When Mike Craven won the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award at the 2023 festival in Harrogate last week, there was one person he made sure to give special thanks – without whom, he might have found himself involved in a real-life crime as well as fictional.
That person was the author and scientist Brian Price, whom the 55-year-old, who writes as MW Craven, had employed to read his manuscript and check for scientific inaccuracies. The winning book – The Botanist – is the fifth in Craven’s Washington Poe series of police procedurals set in Cumbria, and features a poisoner who targets celebrities with cryptic poems and pressed flowers. Price had pointed out that in one of the killer’s poems Craven had included the exact recipe for ricin – a biological warfare agent that is classified as a weapon of mass destruction.
“It’s illegal to publish the recipe for ricin under anti-terrorism laws,” says Craven with a laugh. “I could probably have gone to jail if Brian hadn’t spotted it.”
Craven is speaking to me on Zoom from the home he shares with his wife, Joanne, near Carlisle. He is an imposing figure on the screen with tattooed arms and a down-to-earth manner. A bookcase behind him shows off an eclectic range of titles, reflective of the author’s lifelong love of all kinds of books.
Born in Cumbria, Craven moved with his family as a baby to a village near Newcastle. “The library was a big part of my life growing up,” he says. “This guy used to come round our village, with his car boot full of books. He would sell books for something like 50p and buy back the books you’d bought the week before for 10p. I would read anything. I used to read Mills & Boon romances, whatever he had.”
Craven was a keen footballer at school, although his talent as a centre-forward was somewhat overshadowed by a lad a couple of years below him. While that boy – Alan Shearer – was recruited to Southampton FC, Craven was recruited to the army.
His military career came about almost by accident, after he accompanied a friend to a recruitment event, despite having “no interest in it”, himself. When they came out, the friend hadn’t signed up but Craven had, and he embarked on a 12-year career with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.
“I got to travel the world – all that,” he says. “It was mainly fun. Nothing too exciting, no war zones or anything like that.” His exit from the army was just as spontaneous as his joining up. Sent to an office to collect some pension documents, he accidentally picked up a pile of discharge papers, too. On a whim he filled one in and put it in the tray, and at the age of 28 was out of the forces.
Next, he enrolled at Newcastle university to do a social work degree. On his first day, when he was queueing up to choose the modules he would study, he got chatting to another student who said he fancied being a probation officer.
“By the time I got to the front of the queue, I said I wanted to be a probation officer, too,” says Craven. After he completed his degree, he returned to his native Cumbria to start this new career, rising through the ranks to assistant chief officer. After 16 years in the profession, he took redundancy in 2015 and, spurred on by his wife, took the plunge to become a full-time writer.
“That was probably the only decision I made that wasn’t on impulse”, the author says. “I said I’d give it a year, see how it turned out. I left the probation service in September and in December I had my first book deal.”
The independent publisher Caffeine Nights published Craven’s two novels featuring Avison Fluke, a police detective trying to hide the debilitating effects of cancer. The author was drawing on his own experience: in 2003 he had been diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. He underwent chemotherapy and surgery, in which they removed a tumour that was “the size of a rugby ball” during a 12-hour operation.
After that, Craven’s outlook changed. “I was a working-class kid and never thought writing books was for someone like me”, he says. “But, eventually, I thought, I’ve just survived cancer. Getting published or not isn’t a matter of life or death. I should just have a go.”
In 2017, he got a two-book deal from Little, Brown for the first of the Washington Poe series of books, which feature the cynical detective sergeant Poe (the name came from a friend mishearing him saying “Washington Post”) and the civilian analyst Tilly Bradshaw, whose mannerisms have led people to speculate if she is autistic.
“My stock answer is that she is if that’s how people want to read her”, says Craven. “The reader owns the character once the book is published – they can decide for themselves.”
The sixth Poe and Bradshaw novel, The Mercy Chair, will be published next year, and Craven says it will be the darkest one yet. In the meantime, he has started a new series, beginning with Fearless, published last month. Its hero Ben Koenig is as far removed from Washington Poe as possible – he’s a US Marshal, and a maverick law-enforcer in the mould of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher.
Both the Poe series and the Koenig books have been optioned for TV, and the author’s award shelf is filling up. Success, though, is relative for Craven. “My cancer was quite rare, and when they took the tumour out of me, practically every university hospital in the world wanted a sample of it to study”, he says.
“My books have been really successful and they are available in something like 45 countries. There are slices of my tumour in 160 countries. It puts things into perspective a bit.”
• The Botanist by MW Craven is published Little, Brown. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy for £9.29 from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
