“Everybody is a possible killer, certainly until about a third of the way through,” she says. Rather than working out her plots in advance, she goes down the rabbit holes of investigation with her detectives. She kills schoolgirls.” Mind you, so does Cleeves.) She is an entirely different kind of writer. Is there another library with a ladies’ lounge? Cleeves is all about libraries – she worked in one and now makes speeches defending their importance – but this lovely, loopy place is clearly first among equals.Īt 67, Cleeves is the acknowledged modern queen of crime, the title once bestowed on Agatha Christie (of whom, incidentally, she was never a fan: “I still think she’s very cold and ruthless.

We sit in the ladies’ lounge, sharing the space with a piano. “It’s a structure that can hold you up, like a corset.”Ĭleeves and I meet in a 19th-century edifice in the northern English city of Newcastle generally known as the Lit&Phil, a library with eccentricities including stuffed exotic animals on the tops of the bookshelves and regulars who gather there to talk over cut lunches. She realised how much she liked that form. It was only when I killed somebody that I was away.” She had a dead body, a collection of murder suspects and an obvious end point. But you can’t just have people sitting round talking. I’m not bad at creating characters, so I had these interesting people. “You know, that wasn’t so much plot-driven. “I was going to write a great work of literature,” she says. It was time – and she certainly had the space – to write. Cleeves was training to be a probation officer - one of a string of jobs she has done that have fed, one way or another, into her books - but taking a boat to Liverpool for classes became too much once she was pregnant. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text sizeĪnn Cleeves first set about writing a novel when she was living on Hilbury, a tiny island off the west coast of England where her late husband Tim, an ornithologist, was working for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Somebody killed his editor