Since penning her first television screenplay, a crime drama for British television in the 1980s, Lynda La Plante has often received gruesome gifts from the London police: inside information on murder cases that she can transform into plot lines. In fact, an invitation to visit a crime scene led to the creation of detective Anna Travis, who makes her seventh appearance in Blood Line (October).
A nervous, awkward young policewoman was working the real-life investigation, her first as a detective, and confided in La Plante that until then she had handled only plastic dummies and never a real body. "She was just wonderfully inept," said the author. "I loved her so much Anna Travis emerged." La Plante also drew on some of her own early experiences researching crime fiction, such as the time she fainted during an autopsy and landed on a trolley full of equipment.
In Blood Line, Anna is grieving the loss of her murdered fiancé and throws herself into her new role as Detective Chief Inspector for London's Murder Squad. The routine missing person's case she is asked to look into by a superior takes an ominous turn, leading her on a desperate hunt for a young man who has disappeared seemingly without a trace. With no body and increasing pressure to make an arrest, Anna becomes obsessed with the smallest details of the case, prompting her boss to believe she might be losing control of the investigation--and of herself.
When La Plante traded a successful acting career for one behind the camera, she found her true calling, she said. Seeing that first TV script, the drama Widows, brought to life on the screen was a defining moment for her. "That was it," La Plante said. "I never, ever wanted to act again. The enjoyment of writing surpassed anything I had been feeling lately as an actress."
HarperCollins executive editor Claire Wachtel was a longtime admirer of the author's work well before acquiring Blood Line. Another fan is Karin Slaughter, who has claimed that her fellow crime writer "practically invented the thriller." Prior to introducing readers to neophyte Anna Travis, La Plante created Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison, a difficult, brilliant, high-ranking detective who tenaciously does her job amid an old-boy network. The award-winning PBS series starring Helen Mirren garnered a slew of awards, including an Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries, and was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
Among other accolades, La Plante has received royal recognition for her endeavors. She was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for services to Literature, Drama and Charity in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in 2008. La Plante divides her time between London and East Hampton, N.Y., where she spends summers plotting her next novels.
One thing readers will never encounter in La Plante's books is an out-of-the-blue solution to a crime. "I hate when you go through a murder mystery and then at the very end they bring in a new character you've never met before and it turns out they did it; and you think, oh, no, no, no," she said. "I love to write the clues and say to a reader, spot it if you can. Then the jigsaw begins to take shape."