22 Nov 2018

Queen of crime Lynda La Plante's life of plot twists

From Nine To Noon, 10:07 am on 22 November 2018

The importance of going direct to the source was an early lesson learnt by British crime writer Lynda La Plante.

La Plante started out as an actress but - being short, red-haired and a Liverpudlian - when she got to London she was often typecast as a prostitute, she says.

“I’d done so much theatre. I’d been in Hedda Gabler, I’d been in King Lear, Chekov, Strindberg. I’d done all the major playwrights in repertory, but when you come to London as an actress and you go for an interview and they've got, '5”2’, red-haired, short, quite plain looking – prostitute'.

“I played more hookers on TV than you would believe.”

"I was astonished when Melvyn Bragg did a program on me, they clipped them all together and when I saw how many times I’d fallen out of alley ways saying  '‘Ello luv, are ya comin’ my way?' It was absolutely amazing."

La Plante wanted to widen her scope and so started developing ideas for TV scripts. Her first big breakthrough was Widows, about a group of women - left penniless when their felonious husbands get jailed - who plan a heist.

Steve McQueen, later to become an Oscar-winning director for 12 Years a Slave, saw that show as a teenager. He was, La Plante says, "obsessed" with it and has made a Hollywood film based on the original TV show he so admired.

The film Widows - starring Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Colin Farrell, and relocated to the the US - opened in cinemas this week.

La Plante went on to write many acclaimed TV dramas - including The Governor, Trial and Retribution and The Commander - but it was her second TV series - Prime Suspect, that announced her as a brilliant crime writer.

Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison

Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison Photo: Supplied

That show - which gave the world DCI Jane Tennison, famously played by Helen Mirren -  started when La Plante was pitching ideas to Granada TV.

"They said we’re looking for a police drama, and really interested in a female leading a police drama and I totally lied and said ‘oh I’ve been working on one of those’.

"They said 'oh really? What is it called?' And out of, I don’t know, an angel on my shoulder I said ‘Prime Suspect’ which is an incredibly powerful title for a series but that’s all I had – a lie and a title."

She says that was the moment she learnt to pitch what commissioning editors are actually looking for. Granada was eager to read what she had.

"They were so excited and couldn’t wait to read what I had written and I hadn’t written a word. When I got home I rang the Metropolitan police and I said, 'I’m really searching for a high-ranking female detective, plain clothes, attached to a murder squad' and a rather pompous man said of 'yes, yes, we have three'.

"And I was so fortunate because he got me to meet one of them and she became Jane Tennison. I worked day and night with her."

La Plante's real life DCI showed her the nitty-gritty of life on a London murder squad.

"She was absolutely incredible, because the most important thing for her was to get it right.

"She took me to autopsies, she took me into incident rooms, and one time she was reading something I’d written and she said 'I don’t know where you get all this from' and she didn’t remember that she’d told me … and bit by bit, by bit, Jane Tennison was born," La Plante says.

Prime Suspect went on to become one of the most popular and critically admired dramas in British television history.

This method of meticulous, coal-face research is the cornerstone of all La Plante's work.

"I’ve never worked any other way, if I can’t go to source I can’t write it,"

When writing Prime Suspect 1973 - a show about Tennison's early career as a uniformed police officer in 1970s London, long before personal computers and DNA forensics - that approach was invaluable, she says.

"I find an ex-police officer who was there in the 1970s, they will give me more material than I could have ever dreamed of – stories, anecdotes. For me, to be a good crime writer you really do need to do the research."

La Plante says she's still proud of her breakthrough work, Widows, but doubts that today - 35 years later - it would be given the green light.

"I don’t think it would be made today: four unknown actresses, an unknown writer. To be given a prime time TV slot, they wouldn’t get it, they would have to be using some TV name or somebody with a lot of credits – and I find that rather sad. They don’t take the risks," she says.