Ann Cleeves reflects on her 40-year career as she prepares to say goodbye to DCI Vera Stanhope

“I once stashed a body in that lighthouse.” Ann Cleeves has just treated me to a slap-up lunch of fish and chips at Spanish City, a rambling Edwardian domed beachfront centrepiece in Whitley Bay, the North Tyneside seaside town that has been the crime author’s home for nearly 40 years.

We are taking a postprandial stroll on a sunny Friday before the late May bank holiday, and many seem to have bunked off work or school, given the number of sea-paddlers and 99-flake gobblers. Cleeves has been pointing out local landmarks and finishes with St Mary’s, the attractive lighthouse at the north end of the bay, which is apparently an apt spot for a fictional murder.

Or, I suggest to Cleeves, perhaps not just fictional, if she got a little overzealous with the background research that crime writers often love to whang on about. She chuckles but then reveals she hardly does any research. Cleeves says: “It’s fiction, isn’t it? You just don’t have to get it too wrong. A friend, Helen Pepper, is in forensics and occasionally I’ll ring her up and say, ‘Helen, what would a body look like if it had been in the sea for 20 days?’ But that’s about the extent of it; [the books] would be boring if they were too real.”

This is somewhat surprising as Cleeves has four decades of police procedurals under her belt, including three bestselling series that have been turned into TV series: the Jimmy Perez Shetland (and, of late, Orkney) range; the more recent Matthew Venn Devon-based Two Rivers titles; and, most iconically, the Northumberland-set Vera Stanhope books (the eighth of which, 2017’s The Seagull, has the body in the lighthouse). All three series are set in places deeply rooted in Cleeves’ own life. Vera is in her adopted North East; she met her late husband Tim on Shetland’s Fair Isle when she was working at a bird observatory; and she grew up in Devon – and conceived the Venn books while staying there with a good friend as she grieved Tim’s sudden death nine years ago.

Venn diagram

It is a big year for Cleeves with the 40th anniversary of her first book (she has been published mostly by Pan Macmillan) and, neatly, the release of her 40th book, the fourth Two Rivers title, The Dying Light, in October.

Her latest has Venn and his team being called to a luxurious North Devon holiday home where a young woman has been found dead in the swimming pool and her best friend, whose family owns the house, is missing. It is soon revealed that the home belongs to a government minister and rising political star. But that politician has secrets – as do many in the vicinity, like the gastropub landlord who despises rich second-homers as much as he depends on their custom; an embittered American political journalist, who just happens to be glamping with his wife nearby; and the missing girl’s local boyfriend. The investigation is hampered by intense pressure from Venn’s superiors, media scrutiny and an oppressive heatwave.

The Dying Light’s gestation was an image, Cleeves says: “I thought of that white house, in a heatwave, the very blue pool and that girl floating in it; I just had to find out what happened to her. I don’t plot in advance because it always has to be fun for me, and it wouldn’t be fun if I knew how it was going to end. Sometimes that means the plot gets tangled, but then you just go back and rewrite, thinking about what happened here, what is the relationship there, puzzling it out like a detective would.”

If 90% of the population belonged to a library, politicians would listen. We need to get people. We can’t just have bookshops

Gearing up for the anniversary, Pan Mac has, over the past few years, been rejacketing Cleeves’ backlist. Which has made her think about her career in retrospect, including what was something akin to a long apprenticeship in that her first 14 books – eight with birdwatchers-turned-sleuths George and Molly Palmer-Jones and six featuring Northumberland Inspector Stephen Ramsay – did not trouble the bestseller lists.

Cleeves says: “In my early days I would only get paid after submitting a full manuscript. So I got few editorial notes and the publisher really didn’t care because they would make a little money as I would go straight into the libraries – those were the days libraries had proper book funds.

“I never thought that all the books would still be in print 40 years on, but it didn’t matter as I just enjoyed it. I wrote in the early mornings before I went to work, when my husband and the kids were still in bed. I did all sorts: trained as a social worker, worked for the probation service, ran play groups and youth clubs, sold flights for British Airways in a call centre, worked in public libraries. Writers need to be out there living a life, meeting different people. I think it’s probably more a London thing, but if you live there and all your friends are also writers, or you come to writing after working in publishing, you have quite a limited pool of experience to draw from.”

Continues…