Sunshine at midnight: How Ann Cleeves’ Shetland creates a strong sense of place
Doomscrolling through the Netflix lineup during the streaming service’s early days in India, I stumbled upon Shetland. The crime show follows Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, who, accompanied by Detective Sergeant Alison “Tosh” Macintosh, and Detective Constable Sandy Wilson, solves an astonishing number of crimes in the gorgeous subarctic archipelago of the same name in the Northern Isles of Scotland.
I was gobsmacked by what was unfolding on screen – by the mysteries being solved in the BBC TV series, yes, but more so by the stunning vistas demanding my attention. The emerald green islands were set against bright blue sea and sky, and I could almost feel the sharp wind whipping through the air and taste the salty spray in the air as the detectives made their investigations.
The “travel porn” reeled me in, and I began reading more about the islands that date to Viking times as the show progressed.
The remote islands, all 100 of them, are located between Great Britain, Faroe Islands, and Norway, and are as far north as St Petersburg, Russia, or Anchorage, Alaska. Only 16 islands are inhabited, including the main island, known as the Mainland (where the cops work from), with Yell, Unst, and Fetlar to the north, and Bressay and Whalsay to the east.
Over the course of the series, I picked up the names of other smaller islands like East and West Burra, Muckle Roe, Papa Stour, and Foula. And, of course, Fair Isle, home to Jimmy Perez, which lies halfway between mainland Shetland and Orkney and is the most remote inhabited island in the United Kingdom.
I also started noticing other things – the rugged coastline, abandoned crofts and stone houses, the lighthouses standing guard as sentinels, the fact that the topography seemed largely treeless, and the graphic, guttural Scottish burr.
Once I finished the series, I picked up the books to explore the places Cleeves was describing with so much flair. I wanted to know more about the intense blue and bright pink of spring flowers on cliff tops, the long, white nights of midsummer, the fierce gales and high tides of autumn, and the drama of the Viking fire festival of Up Helly Aa in winter.
Cleeves’ plots, themes, characters, atmosphere, voice, and language had together created a brand new character: Shetland. Her words so vividly captured Shetland’s bleak and unusual beauty that they seemed to mentally transport me to the islands – a place that I would actually be inspired to visit, drawn by her writing.
In an interview, Cleeves said Shetland is a character on its own in her books. “Shetland is very much a character. There is nowhere like it in the UK. It’s a long way north. It’s on the same line of latitude as bits of Greenland and Alaska. So it does get dark at night. In the winter, it’s very dark and in the summer it’s very light. You can read a newspaper outside at midnight and the birds are still singing,” she said.
Cleeves grew up in the English countryside, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. She didn’t exactly train to write – dropping out of university and taking up a wide variety of temporary jobs. She served as a child care officer, women’s refuge leader, bird observatory cook, and auxiliary coastguard before making her way back to school and training to be a probation officer.
One of these jobs took her to the Fair Isle observatory where she took up residence as the cook (and where she would later go on to set a murder mystery) and met her husband. After her marriage, she moved to Hilbre, a small tidal island nature reserve in the Dee Estuary, when Tim was appointed warden, and soon found herself quite isolated. The couple were the solitary residents and the only access to the mainland was at low tide. There wasn’t much to do and Cleeves soon turned her attention to writing.
Her first series of crime novels in 1986 featured George Palmer-Jones, an elderly naturalist, who solved mysteries held by his wife Molly.
Looking back, in an entry in an online diary, the author told herself: “Focus on what you’re good at. A Bird in the Hand is a flawed first novel, but you’ve created some interesting characters and it contains the elements that will work well with you later – a strong sense of place and a traditional mystery with a contemporary twist.”
After that, she created a series of characters and books, all of them defined by that very “strong sense of place”. The popular Vera Stanhope, Jimmy Perez, and Matthew Venn series have all been adapted into TV shows.
Vera, a detective chief inspector of the fictional Northumberland & City Police, is nearing retirement and near obsessive about her work. Aided by Sergeants Joe Ashworth and Aiden Healy, she has showcased her superior investigating skills ever since she burst on to the scene in an “unexpected manner” in The Crow Trap.
Set in North Devon, where the rivers Taw and Torridge meet, the Venn series follows Detective Inspector Matthew Venn after he returns to his hometown in Devon with his husband for his religious father’s funeral. In The Long Call, the detective soon finds himself in the thick of investigations regarding a local murder, dealing with the evangelical community that he thought he had left behind, and discovering all over again that the Two Rivers region wasn’t as tranquil as it appeared.
Cleeves’ latest mystery novel, The Raging Storm was released in August 2023, and has Venn unravelling his third case in a remote fishing village in the area of North Devon where he – and the author – grew up.
And then, of course, there’s the Shetland series. Set in the isolated Shetland Isles, the books showcases all that’s right and wrong with the islands. DCI Perez must deal with the savage beauty and personal turmoil while focusing on the tight-knit island community, their dark secrets, and the many mysterious disappearances and murders.
The first novel in the series, Raven Black, won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger (CWA Gold Dagger) for best crime novel. It was followed by seven others: White Nights, Red Bones, Blue Lightning, Dead Water, Thin Air, Cold Earth, and Wild Fire.
Raven Black was an important milestone for Cleeves; it let her give up her day job and write full-time, and has sold more than any of her other novels.
Cleeves has said that the Shetland setting had a lot to do with the interest and popularity, and that, in Perez’s case, the setting came before the character. The crime author went to Shetland more than 40 years ago and immediately fell in love with the islands.
She was inspired to write Raven Black came after a mid-winter trip. “It had snowed and the islands looked stunning – cold and bleak but very beautiful in the sunlight. I was in the middle of another novel, but the image of ravens, very black against the snow, stuck with me and I deserted the book I was writing to start this one set in Shetland,” the author said in a podcast.
Why did her central character, a man who lived in Shetland, have a Spanish name? Cleeves wanted a central character “who was a Shetlander but still felt like an outsider”. That was the idea behind making him a Fair Islander with a Spanish name. The fact that the El Gran Grifon, one of the ill-fated Spanish Armada fleet ships, washed ashore at Stroms Hellier in Fair Isle in 1588 made this feasible. Jimmy Perez on the show might have been played by a very white Douglas Henshall, but in her books the “emotionally incontinent” detective is dark of skin and hair.
Apart from these three series, Cleeves also penned six murder mysteries featuring Inspector Stephen Ramsay in the 1990s, a couple of standalone mysteries, and umpteen short stories. Her books have been translated into 20 languages, and she’s particularly popular in Scandinavia and Germany.
In 2016, she celebrated the publication of 30 novels in 30 years. In 2017, She won the Diamond Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association, the highest honour in British crime writing. She was awarded an OBE in the 2022 New Year Honours List “for services to Reading and Libraries”, and was presented with the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award in July 2023.
Cleeves, who says Enid Blyton is her “go-to author”, maintains that her comfort reading is “always crime”. The structure of the crime novel works for the author in her as “it gives me a framework to work within”. It works quite well!
The author, who lived in Fair Isle for a couple of years “with a population of 60 people on a very small island about 3 1/2 miles long and 1 1/2 miles wide”, believes that the characters and their traits were born out of their isolation, seclusion, and positioning.
“If you lived in a small community like that, privacy would be incredibly important. There were secrets that people had about each other that they never spoke of because you needed to keep that distance. There needed to be some things kept personal for you and yours. I try to use that sense in the books,” she said.
She has also authored Shetland, an illustrated companion to her novels, focusing on a year in the islands, their past and people, festivals and seasons, flora and fauna.
Douglas Henshall has in the past said that Shetland is “what quiet sounds like”.
Cleeves knows that as do all her fans. It’s clear that her “village noir” works on account of the setting and sense of place: An enclosed community where everyone knows each other and bleak beauty that creates an unsettling backdrop. Crashing waves, rugged cliffs, birdsong, white summers, harsh winters, small crofts, a close-knit community; there’s no way the Shetland series could have worked had it been set someplace else.
Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle
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Doomscrolling through the Netflix lineup during the streaming service’s early days in India, I stumbled upon Shetland. The crime show follows Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, who, accompanied by Detective Sergeant Alison “Tosh” Macintosh, and Detective Constable Sandy Wilson, solves an astonishing number of crimes in the gorgeous subarctic archipelago of the same name in the Northern Isles of Scotland.
I was gobsmacked by what was unfolding on screen – by the mysteries being solved in the BBC TV series, yes, but more so by the stunning vistas demanding my attention. The emerald green islands were set against bright blue sea and sky, and I could almost feel the sharp wind whipping through the air and taste the salty spray in the air as the detectives made their investigations.
The “travel porn” reeled me in, and I began reading more about the islands that date to Viking times as the show progressed.
The remote islands, all 100 of them, are located between Great Britain, Faroe Islands, and Norway, and are as far north as St Petersburg, Russia, or Anchorage, Alaska. Only 16 islands are inhabited, including the main island, known as the Mainland (where the cops work from), with Yell, Unst, and Fetlar to the north, and Bressay and Whalsay to the east.
Over the course of the series, I picked up the names of other smaller islands like East and West Burra, Muckle Roe, Papa Stour, and Foula. And, of course, Fair Isle, home to Jimmy Perez, which lies halfway between mainland Shetland and Orkney and is the most remote inhabited island in the United Kingdom.
I also started noticing other things – the rugged coastline, abandoned crofts and stone houses, the lighthouses standing guard as sentinels, the fact that the topography seemed largely treeless, and the graphic, guttural Scottish burr.
Once I finished the series, I picked up the books to explore the places Cleeves was describing with so much flair. I wanted to know more about the intense blue and bright pink of spring flowers on cliff tops, the long, white nights of midsummer, the fierce gales and high tides of autumn, and the drama of the Viking fire festival of Up Helly Aa in winter.
Cleeves’ plots, themes, characters, atmosphere, voice, and language had together created a brand new character: Shetland. Her words so vividly captured Shetland’s bleak and unusual beauty that they seemed to mentally transport me to the islands – a place that I would actually be inspired to visit, drawn by her writing.
In an interview, Cleeves said Shetland is a character on its own in her books. “Shetland is very much a character. There is nowhere like it in the UK. It’s a long way north. It’s on the same line of latitude as bits of Greenland and Alaska. So it does get dark at night. In the winter, it’s very dark and in the summer it’s very light. You can read a newspaper outside at midnight and the birds are still singing,” she said.
Cleeves grew up in the English countryside, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. She didn’t exactly train to write – dropping out of university and taking up a wide variety of temporary jobs. She served as a child care officer, women’s refuge leader, bird observatory cook, and auxiliary coastguard before making her way back to school and training to be a probation officer.
One of these jobs took her to the Fair Isle observatory where she took up residence as the cook (and where she would later go on to set a murder mystery) and met her husband. After her marriage, she moved to Hilbre, a small tidal island nature reserve in the Dee Estuary, when Tim was appointed warden, and soon found herself quite isolated. The couple were the solitary residents and the only access to the mainland was at low tide. There wasn’t much to do and Cleeves soon turned her attention to writing.
Her first series of crime novels in 1986 featured George Palmer-Jones, an elderly naturalist, who solved mysteries held by his wife Molly.
Looking back, in an entry in an online diary, the author told herself: “Focus on what you’re good at. A Bird in the Hand is a flawed first novel, but you’ve created some interesting characters and it contains the elements that will work well with you later – a strong sense of place and a traditional mystery with a contemporary twist.”
After that, she created a series of characters and books, all of them defined by that very “strong sense of place”. The popular Vera Stanhope, Jimmy Perez, and Matthew Venn series have all been adapted into TV shows.
Vera, a detective chief inspector of the fictional Northumberland & City Police, is nearing retirement and near obsessive about her work. Aided by Sergeants Joe Ashworth and Aiden Healy, she has showcased her superior investigating skills ever since she burst on to the scene in an “unexpected manner” in The Crow Trap.
Set in North Devon, where the rivers Taw and Torridge meet, the Venn series follows Detective Inspector Matthew Venn after he returns to his hometown in Devon with his husband for his religious father’s funeral. In The Long Call, the detective soon finds himself in the thick of investigations regarding a local murder, dealing with the evangelical community that he thought he had left behind, and discovering all over again that the Two Rivers region wasn’t as tranquil as it appeared.
Cleeves’ latest mystery novel, The Raging Storm was released in August 2023, and has Venn unravelling his third case in a remote fishing village in the area of North Devon where he – and the author – grew up.
And then, of course, there’s the Shetland series. Set in the isolated Shetland Isles, the books showcases all that’s right and wrong with the islands. DCI Perez must deal with the savage beauty and personal turmoil while focusing on the tight-knit island community, their dark secrets, and the many mysterious disappearances and murders.
The first novel in the series, Raven Black, won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger (CWA Gold Dagger) for best crime novel. It was followed by seven others: White Nights, Red Bones, Blue Lightning, Dead Water, Thin Air, Cold Earth, and Wild Fire.
Raven Black was an important milestone for Cleeves; it let her give up her day job and write full-time, and has sold more than any of her other novels.
Cleeves has said that the Shetland setting had a lot to do with the interest and popularity, and that, in Perez’s case, the setting came before the character. The crime author went to Shetland more than 40 years ago and immediately fell in love with the islands.
She was inspired to write Raven Black came after a mid-winter trip. “It had snowed and the islands looked stunning – cold and bleak but very beautiful in the sunlight. I was in the middle of another novel, but the image of ravens, very black against the snow, stuck with me and I deserted the book I was writing to start this one set in Shetland,” the author said in a podcast.
Why did her central character, a man who lived in Shetland, have a Spanish name? Cleeves wanted a central character “who was a Shetlander but still felt like an outsider”. That was the idea behind making him a Fair Islander with a Spanish name. The fact that the El Gran Grifon, one of the ill-fated Spanish Armada fleet ships, washed ashore at Stroms Hellier in Fair Isle in 1588 made this feasible. Jimmy Perez on the show might have been played by a very white Douglas Henshall, but in her books the “emotionally incontinent” detective is dark of skin and hair.
Apart from these three series, Cleeves also penned six murder mysteries featuring Inspector Stephen Ramsay in the 1990s, a couple of standalone mysteries, and umpteen short stories. Her books have been translated into 20 languages, and she’s particularly popular in Scandinavia and Germany.
In 2016, she celebrated the publication of 30 novels in 30 years. In 2017, She won the Diamond Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association, the highest honour in British crime writing. She was awarded an OBE in the 2022 New Year Honours List “for services to Reading and Libraries”, and was presented with the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award in July 2023.
Cleeves, who says Enid Blyton is her “go-to author”, maintains that her comfort reading is “always crime”. The structure of the crime novel works for the author in her as “it gives me a framework to work within”. It works quite well!
The author, who lived in Fair Isle for a couple of years “with a population of 60 people on a very small island about 3 1/2 miles long and 1 1/2 miles wide”, believes that the characters and their traits were born out of their isolation, seclusion, and positioning.
“If you lived in a small community like that, privacy would be incredibly important. There were secrets that people had about each other that they never spoke of because you needed to keep that distance. There needed to be some things kept personal for you and yours. I try to use that sense in the books,” she said.
She has also authored Shetland, an illustrated companion to her novels, focusing on a year in the islands, their past and people, festivals and seasons, flora and fauna.
Douglas Henshall has in the past said that Shetland is “what quiet sounds like”.
Cleeves knows that as do all her fans. It’s clear that her “village noir” works on account of the setting and sense of place: An enclosed community where everyone knows each other and bleak beauty that creates an unsettling backdrop. Crashing waves, rugged cliffs, birdsong, white summers, harsh winters, small crofts, a close-knit community; there’s no way the Shetland series could have worked had it been set someplace else.
Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle
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