Vitual visit to Shetland through the eyes of Ann Cleaves

From http://www.npr.org/2014/07/08/329520153/for-one-crime-writer-peaceful-shetland-is-a-perfect-place-for-murder

Crime writer Ann Cleeves puts it best in her novel Dead Water: "Shetland didn't do pretty. It did wild and bleak and dramatic."

The Shetland Islands are a damp and rocky place, with endless miles of green and gray. Humanity seems to cling to the land here like a few tenacious barnacles. "I love the idea of long, low horizons with secrets hidden underneath," Cleeves says.

These Scottish islands lie hundreds of miles from any mainland, as far north as the tip of Greenland. And thanks to Cleeves, they've been the setting for five popular crime novels.

 

Old stone houses abut the harbor in Lerwick, Shetland's largest town. Outsiders are known here as "soothmoothers," because they arrive on the ferry through the south mouth of the Bressay Sound.

Ari Shapiro/NPR 

 

"There are no trees in Shetland, and you can't do overgrown language here," she says. "The language has to be simple, because that's how the landscape is."

This is a land of extremes. In the winter, you barely see the sun, and during midsummer, the daylight never leaves. If that sounds bucolic, it also has a fearsome side. In the middle of the night, the sun comes streaming through the window, upending any sense of time and place. "[People] came looking for paradise or peace and found the white nights made them even more disturbed," Cleeves writes in White Nights, the series' second book.
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Discovering Shetland's Crime Fiction Potential
While these islands have made Ann Cleeves's career, it took her a long time to write about them. She first came to Shetland in the early 1970s as an aimless 20-something college dropout who was hired to be an assistant cook in a bird observatory. "I didn't know anything about birds, and I couldn't cook," she says.

While working at the observatory, Cleeves met the man she would marry. Two years later, they moved away. Cleeves became a crime writer, without much success, writing a book a year for 20 years. Though she came back to Shetland all the time, she never set a novel here. Then one winter, she was in Shetland bird watching with her husband. Snow had fallen, frozen over with ice, and Cleeves saw ravens — black against the bright white snow.

"And then I thought, because I'm a crime writer: If there was blood as well, it would be really quite mythic," she says. "Like fairy stories with those colors — like 'Sleeping Beauty' or 'Snow White.' And just with that image I started writing Raven Black."

Her agent said it would have to be a standalone. It just wasn't believable to have lots of murders set in a small cluster of islands like Shetland. Then Raven Black became a huge hit. It won the biggest crime fiction award in the U.K. Now, the sixth Shetland novel is coming out in the spring.