Watch out for Brighton cameo from Peter James in this Sunday's episode of Grace

John Simm is rapidly making the part of Brighton detective Roy Grace his own in the widely acclaimed series.

But watch carefully and you will catch Roy Grace’s creator Peter and his wife Lara pop up as two coppers on the beach within the first five minutes on Sunday.

This week it is the turn of Not Dead Enough, number three in the series based on Peter’s multi-million selling series of novels.

“Don't blink!” says Peter. “Lara and I are dressed as coppers on the beach when a body gets washed ashore. It was quite funny. We were standing at the top of the beach waiting for our call and a couple of people from the public came along and started saying ‘Officer. could you tell me...!’

Number two in the series went out last Sunday: “And we had the great news that it was the most watched show on Sunday night.”

Also hugely pleasing is the sense that all concerned have really truly found their roles in the piece: “I do think they have really grown into the characters and I really do sense a difference. I felt in the first one with Dead Simple that it was really good but it was not totally a sense of a team working together, but now you do definitely get that.

“You get a real sense of John (Simm as Roy Grace) and Richie (Campbell as DS Glenn Branson) working together and really becoming a partnership. And it is also great to have Craig Parkinson as DS Norman Potting.

“When I first created Grace I had Alun Armstrong in mind. He would have been the ideal Grace back then, I thought, but really things have just moved on so much. Certainly the kind of Norman Potting character just certainly wouldn't be in the police anymore. I've had to update him in a way and Craig is great. Taking a throwaway line Craig can still really show you that he really is not very PC at the same time”

And things are about to get even more interesting with the third episode this Sunday as an element of romance starts to be introduced for Grace. In the show and in the books, Grace's wife had inexplicably and completely disappeared six years before. In the forthcoming episode Zoe Tapper joins the cast as Cleo, a new love interest…

“She has got a fantastic warmth about her and is a very good leading lady and I know how important that is from my own experience and from my own bad experience, in fact. If you don't have the right chemistry, then a film is always going to fall flat. It just does not matter how good the plot is. But you watch John and Zoe together (as Grace and Cleo) and it is just absolutely right. You remember that great line about Marilyn Monroe that Tony Curtis said, that kissing her was like kissing Hitler, but with John and Zoe you get exactly the opposite. It is just electric.”

It will give us an important new insight into Grace as the romance develops.

“What I have always tried to do with Roy Grace books and with the show is that with Roy and his other officers, I have always wanted to show them as not just boys in blue kicking down doors but as human beings that live with the consequences of what they do and what they have to see. They don't just go and track criminals down somewhere and forget all about it. They have to go home and live their lives, have dinner with their partners, put the kids to bed and lead normal lives. It is so important to show that they are humans.

“But also we all love a love story in a way. The novels have quite dark elements and the story lines are quite dark but the love interest will light it up, and what we will see during the course of the series and through the books is that Roy is a multiple faceted guy. He doesn't have an old-fashioned way of looking at women. He sees them as equal partners doing an equally tough job.”

The next in the series of Roy grace novels to be published, number 18 in the series, will come out at the end of September. As for the TV series, five episodes have been made so far. As for making more, everyone will be monitoring the success of the series currently going out: “But it is certainly looking very hopeful.”

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