More from Ann Cleeves

THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY

In 1999, the National Year of Reading, I was appointed as Reader in Residence to the libraries of Northumberland, Cumbria, Gateshead and North Tyneside. The brief was to promote reading. In some areas I set up readers' groups, in others I ran readers' surgeries. I worked in high schools and in two category C prisons, Acklington on the Northumberland coast and Haverigg in South West Cumbria. It was a huge geographic area and I seemed to spend a lot of time on the A69.

The biggest challenge came when a librarian said she wanted a novel event which would attract people who might not normally come into a library. Crime was popular. What about a Cluedo type evening? I wasn't enthusiastic. I'd never written for the stage and I didn't know where to start.

I decided from the beginning that the evening would be more about story telling than acting. It was set in a library after all. I developed the outline of a plot - a pretty and generally unpopular library assistant had been murdered. Four suspects would tell the audience about their relationship with the young woman, the audience would have the chance to ask them questions, before deciding who had killed her and why. It was all very simple.

The stroke of genius was to ask for help from Helen, a senior crime scene examiner with Co. Durham police. I'd met her at a writers' workshop and knew she had a sense of humour and a talent to entertain. She provided me with an unusual method of murder, a fake scene of crime report and realistic clues. Even better she agreed to take part in the performance.

The first event was held at Gateshead Central Library. The cast was a senior librarian, two amateur actors and my eldest daughter. The library put up a display of crime fiction and put together some imaginative reading lists. We marked out our crime scene with blue and white tape the week before, to stimulate interest. At first tickets sold slowly, but by the afternoon of the event all 90 tickets had gone and in the evening we were turning people away.

It was a great night. There was wine and lots of laughing. It had something of the atmosphere of a pub quiz. People who'd never been in the library before met staff, found they were human and decided they might come back. The computer borrowing system was left on, so books could be borrowed and new customers recruited.

Since then, I've run the evening five times. Each performance is different but every one has been a success. It's simple to put on - the cast read scripts so there are no lines to learn. If library staff aren't prepared to make fools of themselves - and many are - the local amateur dramatic society, or the Theatre Studies A level group of the local high school can usually be persuaded to help out. And they bring their own audience. More people into the libraries and the joys of crime fiction.