I love Shetland so much it’s criminal!
Detective writer Ann Cleeves reveals how a chance encounter led to marriage, eight novels and a lifelong passion for the Scottish islands
In 1976 I dropped out of university and found myself lost and a little miserable in London where I worked as a childcare officer for Camden Social Services. After a chance meeting in a pub, was offered a job as an assistant cook at the bird observatory on Fair Isle.
I must admit I wasn’t entirely sure where Fair Isle was, but I was young and it represented an escape from the city.
I arrived on the most remote inhabited island in Shetland – indeed the UK – feeling like an imposter. After all, I knew nothing about birds and I couldn’t cook!
But I soon fell in love with Fair Isle and its people, the routine of crofting and bird migration, the stories of shipwrecks and storms.
It was here that I met my husband Tim – he came as a visiting birdwatcher, then returned the following year to camp and to work on a friend’s croft in return for food and home-brew. We left as a couple.
Shetland has been my place of sanctuary and inspiration.
It’s where I go to spend time with friends, to blow away the anxieties of everyday life and to write, including my series of detective novels which have been turned into the BBC series Shetland.
They’re based around Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, who comes from Fair Isle, and is played by Douglas Henshaw in the show.
People ask why a detective named Perez is a native of Fair Isle. He’s fictitious, of course. But truth really can be stranger than fiction. It was here that El Gran Grifon,a in the Spanish Armada, was shipwrecked. Apparently there were 60 survivors, so it’s not outside the realms of possibility that one of those island survivors was named Perez.
You don’t have to be on Shetland for very long to discover that it is a world on its own. It’s completely different from, say, Orkney – it’s a lot further north for a start. I think Shetland is very Scandinavian in its flavour – after all, it belonged to Norway until the 15th Century.
By contrast, Scotland’s Western Isles are more relaxed – I know Uist quite well. They’re chilled and maybe more Irish in flavour.
The people of Shetland are workers, they’re grafters; they’re very proud of what they’ve made of the islands.
People sometimes say that since my books are about murders on Shetland, the stories of violent death must deter tourists. But Shetland is largely crime-free – murders are thankfully a rarity.
Happily, however, readers are prepared to suspend their disbelief and accept that bad things can happen in beautiful places. And beautiful Shetland is the star of the TV shows as the production team insisted they would film on the islands, even though it would have been much cheaper to have filmed on the west coast of Scotland instead. One of the things I love about Shetland is that while tourism plays an increasingly valuable part in the local economy, it remains very much a working community. Shetland lands more fish than the rest of the UK put together, so it’s a busy place.
While visitors are warmly welcomed, Shetland hasn’t become a folkloric theme park. You find real people, for example, making real knitwear from local wool.
This is what I love. Actually, if you’re heavily into textiles and knitting, there’s Wool Week later this month – it’s a really big deal. And on the last Tuesday in January is Up Helly Aa, an incredible fire festival which takes place in Lerwick, Shetland’s main port.
When North Sea oil was first discovered in the mid-1970s, the islanders were canny and said: ‘Yes, you may bring your oil to our lovely islands, but we’ll take a percentage of every barrel that comes ashore.’ The levy was paid into charitable trusts which support various projects.
There are excellent roads here and local art is amazingly well supported. Each little community has its own swimming pool and leisure centre, and all that came from the oil revenue.
That’s not happening so much now, because interest rates are so low and they’re not making so much from their investments – and in fact there’s not much oil or gas coming ashore.
People ask me if I plan to come and live in Shetland one day.
My reply is not now. I think if I were younger and had young chilvessel