Moments In Crime

The real deal

At the end of the month I'll be coming to the US to talk about WHITE NIGHTS, meet readers and take part in Bouchercon.  One of the events - at Port Washington Library, Long Island - is a traditional Shetland tea.  I'll show some images of the islands and explain about the places that have appeared in or have inspired the books.  For those who can't make it, and because this is my last post, I thought I'd share some of the images with you now.  If you click on the pictures they should become larger and clearer.

One of the early scenes in WHITE NIGHTS  takes place in an art gallery, which has been converted from a building that once dried fish.  There's a party to celebrate a new exhibition and a stranger walks in.  He stares at a self-portrait, falls to his knees and begins to weep.  It seems he's lost his memory and his identity.  Later he's found hanging in a boat shed.  This is the Bonhoga Gallery that provided the model for the Herring House.  It has a great coffee shop too - just like in the book!

Shetland is full of long empty beaches.  Everyone expects the water to be freezing but the Gulf Stream warms it and it's not as icy as you might expect.  This could be the beach in Biddista where Bella Sinclair's guests partied and danced in the strange mid-summer light into the small hours of the morning.

This is Lerwick where Jimmy Perez lives and works.  The big building in the distance is the town hall and it's from here that the great Up Helly Aa parade starts.  Up Helly Aa is a Viking fire festival and the climax of the first Shetland novel, RAVEN BLACK, takes place during the evening.  Men from Lerwick, dressed as Vikings - and in other more flamboyant fancy dress - march through the town pulling a beautifully made longship.  The street lights are switched off and the scene is lit by flaming torches.  Eventually the galley is set alight.  It's a powerful, evocative event and a great backdrop to a drama.  Jimmy lives in a long narrow house right on the water, looking out over the harbour.

This image is just how I imagine Shetland when I'm not there - all water and sky.  It's bleak and bare and treeless but that's what makes it so special.

OK, we had to have birds here somewhere!  These are puffins.  They breed on the fictional cliffs of Biddista, the setting for WHITE NIGHTS, but all over Shetland.  They used to be far more prolific though.  Over-fishing and climate change has reduced the numbers dramatically.

I hope these pictures have given a flavour of Shetland.  They were reproduced by the kind permission of Roger Cornwell (1,3 and 5) and Jean Rogers (2 and 4).  You can find out about them at www.cornwellinternet.co.uk.  For more images and information about Shetland check out www.visitshetland.com.  But for a real sense of the atmosphere of the islands at mid-summer, you'll have to read the book...

Bringing it all back home

I'm back in the UK now after the Swedish book tour.  Two years ago we moved from West Yorkshire back to north east England.  Although I wasn't born here, it felt like coming home and I'm always glad to arrive back.  Northumberland is the wildest and most beautiful of English counties.  It has moorland, ruined castles and long, sandy beaches.  The south east corner, close to Newcastle and the river Tyne, once provided the coal that powered the industrial revolution, and famous ship-builders and engineers grew out of the landscape.  Some southerners still think of our part of the country as a post-industrial wasteland.  Good.  It means that even on national holidays we're not over-run by tourists.

At Bouchercon in October, I'll be moderating a panel that considers the importance of setting in our mysteries.  Every convention has a discussion on the subject and it's easy to see why it's thought so important.  When I read, I love the sense of virtual travel - it's why I enjoy translated crime novels so much.  When we read another culture's popular fiction we understand its preoccupations, its values.

In the UK, there's a feeling that books with rural settings are quieter, less violent than books based in cities.  I'm not sure that's necessarily true.  In rural mysteries there are no street gangs, fewer knives and guns, but the stories can still be profoundly disturbing.  Read Jim Kelly's books set in the Fens or Martin Edwards set in the tourist idyll of the Lake District.  I enjoy writing quiet, domestic murders, but I hope they can be bleak and chilling too.

I come from the English tradition of Christie, Sayers and Allingham, and more recently of Rendell and James - violence occurs in small communities, where people know each other's secrets.  It would be impossible to write a credible village mystery set in southern England now.  There the cottages have been bought up by rich second-homers, or by people who commute every day to the city.  They might just recognize their neighbours, but certainly know nothing of their secret lives.  By setting my stories in the harsh landscape of Shetland or in the ex-pit villages of south east Northumberland I can write contemporary crime fiction that stays within the tradition of the genre.

The essential art of eavesdropping

People often ask us where we get our ideas from and some writers are irritated by the question.  I remember one formidable novelist barking back at an unfortunate woman in the audience of a library event: 'Don't you ever read a newspaper?'

I think it's interesting, though, to unpick the roots of a story.  RAVEN BLACK began with a single image on a trip to Shetland - three ravens against the snow on a clear mid-winter's day.  The idea for a character in WHITE NIGHTS came from an overheard conversation.  A woman was describing the performance of a young and now rather famous Shetland fiddle player.  'What energy!' she said.  'He danced around the stage as if he was possessed.  At one point he fell to his knees and continued playing without missing a beat.'  And in that one snatch of description I had my character Roddy Sinclair.  He would be restless, rather manic, a bit of an exhibitionist.  And a great musician.

I listen in to other people's conversations wherever I go.  I make no apology for it.  All writers are parasites; we create our fictions from the joys and distress of other people's lives.  I relish the loud young businessman in the train shouting into his mobile phone to make arrangements for his weekend in the country.  I can picture his girlfriend replying to him (when he allows her to speak), as she packs her suitcase in her small London flat, terrified that she won't fit in with his group of friends.  At a restaurant I can tell you before the end of the first course the subject of conversation at all the other tables within earshot.  For this reason I hate background music and a general cacophony of sound that prevents me hearing exactly what's being said.

So it's been a weird experience to visit a country - Sweden - where I can't understand a word that's being said around me.  I find myself watching the body language of the people helping themselves to fruit and cheese and yoghurt at the breakfast bar of my hotel in Kristianstad, still intrigued, but my curiosity unsatisfied.  That middle-aged man at the table in the corner pokes his glasses further onto his nose and bends again over a book.  I decide he looks like a writer and I'm delighted when he takes out a programme for the Book Festival from his briefcase and studies it, frowning.  But I wish I knew what he was saying to his elegant companion.

Later in the day my editor, Ing-Britt, and I are sitting in the park in the evening sunshine, looking out over the water.  Three beautiful young women are chatting.  They are very young, still of school-age and one at least, is very animated.  The others listen, wide-eyed, admiring.  I long to know what they are discussing.  Ing-Britt seems completely uninterested and turns her face, eyes closed, towards the last of the sun.  When we walk back to the town for dinner Ing-Britt grins. 

'Don't you want to know what the girls were talking about?'

'Of course!'

'Sex,' she says.

What else?  She was listening all the time.  She said she'd learned the art of eavesdropping from me.

White Nights and dark deeds...

WHITE NIGHTS is the second of my Shetland books.  I've known Shetland for more than thirty years, arriving as a university drop-out in the 70s to be assistant cook in the Bird Observatory on Fair Isle.  I couldn't cook and I knew nothing about birds, but needed the work and thought it would be an adventure to spend a summer on Britain's most remote inhabited island.

I loved the place from the moment I arrived on the mail boat the Good Shepherd, although I was very seasick!  It was spring then and the isle was covered with wild flowers and there were colonies of seabirds on the cliffs.  Later, in mid-summer, I began to appreciate the special quality of the place.  I come from the south of England where there's no dramatic change of day length with the seasons.  Shetland is as far north as it gets in the UK and in mid-summer it never really grows dark.  There's a weird dusk that Shetlanders call the 'simmer dim.'  The sun slides towards the horizon and then back again.  Birds sing at midnight.  If the weather's good it's a time for barbecues, parties and taking to the water for sailing or fishing.  People have an almost manic energy: they know that soon winter will return and it will be dark all day, so they're determined to make the most of the light nights and the sunshine.

WHITE NIGHTS is set in mid-summer and I wanted to catch the mood of unreal perceptions - of night that seems like day, the sense of people not knowing quite who or where they are.  So the theme of the book is pretence, play, performance; in the first scene we meet the victim who is wearing a mask, one character is an actor, another is a precocious young musician.  Against the rhythm of island life - the reality of clipping sheep and working in the field - is set the glitter of celebrity.

In a few weeks time I'll be visiting the US to talk about Shetland and the books.  The audience will have a chance to hear traditional fiddle music and see where the books are set.  If you'd like to catch up with me, check out my schedule on the events page of my website - www.anncleeves.com.

Blogging This Week: Ann Cleeves

In this second book of the Shetland Quartet to feature Inspector Jimmy Perez, the launch of an exhibition at The Herring House art gallery is disturbed by a stranger who bursts into tears, then claims not to remember who he is or where he comes from. The next day he's found dead, wearing a clown's mask. Set in mid-summer, the book captures the unsettling nature of a landscape where the sun never quite sets and where people are not as they first seem.  According to Reginald Hill, WHITE NIGHTS is “a pleasure to read, great setting, intriguing plot…and the bonus when we finish is that we know we’ve got two more to look forward to.”

ANN CLEEVES is reader-in-residence for the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival and was  twice shortlisted for the Dagger Award before winning the first Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award for Raven Black. She lives in Yorkshire, England.

In the footsteps of Henning Mankell

I'm writing this in a long, low farm house in southern Sweden, the home of our good friends Lars and Ingrid.  We've known them for years, but this visit has a special significance.  I'm here for work, at the invitation of the Kristianstad Book Festival and my publisher Bonniers.  For most established writers this wouldn't be a big deal, but I'd been published for more than twenty years without ever having achieved the sort of status when Festival organizers send invitations (and pay for plane tickets!).  Until RAVEN BLACK, that is.  RAVEN BLACK received reviews in the national press, won a prize and sold to more than a dozen overseas territories.

What made the difference?  I'm still not sure.  Certainly, an enthusiastic editor had a huge influence.  She made it clear that there would be no marketing budget - previous sales couldn't justify that - but she promoted the book in every way she could, by emailing the first chapter to all the company reps and getting out review copies.  Perhaps the setting attracted readers.  The book's set in Shetland, a tiny group of islands off the north east of mainland Scotland.  The place is dramatic enough in its own right but it also gave me the opportunity to play with the traditional form of the British detective novel, by studying a small, enclosed community.  In the end, I think, I was just very lucky and that should encourage all the other mid-list authors out there, who've been writing for years, honing their skills and waiting for the big break.

I'm in Sweden to promote the second book in the Shetland quartet - WHITE NIGHTS - and I'll talk more about that later in the week.  But I've recently been re-reading Henning Mankell's dark and compulsive crime novels before giving a television interview about the author and here, in the south of the country, I find I've wandered into his books.  This nature reserve, where Lars and my husband Tim count migrating honey buzzards, is where the young people dressed in old-fashioned costumes were murdered.  This could be the farm house where the elderly couple were killed in the first Kurt Wallander novel.  Everywhere there are signposts to places I recognize - to Ystad, where Wallander lives and works, to Lund and Malmö, cities that often feature in the books.  I've always loved translated Scandinavian crime fiction and it seems fitting that for my first real foreign book tour, I'm following the footsteps of an author I've admired for years.