Best-selling crime writer Peter Robinson discusses imagined Yorkshire, murderous folk songs and talking to Ian Rankin, ahead of his visit to York next week. JULIAN COLE reports.

PETER Robinson spends much of his life over there, but we will be seeing a lot of him round here this summer.

First of all, the Yorkshire-born crime writer, who lives in Canada and is best known for the Inspector Banks novels, will be in York on Wednesday in a Crime On Tour event, linked to the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.

Later in the month, he will be appearing at Beverley Folk Festival with the veteran folk singer Martin Carthy. To finish, next month he will be at the crime-writing festival in Harrogate, where he will be in conversation with fellow crime writer Ian Rankin (but probably without the bottle of whisky this time round, more of which in a moment).

Peter divides his life between Toronto in Canada and Richmond in North Yorkshire. Originally from Leeds, he has lived in Canada for years. His wife is Canadian and much of his life is based there. But does he feel like a Yorkshireman or a Canadian? “You know what they say, you can take the lad out of Yorkshire…”

Wednesday’s talk at 6.30pm at Explore York Library and Learning Centre will see Peter introducing two new crime writers, David Mark, a Yorkshire journalist and author of The Dark Winter, and Steven Dunne, author of the British serial killer novel, Deity.

At the time of the interview, Peter hadn’t read either book so couldn’t comment on the writers as such. “They’re meant to be sending me them,” he says of the organisers. But he has a format in mind anyway. He will introduce the writers, allow them to read from their books, engage in a conversation about crime fiction and throw the discussion out to the audience.

Peter is happy to encourage newer writers. Like Rankin, Peter has been successful and prolific, but it all took time, something the publishing world is less keen on now, when overnight success sells. Rankin has often said that today he would not be given the space necessary to become established.

“Yes, that’s the same for me,” says Peter, whose first novel, Gallows View, was published in 1987. It was not until 2000 before he could write full-time.

Richmond provides the inspiration for the setting of Peter’s Inspector Banks novels, although it is not quite the town we know, or indeed the North Yorkshire we know. “It’s my version of North Yorkshire,” he says. As for the not-quite-Richmond that appears in his Banks novels, “it’s similar but it’s different. It’s an amalgamation of different places”.

The actual Richmond did provide the inspiration for his last novel, the stand-alone Before The Poison, in which Chris Lowndes, an English composer of Hollywood film music, returns to Yorkshire after the death of his wife.

On impulse he falls in love with an abandoned house in the Dales and buys it, then discovers it was once the home of Grace Fox, hanged in 1953 for poisoning her GP husband. Peter lays out the narrative in layers, with a ‘factual’ account of the trial leading to extracts from Grace’s wartime diary.

“This was an idea I had had for some time, but I knew it wasn’t a Banks novel,” says Peter. He enjoyed breaking away from the format of a crime novel, especially the research, although it was in some ways more difficult. “With a Banks novel, I have the characters and structure in place to some extent. I knew this couldn’t be a Banks novel because the story was told in three different voices.”

Before The Poison was partly inspired by a lonely Dales house. “I went by it on one of my walks,” he says. Something about the house struck him, but that is often the way. “A house, a place or a location will inspire me.”

At present, Peter is writing a short story which he will perform with folk singer Martin Carthy in Beverley on June 17. Carthy will weave songs into and out of the text – or he will when he gets it from Peter.

“Well, I haven’t finished it yet. But musicians seem to be relaxed about these things, unlike publishers who want everything yesterday. I have done something like this before with Martin’s daughter, Eliza. It’s a story about a folk song collector who stumbles across a murder with echoes from a folk song.”

As for the Harrogate crime festival, Peter remains a fan: “It’s always terrific fun to be meeting other writers and readers and people you have not met before.”

As part of this year’s festival, he will appear in conversation with Ian Rankin, reprising something they did ten years ago for the first festival.

“That time there was a bottle of whisky on the table between us and I seem to remember it has mostly gone by the end.”

Did the conversation make sense?

“Oh, we made perfect sense,” says Peter, who recalls that they spoke about movies and music, among other topics.

This time he isn’t so sure about the whisky. “We’re both older and a little wiser,” he says.

In his spare time, Peter reads crime, naturally enough – “I went on a cruise recently and I read the latest Hakan Nesser and the new Michael Connolly” – but likes to take in non-fiction, too.

A new Inspector Banks novel, Watching The Dark, will be published in August, partly inspired by a teaching assignment he did in Tallinn in Estonia, where some scenes are set. “It’s about a woman who disappeared years earlier on a hen weekend,” says Peter.

Banks will also be back on TV in the autumn, in a second ITV1 series. So what does he think of Stephen Tompkinson in the lead role? “He’s too tall,” says Peter, “but other than that he does a very good job.”

• Tickets for Wednesday’s event in York cost £5. To book, visit harrogateinternationalfestivals.com/crime

• The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival runs from July 19 to 22, at the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate.

• Julian Cole’s latest Rounder Brothers novel, The Baedeker Murders, is available on Amazon for Kindle, for £2.09. Two earlier novels in the series have been published in Britain and the US.