Characters painted by a landscape

The Heron’s Cry ****

Ann Cleeves

Pan Macmillan, R330

What is it, you wonder, that makes Ann Cleeves’s intricately plotted and gloriously atmospheric crime novels so addictive?

Of course, fans of her novels and the two wildly popular TV series they have inspired, Vera and Shetland, will tell you it’s thanks to the authenticity of their settings as much as their characters and complex plots. North Devon is so keenly evoked in her latest and 36th novel, The Heron’s Cry, the second in her brand-new Two River series — soon to hit TV screens — you find yourself longing to visit the estuary landscape where her detective protagonist, Matthew Venn, lives with his husband, at Crow Point.

But as with all her novels, says Cleeves, “landscape is definitely more than a pretty backdrop to the action”. For Cleeves, who famously never plots her bestselling novels, the character, the plot, everything begins with the landscape, the place. “I think we are a product of where we were born, where we grew up, where we live now, the kids we played in the street with, the view we saw from the house where we were brought up. We’re very much individuals in context and that’s what I’m very interested in exploring. My daughter, an academic, is a human geographer, and that’s very much what I do, too.”

Her new series takes its name from its North Devon setting, where two rivers, the Taw and the Torridge, converge and flow into the sea, a landscape Cleeves knows intimately, having grown up there. But she lives in Whitley Bay, a coastal town in Britain’s northeast where she and her husband Tim moved to in 1987, and which continues to inspire her Vera novels.

But in 2017, when Tim died suddenly, says Cleeves: “I just wanted to get away for a short while, to escape the sympathy, really. So I went and stayed with an old school friend in Barnstaple, North Devon, and it was chatting to her and visiting our old haunts that brought Matthew Venn to life. He is gay, not because I want to preach tolerance, but because the couple that were so kind to me after Tim died, and who still look out for me, were a gay couple.  They were in my head when I started formulating this idea.”

Venn’s background, growing up within the strict confines of the Barum Brethren, was informed by the experiences of another friend who’d been raised in a similarly strict religious enclave, and he developed from “just thinking, what if you lost that faith? You might enter the police service for the same sense of community, duty even. But I also wanted to start the Matthew Venn books because I’d stopped writing about Shetland. Eight books was enough. I thought I can’t kill off any more people in Shetland, and I didn’t want to repeat myself. I could continue writing about Vera because there’s such a wide palette of backgrounds here in the northeast, and I like alternating series. I like that sense of finishing a book and thinking I can now go on to something different.”

And with filming already under way for The Long Call, the first in the Two Rivers series, she insists, “I’ve just been very lucky.” Cleeves is now recognised as one of Britain’s most popular and beloved writers. Yet prior to writing her Shetland books, she already had 18 novels published, including two Vera novels. “They were a struggle to sell, so it was tough,” she concedes. She’d spent summers in the Shetlands years before, having met her ornithologist husband there when she’d worked as assistant cook in the bird observatory on Fair Isle, the most remote of the Shetland Islands.

“My husband worked in nature conservation, which isn’t the best paid work in the world, so I always had to have a day job with bringing up two kids. Tim had bouts of illness as well, which we coped with until he was properly diagnosed. So writing was an escape, and I loved it even though it wasn’t making me a lot of money.”

It wasn’t until her first Shetland novel, Raven Black, garnered her the 2006 Gold Dagger, and a global readership, that she could afford to write full-time. “It’s quite unusual for a writer who’s been bumping along on the bottom for 20 years to actually win that, so I was very lucky,” says Cleeves, who recalls another “bit of luck” some years later, when ITV studios were looking for something with a strong female lead, and one of their executives strolled into a North London Oxfam shop looking for a holiday read and purchased The Crow Trap, her first Vera novel. “So that’s how Vera came onto the screen.” But the unsung ingredient that makes both the Vera and Shetland books and TV series so popular, maintains Cleeves, is kindness.

“Vera is dogged, determined and can be mean to her staff, but at the heart of her, there is that compassion, that kindness, and the same for Jimmy Perez in the Shetland series. And I hope the Matthew Venn series will do well too, because kindness comes into that too. Now that we’ve had Covid, Brexit, and have had Trump in the US, I think people want that sense of order restored, with justice in the end and some light to look forward to.” — @BronSibree

Ann Cleeves on the books that have influenced her

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The Lost Domain, by Alan Fournier, which I read in French when I was in the sixth form but have read since in translation because my French has all gone. In French it’s called Le Grand Meaulnes. It’s a rite of passage book, and it’s about the son of a village schoolmaster, and suddenly this older boy blows into his life and brings him adventure and magic. And I felt it related to me because when we were living in Shropshire, I was that child of the village headmaster just looking for some adventure and some magic — I got that when we moved to Devon. It is also about deep friendship. Really, the plot doesn’t hold together at all, but he’s wonderful about describing the lives of rural French people in this particular village. Also, that hope of magic and wonder and how people seek dreams even though they might be worthless when you find them in the end. The fact that it’s about a teenager just about to grow up, sums up a whole two years for me, and also how subjective reading is, because our group of school pupils loved this book and thought it was one of the best things ever written. But the group who read it after us absolutely hated it. So it’s a lesson about how subjective reading is, and how we shouldn’t be snobby about reading, but allow people to like the books they like and be honest about the books they can’t get on with, even though they’re considered masterpieces.

Sidetracked by Henning Mankell. This was my first introduction to contemporary translated crime fiction and to Scandinavian translated crime fiction, and I’ve gone on to love both. Mankell’s central character is, of course, called Kurt Wallander, and he is a complex character, and it illustrated to me that crime fiction could do more than tell a very good story, because he’s exploring all sorts of social issues in the books as well. But what he does brilliantly is describe these initial, stunning visual scenes. This book starts with a young woman running around a field of very yellow rape flowers and then setting fire to herself. There’s another of his novels where he describes someone driving along a country road, and in the middle of the road there’s a big chair, like a throne, and of course the man has to stop, and then of course he is killed because he stops to see what’s happening with the chair. In another, there’s a flock of geese on a lake and they fly up and a flaming arrow is shot at one of them and brings the goose down. So they are all very, very filmic, and I learned from him it is good to start with a great visual image that captures the reader’s imagination. I don’t always do it, but it’s something I’ve learned from him, as well as that complexity and relating the character to the society in which they live.

Ali Smith’s Quartet. She is just such a brilliant writer. Recently I’ve been reading Spring, which is the third one in the Quartet. At first it seems as if it’s going to be really dense and off-putting because there’s not a straightforward narrative line. But in fact it’s incredibly accessible, and she manages to marry the political and the personal in a way that no other writer that I’ve read does. So Greenham Common comes into the Quartet and Brexit, and climate change, but also individuals and their growth and relationship to the world. They are very political. She’s looking at the way the world is now, but they’re very difficult to describe. If you’ve read Ulysses by James Joyce you’ll have a sense of how it works, but I find this book much more accessible than that. It’s not a clear, plain story, but when you read it you understand what’s going on. I’m not sure I can write like her. I already try not to underestimate the reader, but I guess in small part these books give me a sense of how we can trust readers a bit more, perhaps; that we don’t have to spell everything out for them. And that’s where I think Ali Smith is so great. Her books tell you about the political, about the community, about the state of the world in a big way. And she does it through the detail of an individual character.

The Lone Pine series, by Malcolm Saville. The first books that influenced me were Malcom Saville’s mysteries for children. They’re kind of slightly upmarket Enid Blyton. I thought he wrote much better than Enid Blyton and even at the age of eight or nine I could tell. Saville set his books in Shropshire, which wasn’t very far from where we lived until I was 11 and we moved to Devon. I absolutely loved them, because they were great on setting but there was also a mystery to be solved and it was rural crime. But he was really good at drawing characters too. He wasn’t a huge name, but there are a number of crime writers who loved his books. Mick Herron, who writes the spy stories, was a member of the Lone Pine club, who were readers of Saville’s mysteries — as was I, and as was Elly Griffiths, who is a well-known crime writer in Britain, so I think he influenced quite a number of readers and writers, and set us on our way.