Cleeves says crime fiction is reassuring

PROLIFIC WRITER Ann Cleeves has said the murder-and-punishment structure of crime fiction is reassuring in a time of political chaos.

The creator of North East detective Vera and the Shetland stories, Cleeves, inset, said the restoration even in the darkest crime novels is comforting for readers in an age of confusion.

Cleeves said that writing genre fiction has also given her comfort and stability after she was diagnosed with cancer, and her late husband lapsed into serious depression. The author, who has penned more than 30 books at a rate of almost one per year, writes about crime in communities that she believes can offer an escape for readers.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, she told host Lauren Laverne: “In some sense, in this time of confusion and chaos that we’re living through, there is something very reassuring about traditional crime fiction – order restored at the end, justice seen to be done. Certainly the sort of crime fiction which I write, which is quiet and domestic, can be escapist. If there are all these dreadful things happening in the world, you can focus on a particular family or a particular small community.” Country-born Cleeves has maintained a deliberately non-metropolitan life since leaving community work in London for the Shetland islands, where she met her husband Tim.

She said that the role of women has changed in crime fiction, with female characters increasingly prominent and fewer appearances on the page as “the wife, the victim, the prostitute”.

The author worked with murderers in her early career as a probation officer, and has downplayed the role of death in her work, with no interest in centring the action around violent people she found to be deplorable in real life.