Crime writer Ann Cleeves: We can’t write off struggling working-class people as white trash
Long before she became a crime writer, Ann Cleeves spent time working for the probation services in Merseyside. It was the 1980s, the council estates were awash with heroin and most of the people Cleeves would see were teenage boys who’d been stealing to fund their habit. Cleeves was living at the time on the nearby Hilbre Island, where her late husband Tim had a job as an ornithologist, and her life was split in two: birds, seals and wellies at the weekends; troubled young adults, smart suits and a challenging case load during the week.
“With each case we had to write what are now called pre-sentencing reports,” she tells me. “But I always wanted to twist the narrative a bit.” She was bothered by what she saw as “unbalanced storytelling”.
She adds: “I suppose I wanted a happy ending.”
I’ve met Cleeves in her home in Whitley Bay, a brief metro trip from the centre of Newcastle. Down the road sweeps the wide expanse of coastline with its striking lighthouse that has featured in many an episode of ITV’s Vera, based on Cleeves’s bestselling books about the motherly but doughty Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope. For fans of the books, Vera is inseparable from the show’s outgoing star Brenda Blethyn, gimlet-eyed and resolute in her scruffy mac, rain hat and scarf.
Following Tim’s death in 2017, Cleeves lives alone – although her two grown-up daughters, one a midwife, the other an academic, are close by – in a semi-detached house on the sort of road that could also come straight out of one of her novels: quiet, well-kept, nondescript. It is, I suggest, a strikingly modest set-up for someone who is the author of 37 critically acclaimed novels, six million copies sold and with two concurrent TV series based on her books: the 14th and final season of Vera will be broadcast next year; the BBC’s Shetland, based upon her Jimmy Perez novels, is now in its 10th season.
“I suppose I could move somewhere grander, but why would I?” she asks, casting an arm around her simply furnished kitchen, the only discernible extravagance a Rayburn cooker. “Anyway, money doesn’t matter to me at all. I give an awful lot away. And I hate shopping.”
Cleeves is neat and fine boned, with a silvery, bird-like voice. She is 69 and a major force in crime publishing, producing books at the rate of around one a year. All marry complicated, sharply-drawn characters with fearsomely knotty plots. She’s been publishing novels for nearly 40 years, although it was winning the 2006 Crime Writing Association award for her first Jimmy Perez novel Raven Black that lifted her into the big league, and throughout that time she has seen trends in crime fiction come and go: Scandi noir, psychological thrillers, cosy crime. She’s indulged in none of them. “I always found the titillation of mutilated female bodies in Scandi noir very depressing and not very interesting. Suddenly everyone was writing that sort of violent stuff, and it became very fashionable,” she says. “Now, thanks to Richard Osman, everyone wants a Christmas crime novel featuring a blazing fire.”
By contrast, Cleeves keeps producing precisely the traditional whodunnit her readers love her for. Her books are very much in the vein of golden age crime writing, and structurally owe a lot to Agatha Christie.
Christie’s novels, though, with their detached fascination with evil and propensity for viewing characters like specimens in a petri dish, are miles away from the richly human worlds Cleeves’s books inhabit. Cleeves hates Christie. “She’s so cold. And anyway, none of my books feature monsters.”
Perhaps not in the conventional villainous way, no – Cleeves’s wrong ’uns tend to be people who don’t think of themselves as murderers until they realise that’s what they’ve become. Her latest Vera novel, however, The Dark Wives, which begins with a murdered social worker and the disappearance of a 14-year-old girl from a privately-run children’s home, is certainly stalked by societal monsters.
Cleeves was inspired to write it after hearing a File on Four report on Radio 4 into the deplorable standards in Britain’s private children’s home sector, and it examines the impact on those caught up in a system that prioritises profit over care. “The whole idea of making money out of troubled teenagers makes me feel a bit queasy,” she says. “Children who haven’t been properly looked after, who come from chaotic backgrounds, who often have been brought up with addiction: they need so much more than they are being given. I can see why so many public services have become privatised – people assumed it would be more efficient – but if you are having to put shareholders ahead of vulnerable children, I can’t see how that can be in anyone’s benefit.”
Cleeves is quietly, fiercely political. “My grandad was a Welsh miner and he used to say to me: ‘there are two classes, the exploited and the exploiters. And we are the exploited’. And my grandmother would reply to him ‘if a donkey came over that hill wearing a red rosette, you’d vote for it’. So I grew up with both sides of the spectrum.” She says her interest in other people stems more from nosiness rather than do-gooding compassion, keen perhaps not to be cast as some sort of virtue signalling bleeding heart. Nonetheless, The Dark Wives – which, Cleeves confirms, is to be adapted for one of the final episodes of ITV’s Vera – teems with sympathetic portraits of damaged protagonists, even if many are not obviously likeable. “Brad [an adolescent drug dealer] behaves horribly. But you can understand why he does because I’ve taken pains to show you his background. The Belgian novelist Georges Simenon, whose Maigret detective novels I love, said that the role of the crime novelist is always to understand, not to judge.”
I ask her if she is interested in liberal guilt, whereby those who are well off pride themselves on their social conscience while remaining entirely oblivious to the plight of those around them. Certainly, plenty of characters throughout her novels could be accused of this. “I’m as guilty as anyone of thinking of myself as a good person while passing by a homeless person in the street. But in the North East you get less of that. Most people who live here will have grandparents who would have worked in heavy industry or in the ship yards or down the mines. Everyone knows they aren’t so far removed from where they came from. I think that self-congratulatory liberalism is a London thing.”
She gives a sly grin. “We’re all a bit snooty about London up here.”
Cleeves grew up in a tiny village near Barnstaple in north Devon. Her mother did odd jobs in local shops and schools and her father was headmaster of the local primary school. Her mother was constantly anxious about money, not least since her own father had been made bankrupt, and until her books started making her decent money, Cleeves had always been anxious about money too.
“When Tim and I first married [in the mid-1970s] we had nothing: he worked for a charity, the RSPB, and I did what I could to make ends meet.
“When our car broke down it was three weeks from payday, so I had to drag the girls into town on the bus each day. I’m talking about the everyday anxiety of not having enough money to fix something, or having to choose the cheapest option for dinner from the supermarket. If you’ve always had money, it’s very hard to understand people who don’t have it.”
That outlook has fed into Cleeves’s writing throughout her career, shaped further by the towns and villages and the wild isolation of Northumberland, amid which she has lived for decades.
“The North East contains a huge spread of different communities and there is a lot of deprivation. When Tim and I moved here during the mid-1980s there were still a few working pits. Today a large section of the community definitely feel abandoned. We need to think more carefully how we label people and not dismiss those who are struggling as white trash.”
She thinks white working-class men have suffered in particular. “Those men used to be heroes. They were making steel or coal, producing the things we all needed. And almost overnight they are told they are not wanted. Of course that’s going to make people resentful. The closure of the pits was done so quickly and thoughtlessly, with no sense of how to rebuild communities or how to give people their sense of worth back.”
Does she think some of this frustration and resentment fed into the recent riots, which were prompted by false far-Right rumours over the killing of three girls in Southport?
“I was very surprised by the riots. It was weaponised by one tragedy in Southport, which isn’t that kind of place at all. It was horrible. But it was then rather wonderful that everyone came together afterwards [to protest against the EDL].”
She was particularly upset that rioters in Liverpool torched a library. “That’s just mindless. But it also comes from boredom. We don’t have any youth clubs anymore. We have nothing for young people to do. Kids need to do exciting things, they need a bit of adventure and danger in their lives.”
Cleeves’s own adolescence sounds idyllic, whatever her parents’ money worries. She talks a lot about beach parties, about the excitement of getting drunk for the first time in the dunes, staying up all night talking with friends. By contrast, Sussex University, where she studied English, was a disappointment. “I thought it would be like school but it didn’t have the same opportunities for close friendships and exploring ideas. So I dropped out.”
Then, aged 19, she took a job as a cook on a bird observatory on Fair Isle in the Shetlands, drawn, as ever, by the promise of lonely, magnificent emptiness. It was there she met Tim, an obsessive bird watcher, and soon afterwards they married. Cleeves had also begun to write novels – her first, A Bird in the Hand, was published in 1986.
But not long into their marriage, Tim started suffering manic episodes, some so severe he was briefly hospitalised. Cleeves took to walking with Tim through the Northumberland countryside as part of his recovery, and it was during those walks she dreamed up Vera. The first novel featuring her, The Crow Trap, was published in 1999. “I imagined her as one of those 1950s women who had managed farms and factories during the war and didn’t want to give it all up to be married. They preferred to be an independent spinster than a 1950s housewife.”
Still, life was tough. “We eventually found out he had bipolar disorder. He had periods of severe depression. He worked through them but it wasn’t fun to live with.” She coped by going into fixer mode. “I think lots of women think we have to fix things. It’s a feeling inherited through generations of women who kept the family together and made sure everything was OK at home. So I did that.”
Did she ever worry what might have happened if he hadn’t been diagnosed? “No, because social care services were so much better back then. If you had a problem you could immediately contact your GP, there were all these amazing psychiatric nurses that would turn out to help. Today the mental health services are so stretched.”
She brings up Valdo Calocane, the paranoid schizophrenic who murdered three people in Nottingham last year after being discharged back into the community following a period in a mental health facility. “Care in the community can be brilliant – it can be so much better than those asylums. But you need many more resources to do it properly. And in the case of [Calocane], he fell through the system. We have this culture whereby we want to allow people to make decisions about their own healthcare, but if you are so ill that you are a danger to yourself or others, there comes a point when someone has to intervene.”
Because she knows what real depression looks like, Cleeves is scathing about some of the conversations around mental health. “People talk about mental health, but mental health is not the problem; it’s mental illness. If you are mentally healthy you are doing OK.
“It’s great we are talking about this and obviously loads of children were severely damaged by the pandemic, but lots of those people talking to children in school are untrained. There is a huge difference between feeling a bit low and having a psychotic episode. We need to distinguish between mental health and people simply feeling a bit lonely. We can do other things for that, such as read books.”
This brings us to Cleeves’s passion project: Reading for Wellbeing, a campaign she helped initiate in 2020 that aims to promote reading as a tool to help those struggling with loneliness or low-grade depression. She set it up because of the solace she found in books following Tim’s death. He died from heart and kidney complications after being ill for just a week, and part of Cleeves is still reeling from the shock. Reading for Wellbeing now operates in six health authorities in the North East.
“The results have been outstanding. If you have a loop of anxiety in your head you are struggling to escape, getting inside someone else’s head for a bit can be very restful. I sat in on a session recently in Killingworth attended by largely single mums. They were discussing a Japanese thriller. The best thing was these women didn’t care about the difference between literature and genre fiction; they were just gobby Geordie women talking intelligently about a book they had read.”
As a crime writer, Cleeves has encountered her own fair share of snobbery. “To be fair, when I first started out, I wanted to write worthy novels about family and communities. Now I write escapist novels about families and communities that also feature a dead body. A murder gives you an instant plot. But I’ve definitely had from other writers comments such as ‘Oh, you write crime novels. I don’t write that sort of book.’ And I think ‘So do you have a day job too then, pet? Because I bet you don’t make much writing that.’”
Cleeves now splits her time between Whitley and a cottage in the hills, which she bought after Tim’s death and where she can walk happily for miles without seeing a single soul. She has no thoughts of retiring.
“What else would I do? Anyway, nothing makes me happier than getting up early and sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop and a cup of tea.” What does she think of social media’s true crime phenomena, whereby members of the public turn detective over real life cases such as the disappearances of Nicola Bulley and Jay Slater (both were found to have died in circumstances that were not suspicious)?
“The idea that someone who watches true crime podcasts knows better than the police: that’s just sheer arrogance. But I also think it’s really sad. It stems from a lack of trust in the authorities, be it the deep state conspiracies in America or Nigel Farage questioning what the public were told about the Southport killer. But I really believe we should trust those such as the police, or the teachers who teach our children, unless we’re given a reason not to. We’ve seen amazing policing in these last couple of weeks [because of the riots]. If we lose that trust, if we start undermining people in authority, then that’s scary.”
But the Metropolitan Police have been found guilty of corruption a fair bit recently, be it the various internal WhatsApp messaging scandals or, of course, the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in 2021.
“I’m definitely aware of that shift. I even have in my new book a police officer tell a teenage girl they are aware no one respects the police anymore. But I also write with optimism. I have corrupt people running childcare but I’ve never written a corrupt cop. I think I want to believe they are always going to be on the side of justice. That all will be well in the end. Even if it’s just in a work of fiction.”
‘The Dark Wives’ by Ann Cleeves (Pan Macmillan, ￡22) is published on August 29 and can be pre-ordered from The Telegraph Bookshop
