Ann Cleeves

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:42

My castaway this week is the writer Anne Cleves. She's known as the queen of village noir. Crime fiction is her métier and she is as successful as she is prolific. In 2016 she celebrated the publication of thirty novels in as many years and the following year received the Diamond Dagger Award from the Crime Writers Association, the highest honor in British crime fiction.

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However, it was twenty years into her career before mainstream success arrived with the first of her Shetland series, Raven Black.

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Her characters have made the transition from page to screen so successfully that last year both Vera and Shetland appeared in the Radio Times list of the greatest British crime dramas. Neither of her best-known creations, Detectives Vera Stanup and Jimmy Perez, fit the traditional mold. No smart suits, cut glass accents, or explorations of London's seedy underbelly for them. Vera is northeastern, overweight and middle-aged, while Perez is a soft-spoken Shetlander whose investigations into grisly island crimes belie their picture-perfect setting. Landscape and plot often intertwine in her highly atmospheric stories. People make a mistake when they separate setting from plot and character, she says. People grow out of where they are born and live. Anne Cleves, welcome to Desert Islandists. Thanks very much. It's lovely to be here. So I have to ask you first about planning when it comes to your books. You don't do it at all, which frankly sounds terrifying. Tell me about that decision. Well, partly it's because for the first 20 years I didn't have any commercial success, so it had to be fun. And I think if I knew how a book was going to end, there'd be no fun in writing it,'cause.

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It's already written in a sense, isn't it? So, no, I start with a scene or an idea or a vague theme and I write the first chapter and then I write like a reader, so I need to know what's going to happen next. So, I have to write the next bit and then the next bit. And how unusual is that approach when it comes to crime authors? I think I'm at the extreme end of the fly-by-the-seat of your pants brigade. And there are some people who are really very well organised, but it works for me. I usually get there just before Vera or just before Jimmy, so that's all right. So, you're walking into the darkness with them, to call the phrase. Tell me more about the idea of writing about a place through its people and vice versa. This idea that the landscape that we inhabit shapes us and affects us as human beings. I think it does. My daughter is a human geographer, and I quite like the idea that what I do is human geography. I'm interested in community.

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Yeah.

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You talked about village noir, and I think there is such a thing as society, and that community is important, and we grow out of those.

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Those people that we live next door to and the people who raise us and help us. Every time you launch a Shetland book, I know that it's read by an islander before publication. Why is that?

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I don't want to get it too wrong. I always make mistakes. The Shetland Times usually manages to find something that I've got not quite right. But it's a matter of respect, really. I know the islands fairly well because I've been going there for more than 40 years, but I don't live there. So it's important to recognise that it's not my community, it's their community. Let's go to the music. It's your first disc. Tell me why you've chosen it. It's Bowie, and it's got to be Bowie, because he runs through my life, really. I'm not someone whose soul is stirred by music, so these records have all been chosen because of memories or stories.

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And also I want them to provide more stories. So I would hope at the end, I love writing short fiction and I get very little chance to do it. So I'd hope when I am rescued by that helicopter in the sky, I'll have a collection of eight short stories, each inspired by the music. So Bowie goes back to my youth, but also I went to see him in Sunderland when he played in the Stadium of Light or before. It would have been before the Stadium. Broke a Punk, the Glass Spider Tour. Yes. Famous in the city. We had a nightclub named after it for a while. It wasn't the best. I didn't recognise any of the songs. So it was all a bit of a disappointment, but I was there.

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Broke a lot.

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And a night

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Yeah.

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My mum and dad left halfway through, so. Yeah, well they obviously had the same thought as me. I would have gone if my husband hadn't forced me to stay.

Ann Cleeves5:05

They look fighting in the dance hall. Oh man, look at those gay men go.

Ann Cleeves5:15

It's a creepy shallow

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Take a look at her, oh well, meaning up the wrong guy, oh well, wonder if you'll ever know.

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Who's done the best of the show?

Ann Cleeves5:34

Is their life on Mars?

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David Bowie with Life on Mars. And Cleves, those of us who've read Vera will not forget her in a hurry, but for anyone who has yet to have the pleasure, how would you describe her? She just appeared halfway through a book. And I think it's quite interesting to go back and try and work out where things come from. And I was born in the mid-50s, and in the small town where I grew up, there were some formidable spinsters who'd either lost sweethearts during the war or who'd been given roles and responsibilities that they wouldn't otherwise as women be allowed. At that time, if you were a female teacher and you got married, you had to leave your job. It was very different. And they wore dreadful tweed skirts that were frayed at the hems and thick stockings and sensible shoes, but they were really competent and authoritative. And they were hospital matrons or they were school teachers. And I think that Vera grew out of some of those women who had decided they'd rather be single than be 1950s housewives. And you've said of the TV adaptation where Vera's played by Brenda Blethyn that you wanted her to be an antidote to TV female detectives. Yeah, I didn't want her to be.

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Can we

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glamorous, you know, especially the American series, I think, with the CSIs with their long hair and their heels. Can you imagine escaping a criminal in heels?

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Whereas I think Brenda, Dowdy, Little Boots, Hat, Mac, you can imagine her.

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Outstaring, outsmarting some of the men that she has to face. How well represented do you think women are in crime fiction generally? Are too many of them victims? I think they are. I think not so much now. In the past, they're either the help meet, the wife, the victim, the prostitutes. But I think things are changing now. There are lots of very good young women writers who are changing the mold and who are bringing very real, very strong women into their novels. And what about the appetite for crime fiction? Where does that come from, do you think? I had a friend who was saying he thinks it's addictive. Once you're hooked, it's tricky to step out of the way.

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It's tricky to step short.

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In some sense, especially now, this time of confusion and chaos that we're living through, there is something very reassuring about traditional crime fiction. Order restored at the end, justice seemed to be done.

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And certainly the sort of crime fiction that I write, which is quiet and domestic.

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can be escapist if there's all these dreadful things happening in the world that you can focus on a particular family or a particular small community. Time for more music. It's your second disc today. Why have you chosen this one? This is for my father, who was born and brought up in the Ronva.

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His family obviously had a mining background, and I remember going, and it seemed so romantic and so fun to go and stay with his parents, my grandparents, in this terraced house with the outside lavatory, with the tin bath, the back kitchen with the range being stoked by

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Coal from the pit, and I think it's also about community again, isn't it? Male Voice choirs growing out of working communities. That sense that we forget that culture belongs to everybody, it belongs to all communities, and I love a male voice choir.

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Bread of Heaven, sung by the Trooke Male Voice Choir. Anne Cleves, you've said of your childhood that I was always a storyteller. How did that manifest? Yeah, I think it was partly because I was always a bit of an outsider, at least until I was eleven or twelve, because my dad was a village head teacher and it was a tiny hamlet on the Hereford-Shropshire border. And there were only thirty kids in the school, and one room with a curtain down the middle.

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So I was the teacher's child. The head teacher's child. The head teacher's child. And what is that like? Well, if you're that, it's quite hard to make friends. I would have loved to have been invited to other kids' parties and houses and been included. And it might be that I was, but I don't remember ever going to anybody else's house or having close friends of any kind. I was always the one watching and being the observer and being a great reader because that was an escape and it was something I could do on my own. And yeah, making up stories about just endlessly curious about things and people. And the stories that you would make up, you say that you often featured in your own stories. Yeah, well, this was really before I could read or write, that I had this running narrative in my head. I can remember of describing in the third person what I was doing and what everyone around me was doing.

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Peace.

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And I think that's quite common for writers. But then once I could read and write, that stopped because I had other people's stories to lose myself in. I didn't have to make them up for myself.

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And throughout your childhood and your teenage years, you were an avid reader. What were you reading?

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Anything I could get my hands on as a young child Enid Blyton.

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I can remember the wonderful librarian in the small town where we went to the library and she knew what I loved and she'd save the books for me. And when I'd come in, she'd pull it out from the counter like

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Like a conjurer bit pulling a rabbit out of a hat. And I was six or seven at that point. And so I'd finished it almost by the time I got home. I was just so keen. So page turners, anything exciting, moved from that on to the short stories of Sherlock Holmes, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, Agatha Christie. And even when I went on to read other fiction, which I did, if I was fed up or I'd been dumped by a boyfriend or had the flu, it was always traditional crime fiction that I went back to.

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We're going to go to the music now. Your third disc today, what have you chosen and what? Oh, this is Leonard Cohen Suzanne. And this is very much a Devon song. My dad got a job in North Devon. And it was a sort of sense of freedom then for me. I started at the grammar school. I was 11 and met different friends, a wide range of friends. And I had the best time at school, especially in the sixth form. I loved it. And Suzanne reminds me of great intense friendships that you get when you're 15, 16, 17, and sitting in candlelit bedrooms putting the world to rights and listening to Leonard Cohen on there. But also, it's a thread through to later life because we did go and see Leonard Cohen too, very, very late in his life. And he was so gracious. And he came in and he did every song that everyone wanted to hear. And it was absolutely pouring with rain. And because music doesn't serve us all as it does for other people, I was at the end hoping that this would be the last encore and I could get out of my sodden clothes and go and find a warm pub and dry out.

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Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river.

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You can hear the boats go by

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And we spend the night beside her.

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And you know that she's half crazy But that's why you wanna be there And she feeds you tea and oranges That come all the way from China And just when you mean to tell her

Ann Cleeves13:46

But you have no love to give her Then she gets you on her wavelength

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Leonard Cohen with Suzanne. Anne Cleves, many writers describe their teens as difficult, but yours sound like quite good fun living in North Devon, being happy by the sea. It was wonderful, yeah. Beach parties and North Devon is a bit cut off from the rest of the West Country, and it certainly was then. I think it's gone a bit upmarket now, but it certainly wasn't like that then. My best friend lives in Barnstable, and I still love going down to visit her. And I remember that time with great fondness, and it took a long time to get something to live up to that. You took a year out before university to do community service volunteer work.

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Being happy by the save?

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How was that experience? That was mad, really, because I always lived in the country, lived in North Devon, and it was a single dad and four kids. And he worked shifts on the railways. And they were very, very forward-thinking, and I don't think you'd be allowed to do it now. But Social Services decided that they would put two young lasses in to look after these kids to keep them at home. And so two of us went, and we had a council flat in Chalk Farm. And I just didn't feel any sense of danger coming back from King's Cross on my own at midnight after looking after these kids because it was quite rough then. But we had these ideals for these children. And we did things like take them to the ballet and the theatre and obviously join them up to the library. And what they made of us, I'm not entirely sure. And I suppose that was perhaps why I didn't settle at university because reading about Keats seemed a bit trivial after battling to get these kids sorted and get them well looked after and fed and to school. And what did it teach you about yourself, that experience? It told me that I didn't ever want to live in a city again. I like space, I think, low horizons. I like to see the end of places and to be in London. It seemed to go on forever. And even if you were atop of the tower block where we lived, I couldn't see the edge of it.

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So you went to Sussex Uni to read English, but left in your second year. I think your next disc might tell us a little bit about where you went and why. Yeah, this is Chris Stout, who is a brilliant Shetland fiddle player. But he's also a Fair Islander, and Fair Isle is one of the smaller, most remote of the Shetland Isles. And I knew his parents on Fair Isle because the job that I got after dropping out of university, just after a chance meeting in a pub, really.

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Uh

Ann Cleeves16:05

Yeah.

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Uh

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Yeah.

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Was assistant cook in the Bird Observatory in Farrar. Couldn't cook, knew nothing about birds, but it was an escape from the city, so off I went. And much later, when I first wrote the Shetland books, I wanted to involve him in some way, Shetlanders, because it seemed like a terrible intrusion to be coming in from outside and writing about the islands. So I got in touch with Chris and asked if we could do some gigs together and I would do some readings and he'd play some music. And this piece is a New Year's Day piece and it's a traditional tune. And I'm still friends with Andrew and Kathleen. And when I launched Wildfire, which is the most recent and the last of the Shetland books, they came to the party that we had in Leoway.

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Chris Stout and Dade Dawn. Anne Cleves, when you left London it was to go to Fair Isle in Shetland, as you said. So what do you remember of the journey you took to get there?

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I can remember it was the old ferry, the St Clair, and going up, and that was fine, and then I went down to the south of of Shetland Mainland to get the ferry to Fair Isle.

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And I was expecting a pretty harbour, maybe a tea shop.

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There's nothing at this. And finally the postie came and said, They're not come today. Can you not see the weather?

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And three days later the ferry did come.

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There was still a big swell, and it's called with some irony the Good Shepherd.

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And they bring sheep off on it. It was quite stinky. Rough and ready.

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And we were locked below because of the weather. I was hallucinating by the end. I was so ill.

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I have never been so ill in all my life. What was the island like when you got there? I mean, how many people were living on it? Fifty people then, I think. It's three and a half miles long, a mile and a half wide.

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The most beautiful place in the world. I love it. I still love it. I went back in March and it was partly to say goodbye to some very good friends who were leaving the island, but partly because my husband had died just a few months before and I'd met him on Fair Isle and it was just a lovely way to go and sort of reconnect with that first time of meeting. Yeah, so I was assistant cook in the bird observatory and Tim came along as a visiting bird watcher. And at that point it was quite hard to get anything to drink in Fair Isle. I mean it was cans of beer and not much else. And I noticed that he had a bottle of malt whiskey tucked in the top of his rucksack when I showed him to the dormitory. So I thought he might be worth getting to know.

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So, as you say, you were assistant cook. What was a typical day like for you? Mostly, the first few months were peeling tatties, cleaning bathrooms, laundry. But there were some weird times as well. It was a bird observatory, so they were ringing birds. There were scientists there. But also, people came because very rare birds turn up in Farah because it's on the migration route. So, if a rare bird turned up, I'd be cycling down the island waving flags and telling all the bird watchers to come back and see it. And on my days off, I just go down and got invited in to people's houses, they were so generous.

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We're going to go to the music now. It's your fifth disc. Why have you chosen this one? Ah, this is Geonama Trady and this moves us on from Shetland because I told you I met my husband there and pretty well the first place we lived after we got married was another island, a tiny tidal island called Hilbury. And you get there by plodging out in the mud and the sand at low water and then the tide comes in and it's a real island. So that's where we lived and I always loved Geonama Trady anyway but I can remember being invited out to a party and we went in our island gear, you know, wellies, sweater, jeans and it was quite a smart party and there we were and this was playing in the background.

Speaker 120:25

Yeah.

Ann Cleeves21:05

I am not in love.

Ann Cleeves21:11

But I'm open to persuasion

Ann Cleeves21:16

These dollar west Where's the bear?

Ann Cleeves21:22

For romance and

Ann Cleeves21:26

With a friend

Ann Cleeves21:29

Fuckin' smile

Ann Cleeves21:32

But with a lover I could hold my hair back

Ann Cleeves21:35

Really loud.

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Joan Armour Trading and Love and Affection. And Cleves taken you back to life on Hillbury Island, the tiny island just off the coast of the Wirral. You were working as a probation officer then. What was that like and what did you learn that would go on to inform your writing? Not so much really about the criminal justice system, though that's quite handy to know. But a lot of what I did was going in and digging and wanting to know what might have caused the offence. Were there any problems within the family that probation service might help with? I think things have changed quite a lot within probation now. But I mean, what a chance to go and nab in all these people's homes and houses and

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Ask the most intrusive questions that you could. And what did you find out that surprised you? I did meet murderers because I did I had lifers on my caseload too. And it wasn't really surprising. It was that most murderers are really pathetic, inadequate little men.

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And I don't want to write about monsters. That's not something that interests me. I don't want to write about psychopaths or about serial killers. In fact, the the murder is probably the least important bit in the story.

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It is much more about looking at what interests me, which is about fractured families, and I got lots of that. But I didn't stick it for very long.

Speaker 123:01

But I did

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How did you come to start writing? That happened on Hilbury because I was pregnant. I gave up work.

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And if you're not into birds, then I'm really not.

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There wasn't much else to do, so it was a great chance to start writing.

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And I would just get up very early and write. I have no patience with people who say they have no time to write. If I just had half an hour when the kids were sat in front of Sesame Street, there I would be writing. I mean, the house was a total pigsty'cause I that came right at the bottom of any list of priorities. What about your daughters? You had two young daughters at the time. What did they make of your writing?

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Yeah.

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What did they make of your

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I remember one school holiday coming down and they'd stuck these, you know, like no smoking signs with a cigarette with a line through it, no writing signs with a pen with a line through it. They decided they'd have enough. But they're brilliant. I mean, they're the proudest things in my life, my girls now. They're so strong and so astounding. Tell us about your sixth disc today. What are we going to hear? Ah, this is from The Last Ship and this is my North East song. I think there was a BBC Do documentary before it was actually complete about Sting's, this musical that he was writing. And I heard a couple of the tunes and said to myself, that sounds good. And Tim was so thrilled that I'd expressed some kind of interest in music that he immediately, without telling me, went the next day, queued up at the Sage, the music centre in Ingateshead, to get tickets. And so we went along to that. And then we went to the northern stage with my daughters after he died to watch them do it there. And in the cast was the fantastic Charlie Hardwick, who's a friend, and she and I had, with a lot of other people, had battled to save Newcastle Libraries. And then it's the North East, isn't it? It's Walsenda, it's Vera filmed for the first few seasons in the Swanhunter shipyard offices. And just the thought that they were making things there again, and it might not be ships, but it was a TV show, and maybe some of the crew were men that had worked there. That made me just dead shocked.

Ann Cleeves25:13

What do we got but the buzzer in the morning I'm what we got for the laying of a keel What do we got for the craze of other soren The commotion and the clamour and the well and of the steel What'll we got but the mist upon the river Tell me what have we got for the noise inside the hole Oh what have we got for the outside of the weather Where we're working horizontal rain and shiver in the cool

Speaker 125:38

Oh.

Ann Cleeves25:41

What you got? What do you got? What ya got?

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Jimmy Neil and Sting with What Have We Got? We've Got Now Else from the musical The Last Ship, composed by Sting and Catherine and Peter Takell. And Cleves, in 1986, your debut novel A Bird in the Hand was published, and from then on you were publishing pretty much a book a year. And that went on until about 2006. And that was the year that you published the first in your Shetland series, Raven Black. The hero detective, Jimmy Perez, hails from Fair Isle, and it won the Crime Writers Association Duncan Laurie Gold Dagger Prize, then the richest crime writing prize in the world.

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Yeah.

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Second.

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The hero

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How much did life change? What was the impact of that success? It changed, I suppose, because I felt validated as a writer. Till then, the books just disappeared really. Again, so grateful for libraries because without the libraries buying a certain number of copies and having me to do gigs and to meet readers and promoting me, I certainly wouldn't be published. And there would be no Vera and no Shetland on the Telly actually bringing money into this country. I think the prize was £20,000, which was huge. And it was what I was earning because I was working then. So it meant that we thought that we would be able to move back to the North East. And I thought I would write full-time.

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Now aside from your success, you also experienced some very tough times. At the end of the eighties you were diagnosed with breast cancer, and after suffering from depression, Tim was diagnosed as bipolar. What helped you through?

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Books, escape, family, friends, great, great friends, and I suppose a kind of

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sense that we were in it together. And there were dreadful times. There were times when lying beside him in bed and it felt as if I was lying next to a stranger'cause I didn't know him.

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But the magnificent NHS that I can remember going in and one of the charge nurses saying, Don't worry, we'll get him back for you and not really believing them because he was so different.

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and so depressed and so anxious. There were times when he thought he was Jesus and he could cure the neighbour's cat.

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But they did get him back and he was properly diagnosed and

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Yeah, we we've

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Lived happily afterwards. And I think I would say to anybody out there who is struggling with mental illness.

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It is something that you can get better from, it's not a life sentence.

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And how did you keep up your extraordinary work rate alongside all of these experiences and struggles? It was escape again. And you need time for yourself. If you're caring for somebody or you're in the life of somebody who's struggling, you need to stay well. And my way of staying well was by writing.

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And we had such fun. I mean, even when he was bonkers, the girls loved it'cause he was at home and he would play cards with them for hours and hours and hours. And I hate games. And they looked after him and it's given them a real insight into

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The fact that life isn't easy for everybody.

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Let's have some more music. It's your seventh disc. Why have you chosen this one? Oh, this is Dylan, and Tim was a real Dylan freak, and he did drag me to see Dylan, oh, too many times. And it's back to Barnstable again, because my English teacher was a guy called Michael Gray, who was much more interested in Dylan than he was in teaching us English, I think. And so that takes me back to

Ann Cleeves29:40

Lay lady lay

Ann Cleeves29:43

Play across my big grail space.

Ann Cleeves29:52

Lay lay lay.

Ann Cleeves29:56

Lay across a big breast baby.

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Bob Dylan and Lay Lady Lay. Anne Cleves, you've said you're a Northeasterner by choice and you chose Whitley Bay. What do you like about it? I like Whitley'cause it's kind of it's a bit scruffy. I don't feel very happy in posh places, in tidy places. Why not?

Speaker 130:19

Why not?

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I don't know, it just doesn't feel I don't feel that I belong there, maybe. Perhaps it's not having a degree and still that slightly outsider thing about wanting to not quite fit in. I don't know. But I like Whitley'cause it's mixed,'cause there's still very much a community of people. I love the the local pub.

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And there are guys there who used to work in the shipyard and who talk about that, and people who used to take.

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Boats out from Colour Coats and talk about that. But lots of new people coming in as well and being welcomed, I think. And it's become quite arty now, Itley. We've got our own independent film festival and there's a bit of a book festival at Colour Coats most years. And yeah, so I like it. Time for your final disc, Anne Cleves. What's this one and why have you chosen this? This is Tilted by Christine and the Queens. And again, this is the song for Tim, a final song for Tim, because he loved finding new music. And this is something that I'm not quite sure where he found it or where he heard it, but he loved and dragged me up to his computer. Look at this, look at this music video, isn't it brilliant? And I loved it. And I think it is very restful and sapperific. And if I'm trying to get to sleep on this island with the waves in the background and this, I think this would help me.

Ann Cleeves31:42

Die weapon for my souzela

Ann Cleeves31:47

So I will face up with a moonia

Ann Cleeves31:52

And every morning we fight so bad

Ann Cleeves31:57

I missed them full of tears they shed

Ann Cleeves32:01

But I'm a chaiko, can't help it if we're tilted. I am a chico.

Presenter32:09

Christine and the Queens, and Tilted. So, Anne Cleves are about to cast you away to your desert island. You'll have some books to keep you company, the complete works of Shakspere and the Bible, as well as a book of your own. What would that be? The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning.

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I recently went to a book festival in Bucharest, a mad city, but people so interested in ideas and thoughts. And I'm very interested in that idea of shifting borders, debatable lands. So I want to read the book because it's gossipy, but it also gives an insight, I think, into the politics of the region. And it's big, so it'll keep me going for a while. We'll also give you a luxury item to make life on the island more enjoyable. What would you take with you? Well, you see, I'm assuming that a pad and a pen, they'll float in with the records. And I'm not sure you're going to allow me this, but I am a real radio freak. So even if I can't get Radio 4 and the World Service, maybe podcasts with all the dramas.

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Breaks the rules, I'm afraid. It's got to be one or the other. Oh, I'll I'd have to go for the pad and the pen then, and a big Byro, or many of them.

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Now that I could definitely do. And if you could only save one track from your Eight Today, which would you go for? I think it would have to be Suzanne because that scrolls through the whole of my memories and it's got so many stories in there.

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I sh

Presenter33:37

And Cleves, thank you very much for sharing your Desert Island discs with us. Thanks so much for having me. It's been lovely.

Presenter33:53

Barnstable, Fair Isle, Hillbury, Whitley Bay. I feel I've done more travelling than usual during today's conversation with Anne. Makes me long for some fresh sea air. Not sure about the ferry to Fair Isle though. Anyhow, as many of you will be aware, many crime writers have been cast away over the years. Val McDermott, P.D. James, twice. James Elroy and Ed McBain are just a few. The creator of Rebus, Ian Rankin, was cast away by Sue Lowley in 2006. She began by asking him if he'd always been an outsider looking in.

Speaker 134:26

I think so. I mean, when I was a small kid growing up in a coal mining town, I knew I was different from the other kids. You know, I would sit in my room and uh try and write poetry or song lyrics or whatever or strip cartoons. But I I had this kind of knack of looking like I fitted in.

Presenter34:41

And did they live a spot that you didn't go the whole way for all

Speaker 134:44

I think the first inkling they got that I was actually sitting scribbling things in my bedroom was when I um came second in a poetry competition and it was reported in the local newspaper and they saw it and he said, Is that you? You know, Ian Rand, Cardin Den Lad, come second in poetry competition. And yes, that is.

Presenter35:01

So you're always on the periphery, always watching, collecting material, were you consciously collecting material?

Speaker 135:07

Well, I mean, I think writers are quite voyeuristic. I mean, I do think that we we look at the world and we we suck the soul from it for our characters. Muriel Spark puts it very nicely. She says we loiter with intent.

Presenter35:17

Yeah.

Speaker 135:17

And I think that's just about right. You know, it's just short of a criminal activity.

Presenter35:21

But it's yourself really you've borrowed from most in Rebus. I mean there's a lot of you in Rebus, isn't there? The background

Speaker 135:26

He's a Pfer. It didn't start like that. I mean, it he was invented as a safety measure because my first novel, people thought they could see themselves in it. So I then wrote a detective novel because Rebus was nothing like me.

Speaker 135:39

I was in my twenties and at university and he was in his forties, divorced and with a kid and he was a cop. And it was only really later on that I I realized how much of me was actually being transmitted to him.

Presenter35:51

Which I want to talk to you about, but I mean, let me ask you just one general point about him. I mean, he is arguably I think you said this, a typical working class Scottish male, happiest with his junk food, his fellow drinkers down the local and his music. I mean, how much of you is there?

Speaker 136:05

Oh, quite a lot. Quite a lot. You know, sitting in his chair late at night, staring out of the window or going for long nighttime drives through the streets of Edinburgh. That's me. His musical taste these days is me. The junk food, yes, guilty. He smokes, I've never smoked. He's got a drink problem. He's got a well, I think his drinking's actually under control. I mean, that's one of the maybe the thing that's least realistic about him now is that he's actually the kind of cop who was prevalent in real life maybe twenty or thirty years ago.

Speaker 236:20

He's got a drink.

Speaker 136:34

So Rebus is a bit of a dinosaur, he represents the last of a dying breed of detective.

Presenter36:38

Ian Rankin talking to Sue. Next time, Desert Island Discs takes a historical turn when I cast away last year's Wreath Lecturer, Professor Margaret MacMillan. I do hope you'll join us.

Speaker 237:06

Did you know that technology can make us kinder to one another? Did you hear about the diver who walked out of the sea onto a Portuguese beach, dragging the Internet behind him?

Speaker 237:17

Did you realize that how you speak to the little robot helper in your house might cement age-old stereotypes for decades to come? I'm Alex Krotosky, and those are just some of the stories that we've looked at in The Digital Human, the podcast that explores what it means to be human in the digital age. If you want to hear more, and I guarantee we will surprise you, come check us out exclusively on BBC Sounds.