MW Craven looks back at his journey towards a literary life

For most people, redundancy is not an appealing prospect. But for Mike Craven, who writes as MW Craven, when the opportunity arose to be made redundant from his role as assistant chief officer in the probation services, he leapt at it. He agreed with his wife that they would give it a year and, if he had not succeeded as a full-time author, he would return to traditional employment.

They need not have worried. This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the publication of Craven’s first novel and, over the past decade, he has published three successful crime series, including the US-set Ben Koenig novels with an ex-military protagonist who is unable to feel fear. He is perhaps best known, however, for his Cumbria-based police procedurals featuring grumpy detective Washington Poe – so named because someone once misheard Craven say “Washington Post”. The series is multi-award winning, with plaudits such as the 2019 Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger and the 2023 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. The seventh instalment, The Final Vow, is due to publish in August.

When we speak over video call – Craven from his home in Carlisle that he shares with his wife, Joanne – congratulations are in order: he has once again been shortlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year for Poe’s most recent outing, The Mercy Chair. “I think it is the strongest Poe book to date, but I was very pleasantly surprised.”

Much of the series’ early action takes place in rural Cumbria. “For the first few books, I had to keep inventing reasons why the National Crime Agency was working in one of the least populated counties in England. At one point, one of the characters says: ‘They’ve got another fucking serial killer in Cumbria.’ It was a bit like Midsomer Murders.”

Carlisle-born Craven, who moved to Newcastle when he was little, recalls wanting to be a writer as a child, but “didn’t think it was attainable for somebody from the North East”. After leaving school at 16 he joined the army, where he worked as a gunsmith, and later became a probation officer. His life took a turn in 2003, when he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and told he was going to die.

“I was in hospital for six months and I came out with PTSD and some pretty horrific side effects. Somebody suggested to me: ‘Why don’t you write it down in a diary?’ But this wasn’t doing anything for me, so I thought: ‘I’ll write a crime book and I’ll give my lead detective exactly the same illness I have.’ I made it as realistic as possible.” Thus, his first protagonist, Avison Fluke, was born. “I found it quite cathartic and it did what I wanted it to do.”

Craven returned to his day job with renewed purpose. “During my lunchtimes I was writing; during meetings I was scribbling lines of dialogue; if somebody said something funny or had a weird little mannerism I would write it down.” Suffice to say, when the redundancy offer came, he did not hesitate.

His work as a probation officer has not given him as much material as you might expect. “There are writers out there who write about very real issues exceptionally well, so they would probably get more out of what I used to do, but I want to write about wacky villains with even wackier plans.”

His reflections on his time in the military are more surprising still. “When I was in the army, there were no mobile phones or anything like that. So, when you went out on manoeuvres, you would take books as your entertainment,” he explains. “You would read yours over two or three days and then you would swap with other people. The unit became a sort of giant book club. It was extraordinary.”

When I was in the army, there were no mobile phones or anything like that. So, when you went out on manoeuvres, you would take books as your entertainment

This experience clearly helped foster a lasting love of reading. He sits in front of a colourful bookcase and, as we chat, I glimpse familiar names: Stephen King, Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett. The latter, Craven tells me, is one of his biggest inspirations: “He’s taught me a lot about the way a series can be structured, bringing in a whole cast of characters that your readers get to know over the series, rather than trying to cram everything into one or two books.”

Perhaps the most notable of these characters is Tilly Bradshaw, the highly intelligent yet naïve civilian analyst who works with Poe. “Their friendship is the beating heart of the series,” Craven says, and I concur: their running patter provides welcome relief from the darker themes explored in the books. In The Final Vow, the pair have reunited to investigate a mysterious sniper who is terrorising the UK’s population, with 17 victims and counting. He is an indiscriminate killer and his motivations are unclear.

Without giving too much away, table-top gaming – think Dungeons and Dragons – plays a significant role in the plot. At one point, the crime-solving duo attend a gaming convention in pursuit of a lead. Tilly is unusually reserved and it later becomes clear why when she is cornered by a gaggle of misogynists.

“I already touched on incels in The Botanist, so I didn’t want to labour that point, but I did want to go quite heavy on misogyny in the gaming community. The research I did was awful to be honest. The rape threats women get, the way women have to disguise their gender when they’re playing certain games. It’s absolutely horrific… I’ve never been affected by the misogyny in gaming culture, but it doesn’t mean I can’t get angry about it.”

The start of a new decade also marks a new era for Craven, as a children’s author. He is working on a middle-grade James Bond series, the first of which will be published by Ian Fleming Publications in 2026. The timing of this project was quite fortuitous: “I was doing an event in Manchester last year with a guy called Rob Parker, who is a big Bond aficionado. My wife had bought me some James Bond socks for my birthday and I’d thought: ‘I’m going to save them for my event with Rob.’”

Socks donned, they were sitting in the green room at the event when Craven got a text from his agent, David Headley, asking if he had ever thought about writing a children’s book, “say, about a spy school set in the James Bond universe”.

Unknown to Headley, Craven had already been working on a children’s book in his free time, which he quickly adapted to send to the publisher. “The rules were clear: anyone in the literary canon is fair game, as long as they survived at the end of the series. You can’t resurrect a dead character, like Goldfinger, for example. But you can use any character who has survived, and if you want to kill them you can. I’m having a lot of fun with it.”

I ask Craven if he finds creative inspiration for his writing in the Cumbrian landscape, a love for which is palpable in the pages of his books. “I used to say no,” he admits. “But Cumbria is such a remarkable county. It’s got everything you need as a crime writer…  it’s just so wide open, parts of it, that it kind of frees the mind.”