I am not sure if this is a first, but it is, in my experience, unusual. Here we have an crime author who has been self publishing his novels for a decade, and now he has been taken on by a major publisher – Penguin Random House, no less. I know personally several authors who self-publish. Theirs is a labour of love, and I believe in most cases they do well to break even financially. I think the term ‘vanity publishing’ is rather unkind, as the term implies something that smacks of puffed-up pride, unjustified by any evidence of quality. Mainstream publishers, just like record companies back in the day when ‘records’ were a thing, are in the business to make money for themselves and their artists and writers. So did publishers back in 2015 have a Decca-Beatles moment with Peter Grainger?

I have yet to turn the first page of this book, first published in 2016, so I cannot say. So, who is Peter Grainger? For many years he taught English at a High School in Chatteris, a small town on the edge of Fenland. His real name is Robert Partridge, and after An Accidental Death came out in 2016, he soon realised that fans of the police procedural genre love a good series. Thus, the Kings Lake series was born. Kings Lake is apparently based on Kings Lynn, and I will be interested to see how the settings compare with how Jim Kelly treats the town in his Peter Shaw novels, of which I am a great fan. Anyone reading this might like to investigate other local writers Diane Calton Smith, Marie Tierney and Russell Wate. The reprint of An Accidental Death will be out on 30th April, and I will alert followers on Instagram, X, Facebook and Tiktok when my review goes live.