‘The Long Call’ Delivers Suspense and Secrets

Boredom leads to best sellers

One of the most popular British mystery writers of our time started writing because she was bored. She studied English at the University of Sussex, a “trendy uni because it was close to London,” she says, but that she “didn’t enjoy it at all.” So she dropped out and began working a series of odd jobs, one of them as an assistant cook at the Bird Observatory on Fair Isle, where she met Tim Cleeves, a visiting ornithologist. She was instantly infatuated.   

“I was very attracted to the bottle of very good malt whiskey, which was poking out of the top of his rucksack when I was showing him to his room in the observatory,” Cleeves says, with a smile. Not too long after they married.   

When he was appointed warden of Hilbre Islands, a small tidal nature reserve in the Dee Estuary, they moved there as the sole residents. 

“There was no water, no electricity. We had a little generator that we put on occasionally,” she says. While theirs was a bucolic life, access to the mainland was only during low tide. Cleeves, disinterested in bird-watching or natural history, was 25 years old and pregnant with the first of her two daughters. “So, I started writing.”

She went from being paid a stipend for talking at libraries about reading to winning the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award (formerly the Gold Dagger) for the best crime novel of the year in 2006 for Raven Black, the first of the Shetland series. She describes that series as the turning point in her career. 

“It all changed with the first of the Shetland books. I didn’t get advances — the publisher had to decide whether they would publish it or not,” she says. “I hadn’t planned it, but standard noir was becoming a big thing. It captured reviewers, taking the traditional golden age format of the detective novel but giving it a contemporary twist and setting it somewhere different.” She’d always written with detective-based protagonists and fatalistic overtones, but it had become trendy just as the Shetland series was published. “I was just very lucky — it was great timing, and I won the Gold [Dagger].” 

Inspired by reality, pushed by imagination

Like that of many authors, Cleeves’ fiction is fed from real life. Both characters and settings are built from distinct people and places: an overheard conversation, an encounter with good friends, memories from childhood.  

“Vera grew because I wanted a woman who wasn’t good-looking, who wasn’t young. She grew out of the spinsters that I knew when I was growing up,” she says. “There were these single women in the towns or villages who had been allowed to take on roles and responsibilities who decided they’d rather be single than 1950s housewives after the war.” 

For The Long Call, the characters of Detective Inspector Matthew Venn and his husband, Jonathan, were created as an honor: “Two of my best friends are a married gay couple, and they scooped me up after my husband died.” They were the ones who made her tea, who brought her wine and who nursed her back to life after her heartbreak.  

And the book’s location, North Devon, was always idyllic for Cleeves: “[Moving there] for me, this was like the sun coming out. I could make real friends. It was very close to the beach,” she says. “I’m still great friends with three or four of the people I was friends with.”  

Cleeves notes that she writes “like a reader” — starting with setting and letting the characters and plot follow. “I start with the place. I think that people are connected. Setting is much more than an attractive backdrop,” she says. “I look at how place affects who you are. I always start with place. I might have a vague theme or idea, or some idea that I want to explore and then I start writing. I don’t start plotting in advance. Most of the minor characters appear as I write. The characters develop as I write. I write like a reader. I write the first chapter and then I need to know what’s going to happen next.” 

In fact, her tiny readership and lack of fame in the very beginning may have been why Cleeves’ stories made such natural mysteries. Because she had no one but herself to impress, she wrote to amuse herself. She didn’t even know how the detective books would end — and was just as surprised as her readers at the outcome.

“It wouldn’t have been much fun if I knew how the book was going to end,” she says, laughing. 

GO TO THE LONG CALL MAIN PAGE

More Members Only Access 

Watch documentaries and tutorials, take quizzes, read interviews and much more exclusively for members

View More