The Finisher

Running Into Writing An Afterword by the Author

I am sometimes asked if I’m a runner. I must confess that I’m not even a fun-runner. I can think of a thousand things that are more fun. Paying my income tax is more fun. It’s true that I’ve written several books with running as a theme, but I am pathologically incapable of doing it myself. I get the stitch if I go a few yards. As a youth, I tried. How I tried, shambling and shuffling through the streets of suburban Whitton after dark, being questioned by the police (this was long before jogging became respectable), attacked by dogs, tripping over paving stones and running into lampposts when my glasses steamed up, all the time convincing myself I was training and would soon amaze the world. And on the day of reckoning I staggered in last in the school cross-country race. All my memories of running are painful. But I owe my career to it.

In 1948, my father took me to the Olympic Games. I was eleven, an impressionable age. The excitement, the atmosphere in the stadium and the achievements of great athletes like Emil Zátopek and Fanny Blankers-Koen stayed with me all my life. I dreamed of being a runner myself. I still do. Eventually I found my own way to participate by writing about athletics. I discovered a rich seam nobody else had mined: the history of the sport. A new magazine was desperate for articles and published me. Overnight I was billed as The World’s Foremost Authority on the History of Athletics; in truth, I was the world’s only authority. By 1968 I had the confidence to publish a book on great runners of the past called The Kings of Distance. It was well received. It doesn’t get better than this, I thought. Will I ever write anything else of book length? Realistically, no.

Then, by some quirk of fate, an advert appeared in the press in 1969 announcing a first crime novel competition. The prize was £1000, more than my annual salary as a teacher. Encouraged by my wife Jax, who is a keen reader of crime fiction, I submitted a whodunit about a Victorian long-distance race and called it Wobble to Death. With a catchy title and an unusual setting that worked within the convention of a puzzle story, it won the prize.

Barely believing in myself as a crime writer, I needed to find subjects other than running to use as backgrounds for detective stories. I played safe and embarked on a series that was set, like Wobble to Death, in the late Victorian period and featured various popular entertainments such as pugilism, the music hall, the seaside and table-turning. After five years I was able to retire from teaching to make my living as a professional writer.

I still couldn’t see myself making a career out of Victorian whodunits. The sport of running remained a passion and I returned to it in a contemporary novel. In the 1970s, athletics was undergoing huge changes. The old code of amateurism was being displaced. For years, so-called shamateurs had received backhanders from promoters of a sport that was a good money-spinner. With the extra incentive of cash payments came temptations to cheat by using drugs. It was an open secret that athletes were improving their performances with sophisticated chemical and biological aids. State-sponsored athletes from the Eastern Bloc had for some decades achieved unbelievable records. In the free world there was evidence of hormone injections and the use of blood transfusions to gain lucrative advantage.

I decided to air some of these issues in fiction. Enter Goldine Serafin, a gifted and attractive American woman who would challenge for three gold medals at the next Olympic Games, due to be held in Moscow. Goldengirl (written as Peter Lear) was about the marketing opportunity this presented and the moneymen, crooks and cranks who homed in on the unfortunate athlete to exploit her. The novel became a bestseller. Even better, it was bought by Columbia and filmed with the beautiful Susan Anton in the starring role and a cast that included James Coburn, Curt Jurgens and Leslie Caron. The bad news was that in real life the Russians marched into Afghanistan and the Americans boycotted the Olympics in protest, so Goldengirl, the film, never went on general release.

But these were heady days for a wannabe athlete. I was commissioned to write the official centenary history of the Amateur Athletic Association, encouraged by Harold Abrahams, the 1924 Olympic sprint champion, who was a family friend, an unofficial uncle to our children. After his death in 1978 I was invited by the actor and writer Colin Welland to supply some memories of Harold for a film project that would become the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire.

Fortune favoured me again when June Wyndham-Davies, a TV producer, read a review of Waxwork, the eighth book in the Sergeant Cribb series, and persuaded Granada to buy the rights and screen it in prime time on the Sunday before Christmas 1979. Starring Alan Dobie as Cribb, William Simons as Constable Thackeray and Carol Royle as the convicted murderer Miriam Cromer, this pilot production was so successful that a series was commissioned using all of the books. I was thrilled when one of the best scriptwriters of his generation, Alan Plater, took on Wobble to Death. The episode was filmed in Manchester Free Trade Hall, an early Victorian building remarkably like the Agricultural Hall, Islington, where the original six-day races had been run. The weird form of entertainment was made believable and compelling by a cast including Kenneth Cranham and Michael Elphick.

Sergeant Cribb’s investigations came to an end with the TV series. Together with Jax, I wrote six original screenplays for a second series and used up the stock of ideas that might otherwise have become novels. Several “stand-alones” followed and then a trilogy featuring Bertie, the Prince of Wales, as an inept amateur detective.

In 1991 I foisted the burly, belligerent Peter Diamond on to the city of Bath’s murder squad in The Last Detective. He resigned straight away and then surprised me by returning in The Summons and staying in the job for nineteen books over twenty-nine years. He was middle-aged in the first, so I don’t like to think how old he must be now. As for his cat Raffles, one thing I have learned as a crime writer is that you can murder anyone, but you never kill the cat.

Writers are often asked where they get their ideas from. Tough question, but the inspiration for The Finisher is clear. The book comes fifty years after Wobble to Death.

Running has undergone seismic changes since the Victorian event I wrote about in 1970. I have mentioned some of the bad practices that plague modern athletics, but there is one development we can all applaud — the rise in popularity of “Big City” marathons. People in the thousands run distances that were regarded fifty years ago as only to be attempted by specialists. The trend began with the New York City Marathon, first run in 1970 with a field of 126. By 1980 this had grown to 14,000 and by 2019 more than 50,000. The figure for the London Marathon, instituted in 1981, is over 40,000.

In The Finisher, the half marathon known as the Other Half is entirely fictional. The real Bath Half is one of the most popular city races in Britain and takes place each March over a fast, flat course attracting almost 12,000 runners. It is always over-subscribed. There is also a full Bath Marathon usually run in August over a demanding course that includes the two railway tunnels described in the book. I couldn’t resist using the tunnel of death in my narrative. I am grateful to the management teams of both races for details of their organisation.

Many accounts of marathon-running have been written by brave people who don’t consider themselves as athletes yet attempt and achieve feats I can only dream about. I found Phil Hewitt’s Keep on Running and Outrunning the Demons particularly helpful. Alexandra Heminsley’s Running Like a Girl and Bryony Gordon’s Eat, Drink, Run give honest and fascinating insights into the challenges they overcame as women runners.

For the Bath setting and the lore of the stone quarries, I did some mining myself, of Around Combe Down, by Peter Addison and “A Brief History of the Stone Quarries at Combe Down,” by David Workman, in the Journal of the Bath Geological Society. The true story of the tunnel of death can be found in Diana White’s Stories of Bath. The map of the course at the front of this book is the work of Saffron Russell and her mother, Jacqui Lovesey. Finally I wish to thank my friends David Dell and Yury Tereshchenko for putting me right on some Russian terminology. Any flaws are my own.

Peter Lovesey

www.peterlovesey.com