Award-winning crime writer Ann Cleeves, creator of much-loved detective inspector Vera Stanhope, heads to Southwold this month, the home of crime fiction, with revelations of her latest mystery
Windswept landscapes, moody skies, chunky jumpers and wrinkled raincoats are indicative of the stories for which Ann Cleeves has become best known. Her award-winning novels, and the hugely successful television series Vera and Shetland, are loved as much for their rugged northern locations, climate and atmosphere as for the central protagonists solving the crimes.
“There’s all sorts of inspiration here,” she says. “There’s so much variety. Vera’s patch is between the Tyne and the Scottish border, with the Pennines to the west and the North Sea to the east. There are beautiful moors, beaches and castles, but there are also post-industrial areas and pockets of great deprivation. There is more unemployment in the north-east than anywhere else in the country.”
It’s worlds apart from the pastel colours of picture perfect cottages and well-appointed beach huts of Southwold, but when Ann visits Suffolk for the first time this month, she is sure it will also spark her creativity. “I think it would be a brilliant place for a short story,” she says. “Because I don’t know it. There’s the shock of the new. You see the important bits straightaway – the things the locals forget or have seen so often that they don’t appreciate. I write short stories about a lot of places that are new to me because it’s the detail you pick up when you’re not familiar with a place.”
Ann is the guest of Charlotte Clark, the town’s librarian and founder of the crime writing festival, Slaughter in Southwold, which takes place each June. Ann hasn’t been able to make the date in the past so, aware of the festival’s excellent reputation, she has agreed to appear at a standalone event on September 4. The evening will mark the release of her new book called The Rising Tide, the tenth book about Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope. This time she's investigating a death on Holy Island in Northumberland, the perfect setting for a mystery.
The island is reached by a causeway from the mainland, but is cut off when the tide is high. “It can be quite busy when the tide’s out and everybody streams in on buses,” says Ann, “but it’s lovely when the tide comes in - you’re cut off and you have to stay put.” In this book, possibly Ann’s 37th novel (she’s lost count), a group of friends have gathered for their regular reunion. Now middle-aged, they’ve been together on Holy Island every five years since they were teenagers, and experienced tragedy on an earlier visit when one of their group was lost to the rising tide of the causeway. This time, though, a man is found hanged and Vera is called to investigate.
“This is my lockdown book,” Ann says. She worked on the story as the Covid restrictions first came into force in 2020 when she was at home in Whitley Bay with her grandson. “Having him here and home-schooling was great,” she says. “We’d both sit at the kitchen table. He would do his schoolwork and I would write. Then we would break for lunch and throw a ball in the garden or something.”
The theme of the book was also prompted by lockdown through Ann’s experience of reconnecting with her old school friends. “People were living in different countries, but we were able to speak again quite regularly and it was just as if we hadn’t been apart,” she says. “They were easy relationships when somebody knows you so well.”
Ann grew up in North Devon and has chosen it as the setting for a new series of books about Detective Inspector Matthew Venn televised as The Long Call. She opted out of university and eventually took a job as a cook at the Fair Isle bird observatory where she met her husband. They chose to move to Northumberland to raise their family of two daughters and she has never wanted to live anywhere else.
“Are people the same in their mid 60s as they were when they were 16?” she wonders, looking back on her early friendships. “And how do relationships pull apart? I wanted to explore that.” The result in The Rising Tide is another gripping story in a beautiful setting, with the much-loved Vera, and a powerful, shocking twist. “I want the reader to feel the punch in the gut,” says Ann. “I write about horrible things and sometimes there are consequences. It’s important to remember that.”
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Crime writing never seems to loses its appeal. “It’s been most popular in times of national crisis,” she says. “I think people want the security of knowing that order will be restored. Traditional crime fiction at least gives you the sense that the chaos is over. And they are good stories, too. They make you turn the page and that is a kind of escape in itself.”
Books certainly kept many of us going during lockdown and Ann hopes that the benefits of reading will continue to be recognised. She is working with a project called Reading for Wellbeing in which health professionals, council teams and voluntary organisations have teamed up to investigate how reading can provide relief from chronic pain, anxiety, depression or social isolation.
“We have nine project workers in five local authorities in the north-east and we have a team of academics evaluating the project. The full report will be complete by the end of the year and then I hope we will be able to roll it out nationwide.”
Ann has contributed financially to the initiative which she suggested at a public health conference in 2020, using this to mark the 21st anniversary of Vera’s first appearance, and she has also been an active supporter of the library service. She was named as the National Libraries Day ambassador in 2016 and awarded an OBE in the 2022 New Year Honours List ‘for services to reading and libraries’.
She acknowledges how much she has benefited from libraries personally, accessing books as a child and being supported as an emerging writer 30 years ago when she was yet to achieve commercial success. Librarians introduced people to her books and she would visit to meet reading groups.
“It’s about sharing a passion for books and reading,” she says. “I think being in a reading group gives you a certain confidence because it’s one of the few places where you can voice a dissenting view and not feel that it’s awkward or difficult.
“During lockdown we realised there are lots of lonely people and libraries are a warm hub where people can come together. They can be social spaces as well as quiet places where kids from chaotic families can do their homework and use computers. I think that libraries are becoming more and more important. If we believe in equality of opportunity, we must fight not just for the buildings but for the range of books inside, and the skilled staff who can promote reading in all its forms.
“Over the years, I’ve seen how understanding and confidence grows when people are encouraged to explore their experiences through story. It gives a fresh perspective. A distance. Anger and resentment can dissipate. And because we’re sharing a bit of ourselves when we’re talking about books, friendships develop.”
Lots of reasons, then, to gather together at Southwold’s St Edmund’s Church and meet with master storyteller, Ann Cleeves.
Ann Cleeves is speaking at St Edmund’s Church in Southwold on September 4 at 6.30pm. Tickets £20 including a signed copy of The Rising Tide (Pan Macmillan), £10 for the talk only. Available from Southwold Library 01502 722519 or ticketsource.co.uk/suffolklibraries
