![]() ![]() ![]() Like fellow bestselling author Elly Griffiths, whose novels featuring forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway have become synonymous with Norfolk, Craven’s books have made him Mr Lake District. The action follows a series of gruesome murders, each taking place in one of the Lake District’s stone circles, not well-known but among the UK’s most stunning. Signing a TV deal kept him ticking over financially as book sales crept up, mainly via word of mouth. Having published two Lake District-set novels already, he began work on The Puppet Show, the first of his Poe and Bradshaw thrillers. I said 18 months – so we compromised at a year.” I’ve got a social work qualification, I can get a job in a week’. “I said to my wife, ‘I’ll give it three years, and if it’s not working, I’ll go back. Having gone back to work in the Probation Service, his mortgage paid off by critical illness cover, he lasted another 11 years before taking redundancy to write full-time. “There are slices of it all over the place.” “Basically, my tumour has travelled further than me, and it’s in more countries than my books are,” he tells me. ![]() He left hospital six months later and several stone lighter, but alive and in remission.Īnd, in a bizarre twist, because his cancer was so large and rare, nearly every big research hospital in the world subsequently requested samples. Suddenly the gruelling treatment was back on and Craven was, incredibly, cured. Later, he went to university to study social work after realising it was a two-year degree rather than the usual three.Having been a welfare officer in the Army – “If someone was feeling suicidal, they were supposed to come and talk to me, which obviously never happened, because that wasn’t the culture then” – he “fluked” his way onto the course.įrom there, again by chance, he joined the Probation Service and worked his way to the top in Cumbria where he eventually took redundancy as chief probation officer when the service was privatised for a short, mostly disastrous, period.Ĭraven was told they now needed to explore palliative care options, and his family began to plan his funeral – “it was gonna be on a Monday apparently, I found out recently” – but then a sliver of bone from his hip, removed for tests, revealed the cancer hadn’t spread as expected. Then after 12 years, he left the army by accident, when discharge papers were mixed up in a bundle of documents, quitting that afternoon. Growing up in Newcastle, the son of a cigarette salesman and a nurse, Craven joined the Army on a whim, going to the recruitment office with a friend (his pal decided against it, while Craven joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers). “I’m like a twig on a stream just bumping into things,” he smiles. Will be one of the big draws at the world-famous crime writing festival in Harrogate next month.īut, as he is at pains to explain today, his entire career, from long before he started writing, has been a fascinating mixture of accident, luck (sometimes bad) and instinct. ![]() His most recent, The Botanist, is shortlisted for the prestigious Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year, supported by the Daily Express, and Craven The 55-year-old memorably describes his books, now published in 26 countries, as “locked-room mysteries with added sarcasm”. His award-winning novels featuring one of the unlikeliest pairings in thrillerdom – misanthropic detective Washington Poe and high-functioning civilian crime analyst Tilly Bradshaw – have won legions of fans, inspiring everything from a blend of coffee to five-day holiday excursions to his Lake District locations for foreign tourists. With his shaved head, muscular physique and tattooed arms and hands, the former soldier turned chief probation officer for Cumbria – who writes as M W Craven – admits he makes an unlikely literary superstar. ![]()
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