FINALE OF A CRIME QUARTET
SIR ARTHUR Conan Doyle famously decided to kill off Sherlock Holmes because he’d grown tired of writing about him. For Ann Cleeves, whose latest novel
is the final chapter in her hugely successful DI Jimmy Perez novels, there’s a tinge of sadness in bringing her Shetland-based saga to a close.
“The place and the novels that have changed my life. This is a bittersweet moment in my writing career: a way of tying up loose ends and celebrating my relationship with these extraordinary islands,” she says.
“It was difficult but I wanted to finish the series while people were still enjoying it and not feel like I was telling the same story in different ways,” she says. “The issues are quite similar and I thought eight books was enough, I wrote them in quartets so if I did another one there would have to be another four to keep the pattern.”
Cleeves is speaking to me from Shetland – a place that she has come to know well over the years. “I’ve been coming here for more than 40 years. I dropped out of university and got a job here cooking in the bird observatory on Fair Isle. I met my husband here, we got married here and I’ve been coming here ever since. It will be great to come back and visit friends and explore the islands more without thinking about storylines and work.”
Her first novel was published back in 1986 and it wasn’t until 2006, when – the first of her
– won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger award, that people began to sit up and take notice
Since then her Vera Stanhope novels have been adapted by ITV, starring Brenda Blethyn as the flinty detective, and the BBC have created the popular drama series
The idea for the latter came during a chance visit to the remote islands in 2004. “It was the middle of winter,” explains Cleeves. “My husband was a passionate birdwatcher and a very rare bird turned up in Shetland so we came up on the ferry to see it. It was still dark and it had snowed and it was very still, which is unusual in Shetland, and I’m a crime writer so I thought if there was blood as well it would be a great start to a story.”
That book turned into which changed her career. As she points out “it was overnight success after 20 years”. She was picked up by overseas publishers including in the US.
Cleeves’s journey to literary acclaim has been a long one. “I read a lot as a child but I didn’t know anyone who was a writer, we weren’t that sort of family so I just did it for fun,” she says.
“I thought I might write a great literary novel until halfway through and I thought ‘do I actually want to read this?’ and the answer was ‘probably not.’ My comfort reading was always crime fiction so that was what I went for.”
It was a struggle, at times, in the early part of her career and she is full of praise for the library system in this country that helped sustain her during this period. “I was very grateful to public libraries because in those days they had more funds to buy more and supported new writers and my books have always been popular with library book readers and that sustained me and persuaded the publisher to keep publishing me.”
She worked for a time as a reader development officer at Kirklees Libraries in West Yorkshire before moving with her family to Northumberland in 1987, where she focused on her writing.
Yorkshire is familiar ground for Cleeves, who has been a regular guest at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, in Harrogate, in recent years, and she returns to the spa town on Thursday for an event at the library when she will be talking about her career and bringing the Shetland books to a close. Following the success of
Cleeves found herself on the radar of TV executives when a scriptwriter bought a second-hand copy of the second of her novels, from a local Oxfam shop, while scouting around for a possible replacement for
Both and have become hugely popular with TV viewers. “I’ve been very fortunate because they’ve been made into good television. There are popular writers who haven’t had TV series and who still sell phenomenally well.”
But she says she doesn’t write books with one eye on how it might work on screen. “I don’t have anything to do with writing for TV and if they do adapt one of my books I don’t know how they’re going to do it and really I don’t care because they know about making good television and I don’t. I’m quite happy to stand back and let them get on with it. What matters is that they capture the essence of the book and get the characters right and the sense of place.”
And this idea of ‘place’ is crucial to her stories and are no doubt part of their appeal to readers. Cleeves believes it’s important for Northern voices to be heard – the Vera Stanhope books are set in the North East – and she has certainly done her bit to encourage more geographical diversity.
“I love the idea of our regions being represented and you can’t get further from London than Shetland. We all pay our licence fee and we’re entitled to see ourselves represented because not everyone lives in London. Scottish people are forced to watch dramas set in London and it doesn’t work the other way round which is why I think it’s very important that a wide range of voices are heard, and that people understand that the country doesn’t stop with the M25.”
In many ways her books go against the grain and the current trend for more visceral, violent crime fiction.
“I’m not interested in writing about monsters or serial killers. I like writing about families, relationships and communities and I do that through the form and structure of a traditional detective novel. The murders are almost incidental.”
Although crime writing has never really gone out of fashion, it does seem to be enjoying something of a boom right now with authors from all over the world becoming household names. So what does she believe is the continued allure of crime fiction to readers and viewers? “I think it’s the idea of order being restored. At this time when we have so much uncertainty and we don’t know what’s going to happen with Brexit, if you read or watch traditional crime fiction there is a sense that order will be returned and I think that’s quite comforting at times like this.”