Ann Cleeves' Jimmy Perez Returns!

 LUCY BURDETTE:  I am a huge fan of the Shetland series. In fact a huge fan of all Ann Cleeves’s books. You might remember that the Friends of the Key West Library was lucky enough to persuade Ann to appear last winter as our gala guest of honor. So I’m delighted to welcome her to the blog today! She has a brand-new addition to the Shetland series coming this fall and I can’t wait!

Ann, Jimmy Perez’s life changed so much over the course of his series. How much of that arc had you imagined when you were writing the first, Raven Black? Has his life surprised you?

ANN CLEEVES: Thanks so much! Raven Black was intended as a stand-alone novel. My editor loved the book, but said it would stretch credibility to have more than one murder in a community as small as Shetland.  But this was my breakthrough novel - it went on to win the CWA Dagger - and she decided that perhaps it would run to a small series... Since then, the BBC and I have killed off a good proportion of the islands' population.  Look out for more television, but after eight books, I've decided to move Jimmy and Willow to another setting.

LUCY: I was disappointed that there wouldn’t be a 9th book. In the past, you said that enough bodies had fallen on the poor Shetland Island. But now a new book is coming this fall! Please tell us a little about that, and also the decision to continue that beloved series.

ANN: I thought the series would end after Wild Fire.  I'd said all I wanted about my beloved Shetland.  But more recently, I felt a longing to move north again, a homesickness for the islands. Wild Fire ends with Jimmy and Willow moving to Orkney - the group of islands that lie between Shetland and the Scottish mainland - to begin a new life together.  I first went to Orkney fifty years ago, so I know it, but before writing the new novel I spent a week there with a good Orcadian friend to get a more detailed, contemporary sense of the place.  The result is The Killing Stones.

 LUCY: Your major characters are police detectives. How much research does this take and how do you do it?

ANN: I don't do too much research.  The story is always more important to me than accurate detail, and usually I write the book first and check later if there are gaps in my knowledge.  I have three very good friends who help - an academic and former crime scene manager, a forensic soil scientist and a forensic pathologist. The latter is Dr James Grieve, who appears as himself in the Jimmy Perez books.

LUCY: You’re not afraid to kill off major characters. Without spoilers, how do you decide this must happen? Does it come to you as a possibility while you’re writing the book, or do you think about this ahead of time? Do you think about reader reactions as you write these scenes?

ANN: I don't do much planning before I start writing.  Perhaps because it took me such a long time to get any commercial success, the process doesn't feel like work - it's still fun.  Sometimes, though, I think it's good to show the real result of violence and the reaction to it within a tight community.

LUCY: You’ve been writing and publishing mystery novels since 1986, but were not, I think it’s fair to say, an overnight sensation. (This gives me hope.) would you say that your career really took off with the Duncan Lawrie Dagger award for Raven Black, and could you talk about the long arc of your career?

ANN: I was published for 20 years before my publisher contracted any books in advance, and even after the Dagger it took a while for the novels to gain any real popularity here in the UK.  The award did get me noticed overseas though and Raven Black was published to good reviews in Europe, Scandinavia and the US.  That allowed me to give up the day job.  I find it amusing that the recent reprint of Raven Black is selling so nicely - I see it in supermarkets and airport bookstores.  That never happened first time round!

 LUCY: All three of your latest series have been developed into TV shows. We’d love to hear a bit about how that happened—the wonderful story about your lucky break, how much input you’ve had into the characters and stories, and what it’s been like to see your people come alive on the screen.

ANN: The first of the Vera novels is called The Crow Trap. It didn't sell particularly well and books ended up in charity shops.  A woman picked up a copy in an Oxfam shop in North London to take on her holiday.  There's nothing unusual about that, but she was called Elaine Collins and was books executive for ITV studios.  They were looking for a series with a strong female detective to adapt for television and decided that Vera might work for them.  Elaine went on to produce both Vera and Shetland. I always think of her as my fairy godmother.  The same production team also made The Long Call, based on my Matthew Venn books. I decided from the beginning that the production team knew more about making good television than I did, so I let them get on with it.  I did show them around the places where the books are set, because geography is so important to each of the series.

 LUCY: At the beginning of each of my Key West chapters, I add a quote from an author who is especially good at writing about food and eating. Turns out I’ve used 9 of yours. Here are two from Raven Black:

"She tried to imagine Mr. Ross, sitting at their kitchen table while her mother hacked at the overcooked meat and picked away at him with her questions."

"Mr. Scott was a pale, thin man. A stick of forced rhubarb said Sally’s mother, who had seen him at a parents meeting."

I’m curious about how much you think about food when it comes to revealing character?

ANN: Food reveals character, but it also says a lot about place.  In The Killing Stones, there's a lot about fish - Westray, the small island where the first murder takes place is famous for its fishing - and look out for fatty-cutties, a very specific Orkney delicacy!

Thank you, Ann, for visiting! Reds, she’ll be stopping in to answer your questions so bring them on!

About The Killing Stones

Coming in October, this is a new standalone novel featuring Detective Jimmy Perez, last seen in Wild Fire, the final book in Ann Cleeves’ bestselling Shetland series. When a violent storm descends upon Orkney, the body of Archie Stout is left in its wake. An unusual murder weapon, a Neolithic stone bearing ancient inscriptions, is found discarded nearby. Detective Jimmy Perez, no stranger to the complexity of human nature and the darkness it can harbour, is soon on the scene. He counted Archie as a childhood friend, so this case is more personal than most. Here, in these ancient lands where history runs deep, Perez must discern the truth from legend before a desperate killer strikes again . . .