Conversations in Crime & Kindness
BRITISH CRIME writer Anne Cleeves, author of more than thirty books, among them the Jimmy Perez and Vera Stanhope series, has recently sponsored two “reading coaches” for a pilot scheme across Northumberland (where she lives and where Vera is set). The idea of the scheme is to guide people suffering chronic pain, anxiety, depression, loneliness and anguish toward the healing reading can fashion. Ann was moved to make the donation in memory of how reading and writing (and walking) helped save her when her husband Tim suffered a major psychotic episode, brought on by work stress, many years ago.
Ann Cleeve’s break as a writer came by chance, when in 2005 or 2006, the books executive for ITV happened upon a secondhand copy of Cleeves’s The Crow Trap (one of the Vera books) in a London Oxfam shop and took it on holidays to read. That executive happened to be looking for a new crime series featuring a female lead. “That was it,” Cleeves writes in a recent Guardian piece. “A chance encounter and a breakthrough in my career.” Before that moment of grace, of course, came twenty years of writing without much public notice or much by way or financial return. “I’d like to share a bit of that luck,” writes Cleeves, with her accustomed humility and economy.
This project, which it would be wonderful to replicate in my native Australia, put me in mind of some words that struck me when I read them last year in the New Yorker. Reviewing a new history of psychology and psychiatry, Jerome Groopman, a medical practitioner and staff writer for the New Yorker, reflects on the power, manifest if hard to quantify or anatomise, of well turned words—spoken or written—to console and heal the afflicted: “Words can alter, for better or worse, the chemical transmitters and circuits of our brain, just as drugs or electroconvulsive therapy can.”
You can catch me in conversation with Anne Cleeves at 6:00pm this Sunday evening (Eastern Australian Time). Our conversation is a highlight of BAD, the Sydney Crime Writers Festival, run this year on zoom. Get your tickets at badsydney.com. I’m going to ask Ann about the healing power of words—writing them and reading them—and of literature. Of crime novels in particular. We may also consider the therapeutic power and innate divinity of places and birds.
By desk is swilling with September sunlight and the complete works of Anne Cleeves. With the healing frequencies of the word and the world.
