Cleeves' work was first optioned for television after producer Elaine Collins discovered a copy of one of the Vera novels, The Crow Trap, while searching for holiday reading in an Oxfam shop in north London, where she lived. Collins was the books executive for ITV Studios, which was looking for a new female detective to fill its Sunday night drama slot.[4][5] Collins subsequently went on to buy the rights to Cleeves' Jimmy Perez novels for the BBC, which turned them into Shetland.
In 2006 she won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger for her novel Raven Black,[1] and in 2008 she was elected to the prestigious Detection Club. In 2014 Cleeves was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Sunderland.[7] In 2015, Cleeves was the Programming Chair for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival & the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. In 2015, she was shortlisted for the Dagger in the Library UK Crime Writers' Association award for an author's body of work in British libraries (UK).[8]
These novels, except for The Glass Room and The Dark Wives, have been dramatized in the television series Vera on ITV, which stars Brenda Blethyn in the title role. The programme premiered in May 2011.
In 2013, Red Bones was dramatised by David Kane for BBC television as the first episode of the series Shetland, which stars Douglas Henshall as Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez. Episodes broadcast in 2014 were based on Raven Black, Dead Water, and Blue Lightning.[15]
"Hector's Other Woman" (2011) – (re-released as "The Woman on the Island" in 2022)
"Mud" (2011)
"The Habit of Silence" (2011)
"Drop Dead Gorgeous" (2012)
"The Harmless Pursuits of Archibald Stamp" (2013)
"Secrets of Soil" (2013)
"The Spinster" (2014)
"The Pirate" (2014)
"Stranded" (2014)
"The Writer-in-Residence" (2014)
"The Starlings" (2015)
"Dreaming of Rain and Peter Lovesey" (2016)
"The Queen of Mystery" (2017)
"The Return" (2017)
"Moses and the Locked Tent Mystery" (2018)
"Frozen" (2020)
"Written in Blood" (2020)
"Wild Swimming" (2021)
"The Girls on the Shore" (2022)
"The Woman on the Island" (2022) – (originally released as "Hector's Other Woman" in 2011)
TV series adaptations
The Vera Stanhope novels have been dramatised as the TV detective series Vera beginning in 2011; the Jimmy Perez novels as the TV series Shetland; and the Matthew Venn novel The Long Call (from Cleeves' Two Rivers book series) as the TV series The Long Call (premiered autumn 2021). Some of the later episodes in the Vera and Shetland series were original scripts based on Cleeves's characters.