And she knows of which she speaks: she’s lived in a range of edge-of-the-world outposts starting with Shetland’s Fair Isle where, at 19, she took a job as cook at the Fair Isle Bird Observatory and began a lifelong love affair with Shetland, with the other cooks-“the Sisterhood of Bird Observatory Cooks,” she calls them -with permanent islanders and, perhaps most significantly, with her ornithologist husband, Tim. Vera, the television series starring Brenda Blethyn, aired in 2011 Shetland’s DI Perez hit the small screen in 2013.Ĭleeves specializes in crime novels in which bleak, isolated but beautiful landscapes often have a direct impact on the murderous activities of her characters. A second-hand copy of Cleeves’s 1999 novel, The Crow Trap, a murder mystery set in North East England’s county of Northumberland-and the first to feature a gruff but brilliant detective named Vera Stanhope-sealed the deal. Several years later, ITV television producer Elaine Collins was poking around her local London charity shop bookshelf, on the hunt for a strong detective character and series to replace television’s popular A Touch of Frost which was winding up its nearly 20-year run. Raven Black’s success prompted her to expand that novel first to a quartet, and then to an ongoing series featuring Shetland Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez. In 2006, Cleeves’s Raven Black, a police procedural set in remote Shetland that was originally intended to be a standalone novel, won the Crime Writers’ Association Duncan Lawrie Dagger for the best crime novel of the year the prize money of £20,000 spurred Cleeves to quit her day job-she was working at a library in Yorkshire at the time, but has also held jobs as a cook, a probation officer and an auxiliary coastguard-and write full-time.

Two key events transformed Ann Cleeves’s career from prolific, mid-list author-she’s published a crime novel a year since 1986-to bestselling writer with two concurrent and popular television series based on her books airing on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ann cleeves raven black series