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stories sprang from particular places, often parts of her beloved East Anglia. One evening on Dunwich beach, she pictured a small dinghy drifting, oarless, and bearing a neatly dressed corpse whose hands were severed at the wrists. This striking image was the genesis of her third novel, Unnatural Causes. Even in Innocent Blood, where for once the starting point was not a location, the London Underground, the streets of the capital, and ‘the darkly numinous roof of Westminster Cathedral’ are all integral to the narrative.
I have used East Anglia as a setting for a number of my novels, the last example being Devices and Desires. The book had its genesis when I was exploring Suffolk with an elderly long-standing friend, Joyce Flack, who drove me in her ancient Mini. I stood for a few minutes alone on a deserted stretch of shingle and looked over the cold and dangerous North Sea. I remember that there were two wooden fishing boats scrunched into the shingle and some brown nets strung between poles, drying in the wind. Closing my eyes, I could hear nothing but the tinny rattle of the shingle drawn back by the waves and the low hissing of the wind, and I thought that I could have been standing on the self-same spot a thousand years ago, hearing the same sounds, looking out over the same sea. And then I opened my eyes and, looking south, saw the silent and stark outline of Sizewell nuclear power station dominating the coastline. I thought of all the lives that have been lived on this shore, of the windmills, once providers of power, now prosperous homes; of the ruined abbeys at Leiston and South Cove, which seemed like monuments to a decaying faith; of the detritus of my generation, the great lumps of concrete half embedded in the shingle, and the concrete pillboxes, part of the defences against the expected German invasion on this coast. And immediately I knew with an almost physical surge of excitement that I had a novel. The next book would be set on a lonely stretch of East Anglian coast under the shadow of a nuclear power station. The book, at present no more than a nebulous idea born of a moment in time and a specific place, might take more than a year to research and plan and the writing even longer, but already it has life.
Rural landscapes are a crucial ingredient of Ann Cleeves’ fiction, and have provided vivid backdrops to successful television series based on her books, Vera and Shetland, as well as her new Two Rivers series, set in north Devon. Here she offers thought-provoking observations about the connections between people and place.
The Human Geography of Crime Fiction
My daughter’s an academic, a human geographer. She researches specific communities in some of the more deprived areas of North East England; her work has taken her to a women’s group in Gateshead, into an old people’s home to explore the attitude of the elderly residents to end of life care, and to talk to men who are suffering from cancer. She spends time with them and uses their words in her writing. The places where these people live – the streets where they grew up, formed friendships, met their partners, brought up their children – affect who they are and the way they see the world. This is human geography and I think it provides a model for the way crime writers work. Place is an indicator of educational background and financial status. It influences how healthy we are and how long we live. In many cases it defines class, and class is still potent in every genre of British fiction.
If characters are at the heart of the books that we write – and I believe that they are – then place is vital for authors too. The setting we choose for our novel plays a more important role than simply providing a pretty or atmospheric background to the action. It can explain the motive of the killer and the back story of the detective, the relationships between suspects and witnesses. It fixes the characters in our readers’ minds and helps writers to consider them as concrete, rounded beings, with a credible history; they become solid, rooted in the landscape, whether the landscape is real or fictitious, rural or urban. And place can influence plot.
In the very best contemporary crime fiction, place is intrinsic to the book, and provides the glue that holds all the different elements together. It would be impossible to imagine Chris Hammer’s amazing debut novel Scrublands, for example, set anywhere else but Riverend, the fictitious drought-ridden small town, where a well-loved priest stepped out of his church to kill five people. The place explains everything about the book. Emma Flint’s debut Little Deaths, set in Queens in New York in the 1960s, throbs with the energy of the city. Ruth, her central character, couldn’t have come from anywhere else. In the same way Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects grows out of the steamy, oppressive American South.
Because of the power of the setting, I know where a new novel will be based long before I know anything else about it, before even I have a sense of the general theme, tone or voice. Place is always the first decision I make. More recently, because I’ve been alternating between Vera Stanhope books set in Northumberland and Jimmy Perez books set in Shetland, the choice is inevitable, fixed in the contract with my publisher. There has been a joy in coming to the end of a book and thinking: ‘Now I can go home again and spend some time in Northumberland.’ Or to get excited about sending my imagination back north to the Shetland Isles. Within those places, however, I still have to decide on the kind of community I want to use, and that can be random, triggered by a whim or a visit or a scrap of overheard conversation.
My backgrounds are generally rural; I’ve scarcely lived in a city and don’t understand how they work. But there’s a tremendous variety within the British countryside. A former pit village in south-east Northumberland is quite different from a village built around an almost feudal estate in the north of the same county. Often the community that’s caught my interest will lead to the theme of the story. It might be an enclosed setting, like the writers’ retreat in The Glass Room or the tiny island of Fair Isle in Blue Lightning, for example. Other places are more open to outside influences, like the seaside town of Whitley Bay in The Seagull. Not every place ends up as real in the book – I feel free to invent, or to merge. But the human geography is always real and at the heart of the story.
The Seagull, a Vera Stanhope novel, grew out of a conversation with regulars in my local pub. They were talking about how my home town had changed over the years, from a thriving holiday town, packed by visiting families in the summer, to a party town, rather sleazy and depressed. Now it’s regenerating again into somewhere a bit smarter and arty, with an independent cinema, a poetry festival and a thriving community garden. Still a bit scruffy, but definitely more alive. The theme of the book is about the possibility of change and growth, both for places and for individuals. That theme grew out of the place and the book would never have been written without it. In turn, I needed to find characters who had changed and developed too and that meant a plotline about digging into the past, an explanation of the protagonists’ growth.
With the Shetland books, the scope is rather different and more limited. There are no big cities, not even any large towns. While the geology varies, the landscape experienced by people is similar: bleak, bare and beautiful. That’s why I stopped writing about the place after eight books, and why the TV series has developed story-lines with wider themes, taking their characters away from the islands to Glasgow or Norway. However, the books are still entirely influenced by the place, and by the preoccupations of the people who live there: crofting, the decline of oil wealth, the importance of family and tradition. That’s the element of human geography again. In a more direct way,