For the last decade, Queen Camilla has established herself as the United Kingdom’s biggest book lover. From her Queen’s Reading Room foundation and festival to her role as patron of the Booker Prize, she has lavished praise on England’s authors, sparking up a few friendships with them along the way. Now she’s the star of a new literary thriller by Peter James called The Hawk Is Dead.
In a video on his Facebook account, James said that the novel is “set in London, largely in Buckingham Palace, where Queen Camilla is one of the key characters.” In another video, he added that King Charles III is also a character. The Hawk Is Dead, the 21st book in James’s long-running Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series, centers on an assassination attempt on the royal train. Though the royals’ lives are spared, the queen has to spring into action to help evacuate the train after it crashes in a tunnel. Her fictional private secretary, Sir Peregrine Graves, is murdered, and it’s up to Grace to figure out if he was actually the intended target. The novel also includes a scene where the queen takes the detective on a private tour of Buckingham Palace.
In an interview with ITV, the British network that airs a TV series based on the Roy Grace novels, James said the idea for the novel was actually suggested by the queen herself. “She has been brilliantly helpful. I was given complete access to Buckingham Palace,” he said. “There’s a big chase scene in the book and I had a three-and-a-half-hour tour to get it right. I love the fact that she’s such a fan of books.”
The novelist added that initially he thought the queen was joking when she said she wanted to read a book set in the palace. “Then a senior member of the royal household told me Her Majesty was serious,” James said. “She would love to see Roy Grace in London, and perhaps Buckingham Palace might be a good location? Perhaps there might be a murder in the palace, or two? Might I come up with an idea he could run by her?”
The queen’s love for Grace first became public in April 2020, when she posted a quarantine “shelfie” of her workspace in Scotland that prominently featured several of James’s books. In 2024, James appeared on her podcast series, The Queen’s Reading Room. There, Camilla said that Roy Grace is her favorite fictional detective.
