Picture You Dead will go on tour with dates including February 27-March 1 at Southampton’s Mayflower Theatre and March 4-8 at Theatre Royal Brighton.

Peter Ash returns to the stage following his emotional exit from Coronation Street. Joining Peter is Fiona Wade who, after 11 years in Emmerdale, took to the stage last year in 2:22 A Ghost Story. Jodie Steele takes the role of Roberta Kilgore; and George Rainsford, will reprise the role of DSI Roy Grace, which he played in the 2023 hit production of Wish You Were Dead.

Peter James is particularly pleased that the stage show is going to Brighton: “I have loved theatre ever since I was eight years old and my parents had seats in the stalls at the Theatre Royal in Brighton. They took me to pretty much everything and I just loved watching plays. I loved the magic of the curtain rising on the set and I used to dream that one day the curtain would rise on something I had written. And that first happened ten years ago with The Perfect Murder with Les Dennis.

“When one of my books is touring, I love sneaking into the theatre and watching the audience’s reaction. I think you learn a lot from how people react. I remember with the reveal in Dead Simple you could hear the entire audience gasp and it was a gasp of delight.

“But the other thing I love about theatre is that with my books they will be the same every time you read them and with Grace on TV, however many times you watch a particular episode, nothing will change. But every night in the theatre the experience is slightly different and the fact is that things can go wrong. I remember curtain up when Les Dennis was in The Perfect Murder. He was in bed with his lover and his line was ‘My wife doesn't understand me!’ and someone in the audience shouted out ‘Mine doesn't understand me either, Les!’

Peter certainly wouldn’t recommend that kind of response, but the point is that theatre and TV are very different experiences: “When you're watching TV, you are sitting maybe as a couple or perhaps with a few other members of your family but in the theatre you are sitting with between 600 and maybe 2,000 other people and it's a fantastic great shared experience that you're having. If you are scared then everyone is scared. If it is funny then everyone finds it funny. It's a whole different world.”

And the theatre is a world where the imagination is even more important: “On stage, particularly if you're touring, you can have maybe eight or nine in the cast and maybe one set with a couple of other slightly-smaller sets. You're going to have to get people to imagine that Roy is in his office rather than actually showing it to them. On television you can show the details.

“And the actors will always tell you that it's different in a theatre. The fact is the audiences do participate and if you do get a flat audience, it will certainly affect the actors.”

Just as he is with the TV series, Peter is very closely involved with the stage shows: “(My wife) Lara and I both work very closely with (the adapter, award-winning writer) Shaun McKenna. He writes first of all an outline and then we would see the detailed treatment and then the first draft of the script and we literally go through it line by line and we discuss it all with him and also with the producer. And we are absolutely involved in the detail of the cast.”

As for rehearsals: “I don't tend to go to that many but we both try to go to the big read-through right at the start and then we usually go at some point when the rehearsals are fairly well through.”

There have been a number of different Roy Graces on the stage, but Picture You Dead sees George Rainsford return: “He played it before and he was great. Obviously it is different to the television. You've not got the expansiveness and you can't always have the banter with Branson because he's not in every stage adaptation but what you want is the empathy. You want someone that you can relate to and I think George has got that in the same way that John Simm has got it in the TV series.”