As the best-selling author of more than 35 mysteries, British novelist Ann Cleeves has brought to life celebrated detectives Vera Stanhope, Jimmy Perez, and more recently Matthew Venn, three of the most memorable characters in modern crime fiction.
Mystery lovers can’t get enough of Cleeves’ work – so much so that every Cleeves’ protagonist has been featured in the successful television series “Vera,” “Shetland,” and now “The Long Call,” available to American viewers on Britbox.
Awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2022 “for services to Reading and Libraries,” Cleeves’ books have been translated into 20 languages. She is the recipient of the Diamond Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association, the highest honor in British crime writing, and her characters have endeared her to American readers across the pond.
Although Cleeves’ characters are compelling and complex, place is critical to her character and story development.“I can’t start to create a character until I know where they grew up,” she shares.
“Setting is much more than a pretty backdrop to the story. Individuals are a product of their surroundings,” Cleeves adds.
“We are who we are because of the friends we played with, the communities we grew up in, even the views from our windows. Setting defines the way we speak, the way we look at the world, often it even provides our names.”
And as for those settings, Cleeves is particularly partial to islands, having grown up in North Devon. “For lovers of traditional British crime fiction, an island provides the perfect enclosed community – only the people there could have committed the murder…” Cleeves says.
On Sept. 7, Cleeves visits Tallahassee as part of the tour for her latest release, “The Raging Storm,” third in the series featuring detective Matthew Venn.
A local celebrity mysteriously appears in Devon, but soon disappears. Has he been murdered? Venn and his team investigate, but as more bodies are found, Venn struggles with Greystone, a community in which he spent much time as a child and with which he parted ways as an adult. Who can he trust? Who is telling the truth?
Master of the surprise ending, Cleeves claims not to know the ending of her novels in advance. Instead, she solves her own mysteries as she goes. Cleeves believes a surprise ending is “very much a part of the tradition of British detective fiction,” and she loves to pass the joy of that surprise on to her readers.
“I don’t know anything in advance, not even the identity of the victim!” Cleeves reveals. “Because it took me twenty years of being published before I had any commercial success, writing had to be fun, and there would be no fun if I knew how the book would end. I write like a reader, a chapter at a time.”
If you go
What: Ann Cleeves in conversation featuring her new novel “The Raging Storm”
When: 7 p.m. Sept. 7
Where: The Woman’s Club of Tallahassee, 1513 Cristobal Drive, Tallahassee
Tickets: Available at midtownreader.com