Ann Cleeves--The Raging Tide

DEBORAH CROMBIE: It is always the biggest treat to welcome Ann Cleeves--author of the Shetland novels, the VERA novels, and now the Two Rivers series featuring detective Matthew Venn, all three of which have been adapted as hugely popular television shows--to Jungle Red!! 

Ann's new Matthew Venn novel, THE RAGING STORM, is out in the US on September 5th, AND Ann will be the International Guest of Honor at Bouchercon in San Diego! 

Ann, welcome back to Jungle Red!

DEBS: Matthew Venn, your detective in the Two Rivers novels, seems quite a departure from your Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez. For one thing, he's gay, and for another, he's in a committed, loving relationship with his husband, Jonathan. Was there a particular inspiration for the character?

ANN: There was!  When my husband Tim died, the people who looked after me, who scooped me up from the hospital, and who helped me organize the funeral along with my daughters, were Martin and Paul, a gay couple who have since married.  They’d been Tim’s close friends and they were grieving too, but they’re still looking out for me.  I wanted to celebrate their relationship.

DEBS: Matthew's background is unusual, too, as he grew up in a strict fundamentalist religious cult, and that upbringing affects the way he processes the world and approaches his cases. It's unusual and so interesting. Were the Barun Brethren modeled on a real group?

ANN: Not exactly.  Barum was the Latin name for Barnstaple, so I created a fictitious group.  I didn’t want to offend real believers. There are small exclusive groups who have similar beliefs, though.  The same certainties.  It seemed to me that if someone lost their faith, suddenly and dramatically as Matthew Venn did, they might feel very chaotic and unanchored and turn to the police service to find the sense of belonging, honour and duty they were missing.

DEBS: You've hopscotched around the UK with the settings for your book--Shetland, Northumberland, and now Devon. What drew you to the West Country?

ANN:  It’s where I grew up!  My father was a village schoolteacher in the Taw Valley and then on the North Devon coast in Woolacombe. I live in Northumberland now and lived in Shetland when I was a young woman.

DEBS: In THE RAGING STORM, a body is found near the village of Greystone on the north Devon coast. It's a very forbidding place; gray, isolated, cold, claustrophobic--it's such a wonderful atmospheric setting for a mystery that it almost becomes a character in itself. Is Greystone based on a real place?

ANN: The inspiration came when I was watching the first Matthew Venn novel, The Long Call, being filmed.  The production company had chosen Hartland Quay as one of the locations.  It has gloomy grey cliffs, and the weather was horrendous.  I was looking for a different, less tourist-led place to set the book, and that was the jumping off point.

DEBS: This book has such a twisty-turny complicated plot. I wondered how much you plan ahead?

ANN: Not at all!  I don’t know anything about the book, except the setting, when I start.  Very quickly I decided that this would be more of an adventure story than anything else I’d written.  The victim, Jem Rosco, is rather piratical, there are rescues at sea, and superstition.  But I still didn’t know the plot details!

DEBS: Once your series has been adapted for TV, do you find yourself adjusting what you write to sync with the way things are portrayed in the show? Do you now see Ben Aldridge (who is terrific) when you're writing Matthew?

ANN:  No, I don’t.  Ben is very much more good-looking than Matthew, who is rather restrained!

DEBS: Now that the Shetland books are finished (sniff), is there anything else on your horizon? New settings? New characters?

ANN:  The next novel will be a Vera book – I’m working on that now – and I definitely want to write more Matthew Venn books.  But who knows?  As I said, I don’t plan anything…

DEBS: One last question--what do you read for fun?

ANN: Mostly crime fiction!  There’s such a range within the genre – I’m reading Irvine Welsh’s Long Knives at the moment, which is violent, and thought-provoking and gripping, but I love more traditional Golden Age novels too.

DEBS: And one more question! Tell us what you’ll be up to at Bouchercon!!

ANN: Catching up with friends!  That’s what crime conventions are all about!

DEBS: Ann's Guest of Honor interview will be on Thursday, the 31st, at 4:30, and she'll be interviewed by Catriona McPherson and Lori Rader-Day. I'm sure it will be a highlight of the conference!

Here's more about THE RAGING STORM--

When Jem Rosco—sailor, adventurer, and legend—blows into town in the middle of an autumn gale, the residents of Greystone, Devon, are delighted to have a celebrity in their midst. But just as abruptly as he arrived, Rosco disappears again, and soon his lifeless body is discovered in a dinghy, anchored off Scully Cove, a place with legends of its own.

This is an uncomfortable case for Detective Inspector Matthew Venn. Greystone is a place he visited as a child, a community he parted ways with. Superstition and rumor mix with fact as another body is found, and Venn finds his judgment clouded.

As the winds howl, and Venn and his team investigate, he realizes that no one, including himself, is safe from Scully Cove’s storm of dark secrets.

DEBS: Ann will be stopping by to visit, so do add any questions I've missed in the comments!