Last year, the wildly successful British writer Peter Grainger sent a draft of his latest novel to his new agent, Emma Parry at Janklow & Nesbit. Grainger, 73, had been self-publishing his novels — police procedurals set in the fictional town of Kings Lake, England — for more than a decade, and had already sold more than a million copies on his own. But this was the first time he was being published by a conventional publisher.
“He wasn’t that interested in editorial feedback, and I wasn’t looking to give a lot,” Parry said. “But I had read enough of his work to know that the ending of the book was oddly abrupt.” Tentatively, she brought it up, only to be met with “steely silence.”
Like his main character, the independent-minded detective D.C. Smith, Grainger dislikes being told what to do. He’s also skeptical of technology, and, as it turned out, had sent Parry a file that cut the novel off mid-action, before the ending.
“I’m not very good at making sure I’ve sent the right one,” Grainger said. It was early in the summer, and he was at home in Sutton, a rural hamlet in Cambridgeshire, England, where he lives with his wife, Lynn, and two dogs, Jenna and Negan.
Grainger has had a lot to adjust to recently. Before 2025, despite his burgeoning sales and celebrity status among readers of his ebooks and audiobooks, he had never done any publicity except for a single podcast interview. But then The Financial Times published a glowing article about Grainger and his work, calling his detective “the greatest fictional sleuth you’ve probably never heard of,” and the outside world came calling.
Grainger acquired an agent, Parry; a U.K. publisher, Hutchinson Heinemann; an American publisher, Union Square; translation deals in numerous countries, including Finland and Poland; and a dizzying sense that a new life was rushing his way.
