by JULIET WATERS

Peter Robinson orders the meal you’d expect from the creator of Inspector Alan Banks, the baby boomer detective from Yorkshire: a burger and a glass of Shiraz. “They’re going to cook it enough, right?” he says looking at me for reassurance. He doesn’t like book tours and it shows. A man, it seems, who prefers to stay in one place, or, at most, two.

Robinson’s been living in Toronto for 30 years, but his Yorkshire accent is still reasonably thick, evidence that he gets back regularly. Since the late ’80s, Robinson and Ian Rankin have been a sharing a huge readership for rock ’n’ roll loving British police detectives. A central victim in Robinson’s latest book, Piece of My Heart, is a journalist for Mojo, writing about an imaginary band from the late ’60s. Seems that the Mad Hatters have more lurking in their past than the fact that they once used to be a much better band.

Mirror: What made you decide to kill a music journalist?

Peter Robinson: Well you know, just a way of getting at journalists in general—take the most harmless kind... But as you see when you read the book, there are two plots, one in 1969 and one in the present, and it just made a lot of sense to have somebody who was working on an article about a band from that time. The person at Mojo I talked to said that an anniversary or a reunion tour would be a good reason for a journalist to be digging into the past.

M: Tell me a bit about your research at Mojo.

PR: Well they did a little article about Inspector Banks because of his love of music. So I had a name. And then when I wanted to know about the business, I e-mailed to ask what kind of training music journalists have.

M: Uh. Training?

PR: Exactly. He told me, “We don’t want people who’ve been to journalism school—they’ll pick up all kinds of bad habits.” And he said they use a lot of freelancers. So that seemed like a perfect victim. This guy has his own interests and pursues them himself.

M: It seems to me that your books often have young victims. There’s also this cold case from 1969 about one of the Mad Hatters’ entourage. And another recent book, Playing With Fire, opens with the body of a young junkie. Is there any reason for that?

PR: I think that younger people are always interesting to write about, and not having brought kids up myself, I guess I’m probably looking back on my own adolescence to some extent—not that I was ever a junkie. I was a bit of a rebel. And the same with the ’60s stuff. It’s interesting to look back at the time. I was at a lot of the festivals I write about. The ones I remember particularly are the two Isle of Wight festivals. One in ’69, with Dylan and the Band, then the year after with Jimi Hendrix, not long before he died, and the Doors and the Who.

M: So who inspired the Mad Hatters?

PR: They’re bits of the Doors, bits of Pink Floyd. Not heavy though, more psychedelic pastoral. Then the idea is they changed over the years and became more middle of the road like Fleetwood Mac... Not many people know this, but there is a song in existence by the Mad Hatters.

M: I thought they were imaginary.

PR: I was asked to do a short story for an anthology called The Merry Band of Murderers, and there’s a companion CD. So we each had to write a song for it. One of the editors is a session musician so he put my song to music, and it’s beautiful—very floaty, with flutes and acoustic guitar. The only thing missing is the organ sound I wanted. But you will be able to hear the Mad Hatters when that comes out in September.

Piece of My Heart by Peter Robinson, McClelland & Stewart, hc, 375pp, $34.99