‘I thought my mum and dad might buy a copy’: Simon McCleave on rejection, reinvention and selling 3.5m books

By Jonathan Welford

The bestselling crime writer talks to Caroline England, from The Late Late Book Show, about abandoning Hollywood, finding inspiration in the police cars of Peckham and creating an unexpectedly enduring detective in the mountains of north Wales.

In conversation with interviewer and fellow crime writer Caroline England on The Late Late Book Show, Simon McCleave reflects on a career that has taken him from television and Hollywood to the mountains of north Wales. He has sold more than 3.5m books, created a detective series now stretching to 24 instalments and seen his self-published debut reach No 1 in the Amazon Kindle chart. Yet he still hesitates over the word “author”.

“It always sounds really strange,” he says. “I sometimes just say I’m a writer.”

The modesty feels genuine, although McCleave’s career has hardly followed a modest trajectory. Before turning to novels, he worked in film and television, wrote for programmes including Doctors, Holby City, EastEnders and The Bill, retrained as a teacher and endured the familiar chill of publishers’ rejection slips. His eventual success arrived through a combination of persistence, careful preparation and a crime novel set in a landscape other writers had largely overlooked.

When England takes him back to the beginning of his career, McCleave recalls studying English at Exeter University and emerging with what he cheerfully admits were fairly extravagant ambitions: to become “either Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg of the UK film industry”.

He began more prosaically, earning about £25 a time to read scripts and prepare reports for production companies. It proved an invaluable education. He learnt to examine structure, pace, character, dialogue and, crucially, whether an ending worked. Before long, he was reading for several organisations, among them Miramax, World Productions and Carlton Television, and later became a script editor in the BBC drama department.

“I think it was persistence,” he says. “I just kept banging on doors until someone gave me a break.”

In his 20s, buoyed by what he calls the arrogance appropriate to that age, McCleave set off travelling through India, the Far East and Australia before landing in Los Angeles. He stayed in Venice Beach, surrounded by rollerbladers, tattoo parlours and the theatrical bustle of Muscle Beach, while reading scripts for studios and agents.

Walking through the gates of Warner Bros felt thrilling. Hollywood itself proved less seductive.

“It was very cut-throat, aggressive and go-getting,” he says. Friends told him about a route to obtaining a green card, presenting him with a genuine sliding-doors decision: stay and attempt to build a career in Los Angeles, or return home.

He chose home.

Back in Britain, McCleave began writing television drama. Doctors was his first regular job, followed by work on other continuing dramas. His longest and most formative experience came on The Bill, where research trips with serving officers helped to shape the crime fiction he would write years later.

His first ride-along was in Peckham. He remembers sitting in the back of a patrol car with his coffee, pleased with himself for being a writer conducting serious research. Moments later, the car was travelling at about 60mph down Peckham High Street, lights flashing, on the wrong side of the road.

“I thought: what have I let myself in for? This is terrifying.”

The experience left him fascinated by police officers’ relationships inside their cars. A patrol car could be an office, a confessional and a place to recover after witnessing something harrowing. It could also be filled with banter and dark humour.

“A lot of my books are about cops in cars,” he says. “If they’ve been to see something really difficult, they come back and decompress together. If they’re trying to solve something, they talk about it while they’re driving around.”

Despite the experience he was accumulating, television gradually lost its appeal. A script would pass from editor to director, producer and executive producer before reaching the actors, acquiring changes at every stage. McCleave sometimes watched the finished episode and barely recognised what he had written.

Eventually, he stopped watching altogether. His wife asked whether television was really the right career for him.

Burnt out, he moved with his family from London to north Wales, where his wife had grown up, and retrained as an English and media teacher. He loved teaching, but friends and relatives kept asking whether he could really give up writing.

The answer, it turned out, was no.

A novel offered something television had denied him: control. During lunch breaks and detentions, McCleave began writing on his computer. Looking across the British crime market, he noticed novels set in the Scottish Highlands, Cornwall, Brighton and the Norfolk Broads, but few making full use of Snowdonia.

The landscape seemed made for crime fiction. On a bright day, its mountains, lakes, forests and beaches could be spectacularly beautiful; beneath November rain and mist, the same scenery became eerie and threatening. Its history and mythology, dragons, druids and invasions, gave it an additional imaginative charge.

McCleave had been a devoted reader since childhood, when his mother took him to the library and Enid Blyton introduced him to the pleasures of self-contained mysteries. He progressed from the Secret Seven and Famous Five to Ian Fleming, Alistair MacLean and Biggles, while creating stories and recording homemade radio plays on a cassette machine.

“I think I always wanted to be a storyteller,” he says. “Whether you’re a child or an adult, we love solving mysteries.”

When England asks about rejection, McCleave is emphatic about how difficult the process was. Writing The Snowdonia Killings was one challenge; getting anybody to publish it was another. Agents responded with polite variations on no: they already represented somebody similar, liked the book but were not looking for that kind of story, or simply took months to reply.

Then McCleave heard about crime writers building large readerships through independent publishing. Rather than upload his manuscript immediately, he spent a year studying the business through courses, books and podcasts.

“I thought I probably had one shot at it,” he shared. “I needed to know everything so I could hit the ground running. I didn’t want to do it half-heartedly and then fail.”

He published The Snowdonia Killings in January 2020, supported by a small amount of online advertising. Expectations were not high.

“I honestly thought Mum and Dad would buy a copy. My brother might. Maybe I’d sell 30 and have loads rotting in the garage.”

On the first day, the online dashboard reported 250 sales. The following day brought much the same. McCleave assumed the software was malfunctioning and asked his wife to check. It wasn’t.

The book continued climbing the Kindle chart. Amid the excitement came a more practical realisation: “Oh, bugger. I think I need to write another one.”

Inspiration arrived during a family trip to Harlech beach. While his children and dog ran among the dunes, McCleave became distracted. His wife asked if he was all right.

“I said: ‘This would be a great place to bury a body.’ My kids said, ‘Dad, you’re really sick.’ But I’m a crime writer.”

The Harlech Beach Killings followed, then another book and another. McCleave believes the first novel benefited from a clear title, a professional cover and an appetite for atmospheric rural crime. But readers returned because of DCI Ruth Hunter, the south London detective who moves to north Wales in search of a quieter life and discovers, rather inconveniently, that Snowdonia has no shortage of murders.

Ruth is intuitive, direct and highly capable, without being written as a conventionally masculine police officer. She is also gay, has a daughter and possesses a complicated private life. Readers have formed a powerful attachment to her.

Asked by England to name his greatest achievement, McCleave returns immediately to Ruth. “People beg me not to finish the series,” he says. “Creating Ruth and having people love her enough to keep coming back, that’s probably my greatest achievement.”

He describes writing a Ruth Hunter novel as returning to “a comfy pair of slippers”. The phrase suggests ease, but not complacency. Having lived with the characters for so long, he understands how they think and how each investigation should move. New subjects continue to present themselves, and each book tends to generate the seed of the next.

Success eventually reversed the traditional publishing dynamic. Agents who had once shown little interest began approaching him. McCleave went on to work with Avon, an imprint of HarperCollins, and later wrote psychological thrillers for Storm Publishing, while continuing his independent work.

Traditional publishing brought an initially unfamiliar experience: receiving editorial notes on a novel. Once he trusted his editor, however, he found the collaboration rewarding—and welcomed the relief of handing publicity, advertising and production to somebody else.

“Until then, I’d spent two years flat out doing everything needed to run the business as well as writing the books. It was quite nice just to write.”

His television instincts have never entirely disappeared. Sarah Parish expressed interest in playing Ruth Hunter in a screen adaptation, sending McCleave a photograph of the novel beside a sun lounger. The project came close to production before retreating into what the industry calls development hell. There has also been interest in his series featuring retired detective Frank Marshall, who lives in a remote farmhouse and fancies himself as a Welsh cowboy.

McCleave remains philosophical. Having worked in television, he knows how much enthusiasm can accumulate around a project without anything reaching the screen.

“If it happens, it would be great,” he says. “But I’m not going to hold my breath.”

For now, his attention remains with books and the readers who transformed a tentative experiment in self-publishing into a remarkable second career. Ruth Hunter is ageing more slowly than the rest of us, though retirement has occasionally been mentioned. Whenever it is, McCleave’s readers object.

It is an enviable problem for an author who once expected to sell only a few dozen copies, and who, even now, is not entirely comfortable calling himself one.

The Liverpool Killings, the latest DCI Ruth Hunter novel, is due to be published in September 2026. Click here to preorder