunting.”
As well as his aforementioned foray into scripts Leonard dabbled in another written medium, ad copy. Did the commercial world offer any lessons for his fiction?
“No – nothing!” he laughs. “Writing ads is so different to fiction. You don’t care about the products you’re writing about. It’s a job and you are paid. Writing fiction, you get involved with your characters. Your characters become real, they tell the story. I try to stay out of it and let the characters do the job. It’s just so much more fun – so much more satisfying.
His script-writing experience may come in useful if, as per the rumours, his book All He Saw Was The Girl, reaches the screen.
“A British company made an offer but nothing has happened so I don’t know what the status is. I think it would make a great movie though,” he says.
One of the most colourful incidents in that novel is based on a real-life caper that occurred in the author’s student days.
“I was a student in Rome years ago. A friend and I decided to take a cab across town. The driver wasn’t around so we ended up literally taking the cab. We weren’t going to steal it. We were just borrowing it. I ended up spending a week in Rebbibia prison, which is maximum security. I thought it was bit severe for a prank! It didn’t really translate well in Italy. They didn’t find it amusing at all. It was quite an experience and I knew when I was there that some day I would have to do something with it! It remains a great story. I tell it at cocktail parties.”
Real life experience is something Leonard has brought to his next offering, based, as he says, on his time with Detroit Police Homicide. The book is currently out for bid.
“It’s called Eyes Closed Tight. I finished it last year. The experience with the homicide team was crucial. It gave me great background. I learned the procedure, how to investigate a murder. It was really interesting, just listening to the investigators talk, the rhythms of their speech, their attitude and how they thought about what they did. You can’t make it up. You have to go and witness it first-hand.”
And as for current endeavours, the author is nearly half-way through another book which will be titled Unknown Remains.
“I’ll hopefully finish that in the next few months,” he ventures. “I’m also trying to sell Voices Of The Dead and Back From The Dead to a US company to make into a TV series. The books are circulating. We’ll see if anyone decides to pick them up.”
Prolific output aside, Leonard still gets compared to his father. Does this irritate him?
“Well, yeah a little bit,” he admits. “In most reviews he’s mentioned, even after five books. I actually wrote Voices Of The Dead to try to get out of his shadow. I thought if I set part of it in the past, in Munich, it might help. It didn’t really!”
And what is the best advice Leonard Snr bestowed?
“Leave out the parts readers tend to skip. In other words, don’t overwrite,” he notes. “If you do write something that doesn’t sound right get rid of it. So my father has influenced my stripped-down writing style.”
Through his father, whose grandfather came from Cork, Peter has Irish roots and he exhibits a keen interest in our fiction.
“At the moment I really like Ken Bruen and Tana French. I have read a lot of Ken’s work.”

Back From The Dead is out now, published by Faber & Faber.