Actually until i was just a little bit older. My father insisted, when i went to secondary school, that i play american football. Actually out there on the football field, i realised i was playing for the wrong team. Whats interesting is how quickly people start to presume that you dont know the maths behind your own work. Im always taken aback by that strange presumption, which i will frankly say, i never experienced before and i never see my male peers going through, which is that maybe im good at leading science projects, but surely i dont know the technical details. And they kind of came out of nowhere, just overnight, people stopped asking me maths questions. Whenjoe when joe and joan are whenjoe and joan are doing the same quality of work, what extra work doesjoan quality of work, what extra work does joan need quality of work, what extra work doesjoan need to do to get the same chance of promotion . We found that jonah needs to go to a more prominent school, for longer periods of time. In the states, playing those extra tuition s, spending longer at lower ranked jobs, there really is a monetary task imposed on women and in the Tech Industry in the us, thats roughly a quarter of 1 million of the its a tax applied to use simply because you dont fit the norm. Its the tax on being different. Now its time for meet the author. Peter james harris created a detective, roy grace, who leads an army of readers through the routine and mystery of his work. Apparently straightforward crimes are not quite what they seem. We care about him, we sympathise with him, we worry on his behalf. The Police Procedural novel has an enduring appeal and in need you dead, the latest roy grace story, peterjames produces another taught and hypnotic tale. Welcome. Peter, why do you think so many people get hooked on policemen and women and the trials and tribulations of their everyday lives . Well, i think good crime fiction actually reflects the world in which we live, in a better way than any other genre. I started my career writing spy thrillers. Not very good ones id just had my first book published and we got burgled. A young detective came to the house to take fingerprints and he was married to a detective and he said to me, if you ever want your Research Help with the police, give me a call. My then wife and i became really good friends with them, had a barbecue and all of their friends, as is normal, were also cops, everything from response, traffic, neighbourhood policing, child protection, crime scene investigators. As they told me their stories, i started to realise that nobody sees more human life in a 30 year career than a cop. I think part of my love of crime is seeing the real world. What we also get in these roy grace novels, it moves through time, a glimpse of what is new, the new equipment, the new technique the new way of looking at something. Beginning to inhabit that world. Yes, the police and the villains are always playing catch up with each other. The villains use the internet for their activities and the police cotton on. Every now and again, the police are the innovators and ive used a couple of examples in recent novels. One is a forensic podiatrist called haydn kelly, who discovered that he is a World Authority on gait analysis and is used regularly by police forces. Somebodys gait is as unique as their dna. Just by a single footprint. You cant disguise it . Cant disguise it, james, he could pick you out walking in a crowd. The other thing ive used in my latest book is very low tech, after the london riots the police were trying to identify the looters and they were all wearing hoodies and baseball caps. You and i can probably recognise 23 of faces weve ever seen. The average cop, with all their training, can only do 24 . The world best computers, 25. Scotland yard discovered theres a tiny group of people, theyve nicknamed them super recognisers, who can pick out somebodyjust by the flair of the nostrils, the flair of their lips, the earlobe, and theyve got people who can get 95 accuracy. Theyve already had 150 convictions from the riots just using these people, who are a mixture of police and civilian volunteers. One of the problems with discussing a novel like this, a thriller, need you dead, is that we cant talk about it in any great detail because we give away what happened and people want to know. But its another story in which the things are not as they seem and what appears to be rather straightforward and simple and the beginning, a cut and dried case, suddenly becomes a much, much more complicated and all kinds of avenues open up. As you say, thats life, isnt it . We think something is clear and we know really that it never is. Yeah, i love walking down the street and looking at houses and thinking, whats really going on behind those doors . Thats also part of the fascination of genre. For me, you read what seems to be a simple story and it gets deeper and deeper. Also, i see myjob, as an author of crime thriller, to keep the readers on their toes and guessing. My third stage play has been on tour and i was doing a q a onstage, with Shane Ritchie and Laura Whitmore a few weeks back and a guy in the audience said, why do you make the endings so damn hard to get . And i said, i think ive done myjob, sir as long as you dont play tricks. Theres a kind of honour among crime writers, it seems to me, that you mustnt pull a fast one, that makes the reader feel tricked. They may feel confused, they may feel stupid that they didnt spot it, but its got to be fair, somehow, dont you think . Youve always got to play fair, i agree. Part of the attraction of the crime genre, people love doing puzzles, most of us love doing a crossword or whatever it is. Every major crime, murder or whatever it is, is a huge puzzle and the detectives have to painstakingly piece together, bit by bit. If youre doing yourjob right as a writer, youre feeding a few of those clues out to your readers as well, so you dont want them to get ahead of you but you cant suddenly have, and in one bound, he was free, kind of ending. I was fortunate to spend some time with ed mcbain, evan hunter, his real name, who was a master of this form, the 87th precinct novels, anyone who knows them in new york. He was one of two writers who got me into crime writing. Really . Yeah. His style was just fabulous, there was a chandler esque quality. He used to spend hours, days, weeks with new york cops, looking at how they sat, what they ate, quite apart from the technical stuff, absolutely immersing himself in it and writing his beautifully chiselled novels. How did you get into it, his work . Ive been weaned, obviously, on the english traditional crime novel, agatha christie, dorothy l sayers. But with all of those books there was a kind of tradition, you start with a dead body in chapter one and the rest of the book is kind of a puzzle to solve it. First of all, Graham Greenes brighton rock was the first time id read a crime thriller where the victim is still alive at the end of chapter one. And the menace created in the first paragraph of that. The first line is great, within three hours of arriving in brighton, hale knew that they meant to murder him. You have to read on. And then somebody said that i might like ed mcbain and i read conman first and then ive Read Everything he wrote. What i love about that style of storytelling is that he, incredibly gripping, you really feel ed mcbain knows what hes talking about. People who read fiction are smart from the fact they really but people dontjust want a good story, we want to learn something about life and the human condition. Talk about roy grace. When we first meet roy grace in the first novel, dead simple, he is 39, just coming up to his 39th birthday and his wife, sandy, who he loved and adored, has vanished from the face of the earth. He literally comes home and shes gone. And for ten years, that was when he was 30 and for ten years hes been looking for her, doesnt know if shes been abducted, kidnapped, run off with a lover, and he functions as a very successful homicide detective but all the time hes wondering, is she going to suddenly turn up . And during the roy grace series, which is obviously ongoing, i seed a bit more about what happened and speculations. And i chose that route to go because what really good detectives do is solve puzzles and i thought, rather than having a detective with a drink problem and a broken marriage i thought it would be more interesting, because today a detective with a drink problem wouldnt last 2a hours in the british police. Much more interesting to have a detective with a private puzzle he couldnt solve. I always joke about roy grace, but slightly serious, if i was ever an lucky enough to have a member of my family murdered, roy grace is the detective id want running the investigation. And the reader knows that and they are with you all the way. Peterjames, author of the latest roy grace novel, need you dead, thank you very much. Jim, thank you very much. It has been a lovely cold day across the uk. Some great weather watcher pictures weve been sent. This evening, a lovely sunset in northamptonshire. Following from that, some great views of the moon. Notjust any that, some great views of the moon. Not just any old that, some great views of the moon. Notjust any old moon, a full moon, a harvest moon, the closest full moon to the autumn equinox. Normally it goes into september but this one we are getting in october. We are getting such good views because it is mostly clear skies, which is lucky. High pressure building briefly from the south west pushing away the strong cold wind we had today in the north sea and thats where we are seeing most of the showers. One or two on the north westerly breeze, the isle of man and north wales but they are fading away. Clear skies, wind dropping. If youre in the countryside, quite chilly, maybe a touch of frost. A cold start first thing on friday but the wind wont be as strong and they locked and a lot of sunshine. Some showers in the northern isles, perhaps touching aberdeen, but they are a dying breed. The odd shower clipping the coast of norfolk and suffolk. Otherwise lighter wind, lots of sunshine and temperatures rising fairly quickly and a nice day coming. Not the cold wind we had today but lots of sunshine around. In the north west well see cloud increasing and invading the guys across Northern Ireland into scotla nd across Northern Ireland into scotland and perhaps some high cloud working over the irish sea working towards england and wales, temperatures 15 degrees. Heading into the weekend things are going to change because the High Pressure will be squashed to the south, low pressure coming into the north, pushing these weather fronts southwards and on friday night into saturday morning, a cloudy start, a love of rain. The main area is here a lot of rain. Some showers, brisk wind, we may break up the cloud across eastern scotland and here we will see the best sunshine. Blustery wind on saturday but much lighter on sunday, a westerly drift, so some lighter on sunday, a westerly drift, so some drizzly showers for the west of the uk. Further east, dry and bright but probably not a great deal of sunshine that it should be a fine into the weekend. End to the weekend. Hello, im ros atkins, this is outside source. The pressure is ratcheting up in spain as the Constitutional Court suspends a planned session of catalonias parliament. Police investigating the Las Vegas Attack now believe the gunman, received assistance but his motives remain a mystery. Afghanistans president has told the bbc wants a peace deal with the taliban. And one of britains best known writers Kazuo Ishiguro talks to the bbc on the day he won the nobel prize for literature