Murder She Wrote

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Crime suspect: La Plante

It begins with death, or the spectre of it. Under a mane of reddish hair and sporting Ozzie Osbourne-style shades, Lynda La Plante, doyenne of British TV crime fiction, enters the room. Her fingers are knuckled with carbuncles of jewellery and her clothing is gothic dark. She's talking about an old friend whom she planned to visit while in Dublin, only to discover the lady had passed away. It could be the opening to one La Plante's bestselling thrillers. It's tempting to paint the creator of Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison in a noir-ish light: someone who is fond of saying 'the darkness is everywhere' and who had a series axed by ITV for being too gruesome. But in person, La Plante is not so easily pinned down.

Sitting with her legs propped up underneath her, the author and TV producer talks about her latest book (Blood Line is her 16th title) and a TV mini-series she has been pitching to the US. "You've no idea how tough it is to make two or three pitches a night", she says, and you nod knowledgably. This latest (following such shows as Trial & Retribution and Above Suspicion) is a big-budget production (hence the need for the deep American pockets) being developed through her company, La Plante Productions. "Pirates", she says, with a wary glance around the hotel room. This mini-series, it turns out, is Villains of All Nations, which started with a request from Lionsgate TV for her to cast an eye over a script by a famous writer ("it stunk"). So she took it on.

"I'm up for anything", says La Plante, a line that could be the opening of her memoir. La Plante is an animated and entertaining talker. Give her a prompt - her old school in Crosby for example - and she's off like the clappers, remembering it in forensic detail and occasionally dramatising the characters. But she is at a loss to explain her interest and aptitude for the macabre. There is, however, a story from childhood that may offer a clue. "I remember it with absolute clarity", she says. "I was only about five or six and in the school classroom. The door opened and teacher brought in this woman. Teacher said: 'This is Mischa and Michaela's mother and she has come to take them home.' It was early afternoon, not the time for them to go home. She told them to say goodbye and they didn't come back the next day. That woman had taken her children home and gassed all three of them. I remember that so clearly. Why? Why do I remember that woman in that woollen suit and those two little girls? Weird."

Perhaps just as significant was the death of her older sister, Dale. Dale was killed in a car accident a year before Lynda was born. Perhaps surprisingly, La Plante says her parents, rather than being over-protective, allowed her the freedom to be herself. "I think that if you have any parent or teacher who is afraid to let you free you will come across problems", she says. "My father was very strict but I was always allowed to go out on my bicycle." The other, less measurable, aspect is the ghostly presence of Dale that has haunted La Plante's adult years. "What I had was a presence my whole life", she says. "There was her portrait, her paintings and her photograph. On my mother's death she only wanted Dale's things with her (her voice drops to a whisper), she only wanted Dale's clothes. So Dale was a ghost in our family. She was always the most beautiful and always incredibly clever."

La Plante was born Lynda Titchmarsh and grew up in Crosby in Liverpool. "My favourite show as a child was The Untouchables", she says. "I was always dressing up and writing plays in the garage but no member of my family, in any way, were connected to the theatre. But I did have a phenomenal uncle, Uncle Stanley Hugo, who was a great character." At school, the St Trinians-like Streatham House where they once blew up the cookery class, she was spellbound by one teacher whose influence was to prove significant.

One day, Miss Dawn McCormick (speech and drama) suggested that Lynda audition for RADA and at the age of 15, she did and won a scholarship. "I never set out thinking I'll have to produce my own product", she says of the path of her life. "Someone said why don't you go and so such and such and I thought: 'Alright, I'll have a go.' Why don't you form a company? 'Alright I'll have a go' Why don't you write about pirates?" And so on.

Today, La Plante is a very wealthy woman, with a fortune estimated at £60 million and homes in London and Long Island, but she remains a hard grafter who is famously forensic in her research. "A little ferret" is how she once described herself and this has taken her into some tight corners, including a crack den and sex bar in Los Angeles when researching Cold Blood. "With Cold Shoulder, Cold Blood and Cold Heart I was working with the real person behind the detective in those books", she says. "She was a crack head and she was very, very dangerous for me. One time she told me that I had to go to a crack den to understand how low she was. But she dumped me there for three and a half hours with some heavy duty crack heads in this awful hole. From then on I never went out without telling someone where I was going and that I was due back at a certain time."

There's a story she tells about where it all began for her as a writer - the novel Widows, which was successfully adapted for TV, was inspired by the woman at the next market stall (La Plante was working to supplement her income as an actor). Initially told to get lost by her muse, she persisted and was invited back to the woman's home. "All I was doing was like a sponge, looking at her, the way she dressed, her shoes, her handbag", she says. "That to me is research. If you don't know something, go to the source." So she snorts somewhat at US detective shows like the CSI franchise with their loose interpretation of legal procedure and depiction of criminology. "I hate dramatic licence", she says, just as she also has no time for the misery (and "bad acting") of soap operas like EastEnders and Coronation Street.

She is a solitary person and seems somewhat mystified by this. "If you asked me, 'do you have many girlfriends?', I would tell you that I have many female friends but nobody close. And I never had." Why is that? "I don't know. I'm quite happy on my own." Were you close to your parents? "Not really. I left home at 15. But I'm a very happy soul. My soul is very light and quite happy and suddenly I get terribly emotionally driven by . . . " She talks of a newspaper photograph of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan. "I felt such rage", she says. "Never mind the royal wedding and all that. These boys are dying and for what reason? Oil?" This rage had been channelled into her 1992 TV series, Civvies, about ex-paratroopers coping with life after the army. She subsequently asked the BBC to re-release it. "The BBC just won't do it", she says. "I asked them over and over again but it has never been repeated. Everybody thought I was having a go at the paratroopers but I wasn't. I was saying that the government had to do something when they release these soldiers back into society."

If Prime Suspect is still her best known work, Jane Tennison (played in the TV series by Helen Mirren and by Maria Bello in the imminent US remake) is her most memorable character. La Plante was on duty for the first three productions but was less than happy with the final UK incarnation of the iconic detective in the 2006 TV movie. "Someone asked me what I felt was the most important thing that Prime Suspect had done", she says. "I really felt that if you had a member of your family murdered, after that series, you would accept a female detective. That was a big breakthrough. The second thing is that the police procedure in it was honoured and she became a really special character. So why did they go back into her life and make her an alcoholic? Why not make her a commander and let it go on? But no, they always have to knock the legs off someone."

La Plante has also taken some personal flak - most famously, from fellow Liverpudlian Anne Robinson (they grew up in the same neighbourhood), who accused her of telling fibs about her age. This was at a time when La Plante, after years of trying (there were a number of miscarriages), got the opportunity to adopt through a US adoption agency. Robinson's comments didn't help matters but eventually she got to bring Lorcan William Henry La Plante home to England. "It's the most extraordinary experience in my life", she says of motherhood. "If somebody asked me 'what do you want - your career or your son?' I'd say my son, simple as that. It's not all easy. It's sometimes very complicated but I love the fact that through him I'm going down completely different avenues. People ask me what I watch on TV and what I watch is The Gadget Show, How Do They Do It? and Mythbusters. I have this little seven-year-old who is obsessed by them. I tell him 'did you know that Davy Crockett did actually shoot a bullet and split it between a hacksaw and he goes 'No!' and I say: 'Well yes he did!'''

In the past, La Plante has shredded B-list actresses who 'write' novels just as she has castigated celebrities who churn out biographies. No surprise, then, that she has deflected all suggestions that she pen her own biography. "Raymond Chandler once asked, 'who is really interested in learning when I got my first bicycle?" she says, recalling the great writer of hardboiled noir. "Basically, the only thing people are interested in is gossip and I wouldn't head that way. I find the desire of those who have had two minutes of fame to think people are going to be so fascinated by their lives is ludicrous. The only thing I'd do is write a vicious attack on people. I'd do that."