Ann Cleeves Press. Ann Cleeves Ann Cleeves (born 1954) is an English crime-writer. In 2006 she won the inaugural Duncan Lawrie Dagger, the richest crime-writing prize in the world, for her novel "Raven Black". Cleeves studied English at Sussex University but dropped out. She then took up various jobs including cook, auxiliary coastguard, probation officer, library outreach worker and child care officer. She lives in Whitley Bay, and is widowed with two daughters. The Vera Stanhope novels have been dramatized as the TV detective series "Vera" and the Jimmy Perez novels as the series "Shetland". In 2014 Cleeves was awarded an Honorary
Detectives Inc. follow Will Eisner's influential "A Contract with God". The Gay League's "LBGT Comics Timeline" cites the book as "featuring the first lesbian characters in mass-market comics". The books' genesis, author Don McGregor recalled, had gone back several years. "I had created "Detectives Inc." as early as 1969, as roles for Alex Simmons and myself to play in Super8 millimeter movies I was making". In the early 1970s, the two produced a crude "Detectives Inc." comic book, self-published via photocopier. In 1980, Eclipse Enterprises published "Detectives Inc.: A Remembrance of Threatening Green", the first of what would become two graphic novels