Video interview with Ann Cleaves

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.

May 2015 book: Raven Black

Cindy picked "Raven Black" by Ann Cleeves as our read for May 2015.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Winner of Britain's coveted Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award, Ann Cleeves introduces a dazzling new suspense series to U.S. mystery readers.

Raven Black begins on New Year's Eve with a lonely outcast named Magnus Tait, who stays home waiting for visitors who never come. But the next morning the body of a murdered teenage girl is discovered nearby, and suspicion falls on Magnus. Inspector Jimmy Perez enters an investigative maze that leads deeper into the past of the Shetland Islands than anyone wants to go.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Set in the remote Scottish Shetland Islands, Cleeves's taut, atmospheric thriller, the first in a new series, will keep readers guessing until the last page. Det. Insp. Jimmy Perez investigates the murder of teenage Catherine Ross, found strangled on a snowy hillside shortly after New Year's. While the police and citizens alike are quick to lay the blame on local eccentric Magnus Tait, who was not only the last person to see Catherine alive but also the prime suspect in the disappearance eight years earlier of another girl, Perez has his doubts. He's soon drawn into an intricate web of lies as he unearths the long-buried secrets of everyone from a roguish playboy to Catherine's only school friend. Cleeves, winner of the CWA's Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award (formerly the Gold Dagger), masterfully paints Perez as an empathetic hero and sprinkles the story with a lively cast of supporting characters who help bring the Shetlands alive. When the shocking identity of the murderer is revealed, readers will be as chilled as the harsh winds that batter the isolated islands.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

On the remote island of Shetland, teacher Fran Hunter is walking home when she spots a splash of red in the deep, white snowdrifts, with black ravens flying above. What a perfect picture it makes, she thinks. But on closer inspection, she finds that the "perfect picture" is the dead body of local teenager Catherine Ross, whose red scarf has been used to strangle her. Suspicion immediately falls on recluse Magnus Tait, who was accused--but never convicted--of kidnapping another girl eight years earlier. Policeman Jimmy Perez, assigned to the case, isn't convinced of Magnus' guilt. As he investigates, he uncovers a web of sinister secrets, strange superstitions, petty rivalries, thwarted love, and illicit affairs--the dark underbelly of Shetland's tight-knit community. Cleeves offers up a dark, brutal, suspenseful page-turner that will keep even seasoned mystery buffs guessing right up to the end. Emily Melton
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ann Cleeves (born 1954) is a British crime-writer. In 2006 she won the inaugural Duncan Lawrie Dagger, the richest crime-writing prize in the world, for her novel Raven Black. Cleeves studied English at Sussex University but dropped out. She then took up various jobs including cook, auxiliary coastguard, probation officer, library outreach worker and child care officer. She lives in Whitley Bay.
The Vera Stanhope novels have been dramatized as the TV detective series Vera, and the Jimmy Perez novels as the series Shetland.

In 2014 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Sunderland.
In 2015, Ann is the Programming Chair for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival & the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.

Shetland Island series

The novel Red Bones was dramatised by David Kane for BBC television starring Douglas Henshall as Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, and broadcast in 2013 as Shetland. Episodes broadcast in 2014 were based on Raven Black, Dead Water and Blue Lightning.

• Raven Black (2006); Gold Dagger Award
• White Nights (2008)
• Red Bones (2009)
• Blue Lightning (2010)
• Dead Water (2013)
• Thin Air (2014)