I've made a killing abroad... but back home it's murder

Ahead of its 100th episode, Death In Paradise creator Robert Thorogood recalls his 15-year journey from 'previously unsuccessful' to overnight hit with the BBC crime drama... and reveals why his brilliant new cosy crime series takes place outside his front door

- Matt Nixson

WHEN Robert Thorogood stepped off his passenger Guadeloupe in early 2010, he found himself emotion. The Christie-obsessed overcome by young Agatha scriptwriter had arrived on the French Caribbean island to scout locations for his new comedy crime drama, Death In Paradise. "I'd written it without having been to the Caribbean," he admits today. "We kept having development meetings where I asked if there was any chance of being sent out there, and they just laughed at me.

"When we finally got a recce to look at locations, I remember getting off the plane into that heat. Finally it hit me, 'I think they're going to make my TV show'.

"I'm not ashamed to say I had a little weep standing on the Tarmac. It was moving and odd and strange. When you've been trying so hard for such a long time, it's difficult to grapple with good news."

A year later, Ben Miller would arrive on the island - reimagined as the fictional British Overseas Territory of Saint Marie - as Thorogood's classic fish-out-ofwater cop, Richard Poole. Sent to investigate the baffling murder of another senior British detective - found dead behind the locked door of a mansion's panic room during a party the uptight DI solves the crime but is ordered by bosses back home to stay on to replace the victim.

Viewers were hooked. But we're jumping ahead of ourselves.

Back then, aged 38 and described rather bluntly by one newspaper as "previously unsuccessful" Colchester-born writing Thorogood had been scripts and coming up with ideas to universal indifference for years.