Vera and Shetland author Ann Cleeves on her new novel The Raging Storm, featuring Detective Matthew Venn

It's one of my foremost questions for Ann Cleeves, the writer behind these two series, crime shows that are, at once, comforting and gritty, bleak but beautiful.

But first I need to let Cleeves know about the national uproar that erupted when, upon the death of Prince Phillip in 2021, our national broadcaster interrupted a Friday night screening of Vera to announce the news.

Cleeves, speaking over the phone from London, is mildly appalled; she had heard something along these lines on social media but hadn't realised it was true.

It was, I tell her, beyond the pale, although I'm sure she hears this kind of praise all the time. She's in a hotel room, having risen early to do a BBC breakfast program, and is about to get on a plane to America where she's touring her latest book, The Raging Storm.

It's the third in her newest series, featuring Detective Matthew Venn. Set in North Devon, where Cleeves herself grew up, the story's victim is a famous adventurer returning to his own home village of Greystone and then turning up dead. So far, so British, but the village is both claustrophobic and notably unlovely, nothing like the Devon most people think of when planning a weekend away.

"North Devon is a place where tourists go a lot and so it's famous for its sandy beaches and its surfing," Cleeves says.

"But there is actually, even in the holiday places like Devon and Cornwall, lots of rural poverty. And it's hard for local people who can't afford local homes, and [this] community is very different from that, it's almost industrial because it's in the shadow of a big quarry. But I just wanted to, I suppose, depict a very different kind of North Devon from the North Devon that most tourists see."

Matthew Venn, too, is a very different kind of detective, and a replacement, of sorts, for Jimmy Perez of Shetland, the series she finished in 2018. (Confusingly, the television incarnation of Perez and his team continues and a new season, with a new lead detective, is set to air early next year, with stories written by separate screenwriters).

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But Venn - reserved, withholding secrets, traumatised from a childhood in a religious community, but also gay and married to a man - is a character who is steadily growing on everyone, Cleeves most of all.

"He came because my husband died very suddenly, and I wanted to run away from people's pity," she says (her husband, Tim, died in 2017).

"And so I went back to where I grew up, which is North Devon, stayed with my oldest friend, who I'd known since I was 12. And just talking to her, she grew up in that kind of ... Evangelical community, that absolute belief that the day of rapture would come, and their community would be saved, and everybody else would be damned.

"And I thought, if you publicly lost your faith as a teenager, you would be cast out, you would be unfellowshipped, and that then the world would seem a very chaotic and unfriendly place because you'd lost all your certainties, you had nothing to anchor you to the world.

"And someone like that might join the police service, to find that sense of honour and duty and community that you'd lost. And so that's how it started off."

And in the chaotic aftermath of Tim's death, it was her close friends Martin and Paul, a gay couple, who supported her and her daughters the most.

"Because they were my head, I think that's why Matthew became gay," she says.

"I hadn't intended him to be when I started. And that was quite tricky, because I'm a straight woman, an older woman and I don't know. But Martin and Paul read the scripts before they go to the publisher... and I try and make sure that I've got it right."

Meanwhile, Vera - played by the indomitable Brenda Blethyn - is still an ABC staple down under. And, as she well knows, too much is seemingly never enough. She alternates the series she's working on, spending time with Vera before heading back over to, formerly Shetland, and now more recently Matthew Venn.

She says the character of Vera - who in her head is nowhere near as physically striking as Blethyn - comes from the "formidable spinsters" she knew growing up - the ones who opted not to become housewives once the men came home from the war.

And she never knows where a book is headed before she starts a new story.

"I was 20 years without any commercial success, so my writing has to be fun," she says.

"If I know the ending, what's the point of writing the book that way? There'd be no joy in that, so I write as I always have."

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