I first went to Shetland more than fifty years ago. I’d dropped out of university and I needed to find work. A chance conversation in a London pub pointed me towards the post of assistant cook in Fair Isle Bird Observatory. They were, I was told, desperate for an assistant cook.
They must have been desperate because I couldn’t cook and I knew nothing about birds. I didn’t even know that Fair Isle was one of the Shetland islands. But I understood that it would be an adventure.
I sailed north on the St Clair, NorthLink’s predecessor and then was very seasick on the Good Shepherd, Fair Isle’s mail boat. But as soon as I arrived, I knew this would be a special place. And so it would turn out to be. I met my husband there, and I’m still friends with the islanders who made me welcome on that first trip. The Shetland books came later, very much later, but the first, Raven Black, was a breakthrough novel for me. It won the Gold Dagger and changed my career.
I visited Orkney too on that first adventure north, and fell for its gentler and greener charms, the sense of history, of bones and stones beneath my feet. Now, I’ve moved Jimmy Perez, the central character in the Shetland novels to Orkney. I loved writing The Killing Stones so much that I’m starting a new series set there. It’ll give me an excuse to go back.
I spent most of my childhood in Shetland, and much of my adult life too. When I started writing seriously, it was the islands that I wanted to write about. And even now, when I live elsewhere, my words always seem to circle back to Shetland. I can’t escape it, and I don’t want to.
Is there a specific place in Shetland that is special to you?
I lived in Fair Isle for a few years, and that place – that community – had a profound effect on me. I’ll always carry a deep gratitude for the home I had there.
What sounds, smells, or sights from Shetland instantly bring you back into your story world?
There are a thousand sounds, smells and sights that speak of Shetland to me, and part of what I’ve tried to do in my novels is to bring those little details of island life to the page.
I came to Shetland as a very new, very green teacher back in 1981, and loved Shetland’s landscape and folk straight away.
It’s such a beautiful place, in every season: in spring, with the greens of the new shoots, and the first silver-yellow celandines. In summer, when the sea is blue and the days endless; in autumn, when the hills turn a wonderful burnt orange with the moor-grass growing through the heather stems; in winter, when the snow turns the world to a black and white photo.
I love the low, rounded hills and the great expanse of sky. I marvel at the wildlife; the way I can glance over the pier on my morning walk and see an otter swimming by, or catch a glimpse of a snow-white Arctic hare as I drive at night. I’ve gradually learned to identify the different seabirds I see every time I take the boat out – razorbills, guillemots, puffins, fulmars, kittiwakes, gannets, bonxies.
Life here is like a Norse-influenced version of the world my granny grew up in. Folk are so friendly. I love living in a place where I know everyone, and everyone knows me. I feel rooted here; I went to a school concert some years after I’d retired, and though I couldn’t name the individual children, I could tell who almost everyone was by their resemblance to a parent I’d taught: an Anderson from Eastgate, a Deyell, a Wilmore. I love the freedom of a safe community, where children can still charge off in groups to play on the shore or the hill. It’s a boating community, so there’s a marina in nearly every village – a safe berth for my keelboat Karima S.
We’re never short of something to do, from smaller versions of Up Helly Aa starting in January, through church festivals, plant sales, Sunday teas, the Lifeboat Galas and other fundraisers until we get to autumn and time to start rehearsing the local pantomimes. Right now I’m busy helping to organise Shetland Noir, our crime festival, in June, and I’m making sure visitors get a chance to hear Shetland’s beautiful language, filled with dialect words and grammar constructions that are more like Norwegian than Scots.
Every area of Shetland is different. The south end, with its flatter fields and sandy beaches reminds me of east of Edinburgh, where I grew up. The north mainland is like Iceland, with its black lava cliffs; Yell is one huge peat bank; Unst has the wonderful slanted cliffs of Muckle Flugga. However, I think my heart is firmly west-side, with the higher hills, red cliffs and indented voes that remind me of the West HIghlands, which I loved as a child. If I have to pick one place, then it would be the waters of Swarback’s Minn, the hand-shaped water between Aith, Voe, Brae and the wide Atlantic. That’s my sailing territory, and I love exploring it by boat.
My heroine, Cass, has had adventures all around Shetland, so there are so many places that I associate with her. As I’m planning each book, I visit those places, then I spend a year there in my imagination, as I write the book. The beautiful Georgian Belmont House in Unst, for example; our writers’ group had a weekend there while I was plotting the novel that’s mostly set there, when we returned the following year, I kept expecting to meet Cass’s flamboyant French mother sweeping down the stairs. Fetlar, with Brough Lodge, where Cass had a dodgy encounter with her chief suspect. Scalloway, where she had a narrow escape from a gang of modern witches.
There’s also Shetland’s own tall ship, Swan, a fishing boat built here in Shetland in 1900, now restored as a sail training vessel. I’m a volunteer crew, and Cass has had a number of adventures aboard. Most of all, I feel like Cass when I’m sailing. I kindly allow her the use of my Karima for her own adventures, and so far she’s always brought her home safely. Of course I hope that for readers it’s the other way round: that my story world brings you the sounds, sights and smells of Shetland.
Having lived on Shetland in 2008/2009, during which time I made the series Shetland Diaries for the BBC, I have so many fond memories of my stay on the islands. Everything from the wild winter storms that explode against the cliffs of Eshaness to the long, light summer nights accompanied by the sounds of wild spirits like red-throated divers and drumming snipe are fuel for my creative spirit, expressed both through my film making and writing.
Taking my daughter Savannah, who at the time was just two years old, into the Iron Age broch on Mousa at midnight to watch and listen to the fluttering forms of petrels which nest in cracks in the walls was a magical experience. I still remember her wonder at the cooing calls of the ’night fairies’!
The voices and scent of the seabird colonies, from the Puffins (tammie norries) and the fulmars (maalis) to the towering cliffs of Noss and the clamorous community of gannets (solan gös) – all jet fuel for the imagination! And, of course, a myriad close encounters with otters in so many parts of the archipelago.
