Shetland creator Ann Cleeves: I’ve brought back a more mellow Jimmy Perez

We may be seeing Ashley Jensen and Alison O’Donnell on our screens in the 10th season of BBC1’s Shetland – but author Ann Cleeves has not finished with her original fictional cop, DI Jimmy Perez, played by Douglas Henshall in the first seven series.

The best-selling author and inspiration behind Shetland and Vera has moved Jimmy from Shetland to Orkney, where he is living with his fellow police officer partner Willow and their child – and together they’ve become a crime-solving duo in her new novel The Killing Stones.

“It was going to be a standalone but all my series started off as standalones and I really enjoyed writing it – I can’t wait to go back to Orkney, too, which is a very special place,” says the best-selling, award-winning author. “It’s much gentler than Shetland, it’s more green, fertile, in a sense it’s more Scottish.”

Her last Shetland novel, Wild Fire, was published in 2018, when Jimmy was moving to Orkney with Willow – so why has Cleeves decided to bring him back?

“I thought, that’s the end, I don’t need to write any more about him, but then I get a kind of longing to go north again because I do love the islands, so it’s about place, really, and about exploring how Jimmy might fit in to a new environment and how his setting up home with Willow and their son might mellow him a bit, make him easier, happier.”

Cleeves, 71, who has enjoyed phenomenal success with TV adaptations of her book series featuring Vera Stanhope, Shetland and Matthew Venn, had a slow burn to publishing stardom.

“I was 20 years without any commercial success,” she recalls. “The books went into libraries and the occasional indie bookshop but certainly you wouldn’t have seen it on a Waterstones shelf. So it had to be fun. It didn’t feel like work. It was what I did for myself when I wanted my own time and space.”

It was only after a TV producer – who coincidentally was looking for a new female detective to fill a Sunday night slot – discovered a copy of one of her Vera Stanhope novels in a charity shop, that her career took off.

Cleeves has always loved isolated settings. She lives in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, close to her two daughters and seven grandchildren, but has a long connection with both Shetland and Orkney, having worked at the Bird Observatory on Fair Isle years ago with an Orcadian who she kept in touch with.

She returned to Orkney for research and many of the places she visited appear in the book.

“I love these isolated places. I like being next to the sea. I get a bit claustrophobic if I’m inland. I feel safer somehow on the edge. I like small communities. I’ve never lived in a city apart from about six months in my gap year doing voluntary service in London, and I couldn’t get along with that.”

After dropping out of university she took a job as an assistant cook at the Fair Isle Bird Observatory, where she fell in love with the wilds of Scotland, and met her husband, ornithologist Tim Cleeves.

But she doubts if her crime-fighting duo will become another TV adaptation.

“I didn’t write it in the hopes that Dougie would come back. I wrote it because I wanted to write that story.

“I love the new Shetland (series) on the television. If you think about it, the hero of that show was always the landscape, and having Ashley Jensen and Alison O’Donnell, who plays Tosh, just works really well.

“I love those two women together, so it was nothing to do with the television at all. I just wanted to go north again and explore what was happening in Jimmy’s life.”

In the new book, Jimmy investigates the murder of his close childhood friend, Archie Stout, killed with a Neolithic stone bearing ancient inscriptions.

Her famous detective has changed, Cleeves agrees.

“As he investigates, he finds out that Archie wasn’t quite the great hero that he thought he was when he was growing up. He realises he’d actually suspected that Archie was flawed, too, but hadn’t wanted to recognise it. That’s a kind of maturing.”

She keeps in touch with award-winning Vera star Brenda Blethyn, and they catch up at book events, but says her life has been much the same since the series ended in January, after a 14-year run.

“I used to love going on the Vera set, but watching filming is quite boring because it’s the same take over and over again. I went really to catch up with the cast and crew and would have lunch with Brenda.

“I’m going to write one more Vera novel. She’s retired on television, but not in the books. I’ll certainly think about retiring Vera in this last book but if I want to come back to Northumberland I would probably write from the perspective of the new female character I introduced called Rosie Bell.”

But she won’t kill Vera off in the last novel, she says. “I think it would confuse readers dreadfully if suddenly she died when she was still alive on the screen.”

While she might once have considered moving to Orkney, Cleeves’ husband died suddenly in 2017 and, understandably, she wants to remain near her family in the north east.

“It’s great to have that company all around me.”

She says her friends also helped her cope with her husband’s death.

“When he died, after we’d done the funeral, the girls and I ran away down to north Devon, which is where I grew up, and stayed with a very old school friend and walked a lot.

“It was February, quite wet and windy – and that’s really where the Matthew Venn books came from (adapted into the ITV series The Long Call, starring Ben Aldridge).

Writing helped her in her grief, she recalls.

“Writing has always been an escape for me. It is a joy. I wake up in the morning and think, what story am I going to tell today?”

She still gets up at 6am most mornings because that’s when her brain works better, she says, and has lived in the same 1930s semi-detached house for 20 years.

“We moved in before I had any real success and I still have a lot of the same neighbours, it’s not at all grand, it’s part of a nice little street and we look after each other here.”

Never still for long, Cleeves is currently working on another Matthew Venn story and thinks the Jimmy and Willow crime-fighting partnership will become a book series.

Does she think of Henshall when writing Jimmy?

“No. Mostly, I’m inside Jimmy’s head looking out, so it doesn’t really matter what he looks like.”

Away from writing, you’ll find Cleeves walking in the Northumberland hills, having fun with her family or visiting those beautifully isolated havens further north.

“I don’t feel anything any different in myself,” she says of getting older. “I was back in Fair Isle a few weeks ago, where it all started 50 years ago.

“Walking down the island and catching up with islanders, I didn’t feel any different from that 20-year-old.”

The Killing Stones by Ann Cleeves is published by Pan Macmillan, priced £22. Available now