Author interview: By the book: La Plante recounts a life defined by crime writing

To call Lynda La Plante a force of nature is an understatement. A trailblazing screenwriter, she forged a career when opportunities for women were few and far between.

The impact that La Plante’s ground-breaking television shows Widows and Prime Suspect had on the cultural landscape cannot be underestimated — not to mention the raft of bestselling crime novels. 

Now, the 81-year-old’s storytelling skills have been utilised to great effect in her memoir.

Fittingly titled How to Get Away With Murder, it is a rollicking overview of an eventful life, peppered with hilarious anecdotes (how she got a fortune teller to put a curse on a condescending book editor) and celebrity encounters (she was unimpressed by her fellow Liverpudlian Paul McCartney).

There is tragedy and heartbreak, too, including fertility struggles — she eventually adopted her son Lorcan in her late fifties — and divorce, from the musician from whom she got her distinctive surname.

However, La Plante is not someone to dwell on setbacks. Her default setting is to keep calm and carry on, focused on the future. Looking backwards, for the memoir, did not come easy to her, she says.

“My publishers were pushing for me to do a memoir and I kept saying, ‘No, I don’t want to do it’,” LaPlante says. “And then there was the dawning of exactly how old I was. 

“People say age creeps up on you. It really, truly does. Having lost a few friends, I realised that you never really know when it’s coming around the corner: It could be tomorrow. So, I thought, ‘Well, rather than let somebody else do it, why don’t I do it?’.”

But I had no idea it would take so long and be so difficult. Some memories were clear, others hardly at all.

La Plante grew up Lynda Titchmarsh in a loving middle-class family in Crosby, Liverpool, but lived in the shadow of her sister, who died in a car accident aged five, when their mother was pregnant with Lynda.

La Plante says she has written the memoir through the lens of her career, and what a career it has been.

She spent almost two decades as an actress, starting as a teenager, and attended the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she was friends with Anthony Hopkins and Ian McShane. 

She went on to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as star in many television productions, but she says acting didn’t suit her personality.

“As an actor, I never, truthfully, was very serious,” LaPlante says. “I was the worst person on stage for laughing, I couldn’t keep my face straight. 

“I was told off … when you’re an actor, you are treated like a child, told to behave yourself, and I would think, ‘I’m a grown woman’.”

Her screenwriting career began by chance when she was starring in an episode of pioneering TV show The Gentle Touch, which starred Jill Gascoine as a female detective.

La Plante complained about the dialogue and Gascoine encouraged her to write a script for the show.

That led to Widows. It took her six months to write the first episode, but the show, about four women who pull off a heist planned by their dead husbands, was a huge success.

La Plante carried out extensive research herself, speaking to criminals, police officers, and women who worked around King’s Cross, which was then one of London’s most infamous red-light districts.

Her meticulous approach is a thread running throughout her work. When writing Prime Suspect, a career-making role for Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison, LaPlante was inspired by a real-life female detective, Jackie Malton, whose identity couldn’t be revealed at the time.

“I would go to autopsies, sitting in forensic laboratories before I even put pen to paper. She was wonderful: When she got drafts, she would go, ‘Rubbish, no, don’t do that’.”

In researching her scripts and books, La Plante has also been in close quarters with criminals, including the Krays, the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, and notorious prisoner Charles Bronson. She says her performance skills helped to disguise her fear.

“That’s when the acting training came in, because if you show vulnerability or shock or disgust, they’re onto it.

“When you’re allowed sessions in heavy-duty prisons, you’re not really allowed to mention their crimes. It’s extraordinary.”

Such encounters made LaPlante even more determined to secure better treatment for victims.

“My main priority, in all my crime writing and research, has been how little there is to assist victims.”

The mark of crimes on families is life-long. In a crime novel, it’s over, but in real life, it never ends, ever.

“I always cite [Moors murderer] Myra Hindley, who was given private lessons while the mother of one of her victims was still walking the Moors trying to find her son’s body. 

“What about the help for victims’ families? Victims set up their own support groups and they are among my main charities.”

Professionally, La Plante considers Prime Suspect to be her greatest achievement, because it resulted in real change for women in the world of policing and beyond.

“It showed a woman breaking through in a high-powered position, but because it was so realistic, it also meant that it became acceptable for a woman to lead a criminal investigation.

“And the fight against that was very strong.”

La Plante’s ascent was all the more admirable considering that she is dyslexic, something that was spotted by a teacher who then taught her how to read using a phonetic alphabet.

The dyslexia, she believes, helped rather than hindered her as a writer.

“As someone that advocates for dyslexia, it is very concerning to me that schoolchildren aged four and five are being diagnosed with dyslexia as if it’s mentally challenging and they must be separated and made a special group,” LaPlante says.

“Dyslexia can be advantageous, because you can have an amazingly retentive memory. As an actress, I always had somebody check through the script when I had a problem.

“As a writer, I didn’t care. I just threw everything out there, but I was clever enough to have an exceedingly good secretary.”

La Plante writes at the start of the book: “My education was really very simple: Speak properly, dress immaculately, and know how to fillet a fish.

“That’s all Lynda Titchmarsh was destined to do in life.”

Things have worked out rather differently.

“I can still fillet a fish better than anyone I’ve ever met,” she laughs. “I love it all, I really do. It’s still hard going: I’m still out there pitching. 

“Sometimes it feels that if you do a memoir, well, that’s it, you might as well finish. But I’m working on two books and a TV series, I have no intention of stopping.

“I’m probably one of these people that will be found slumped over the keyboard.”

Does she ever feel the need to put a curse on anyone these days?

“No, but I will — don’t cross me,” she says with a throaty cackle.