Mike Craven: Crime writer motivated by cancer survival

Mike Craven served in the Army and worked as a probation officer before becoming an award-winning author. It was surviving cancer that made him turn to a life of crime writing.

On Monday, Mike had a tummy ache. On Friday, he was in hospital being told he could die.

The pain in his stomach, which he had been using indigestion medicine to treat, turned out to be a rugby-ball-sized tumour caused by Burkitt lymphoma.

"It was a kill-or-be-cured cancer," Mike says, adding: "You either got better or you didn't."

At the age of 35, Mike moved into hospital to face a gruelling course of surgeries and chemotherapy.

He spent six months living at Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary fearing the worst, his family planning his funeral.

But in a dramatic twist apt for the crime writer he would become, his cancer defied doctors' predictions, stopped its spread and he recovered.

Treatment had taken its toll and he came out of hospital unable to resume cycling or playing golf, so he turned to a childhood passion - writing.

He had grown up reading books in Hazlerigg, a small village five miles north of Newcastle.

As well as the Famous Five and Secret Seven books his mother Susan bought for him, he also devoured the Malory Towers she got for his sisters.

The avid Newcastle United fan wrote short stories about football and had early ambitions to make a career of it, asking his mother to enrol him on a writing correspondence course although that did not amount to anything.

His writing ended when he joined the Army "by accident" at the age of 16.

Having accompanied best friend Nick - who was desperate to join the infantry - to the Army recruitment office at Haymarket, a wily recruitment officer suggested Mike do the tests as well which, with nothing better to do, he did.

He passed and was offered a job, so spent the next 12 years in the forces.

His love of reading continued with the Army like "one big book club," he says, adding: "When you go on operations you only have room for one or two books in your bag so you end up swapping with your mates.

"You all ended up reading the same books and talking about them."

The end of his Army career was almost as haphazard as its start.

"I had to sign some paperwork linked to my pension and there was a form to hand in your notice accidentally attached," Mike recalls.

"I just read it and thought, 'actually maybe now is the time to leave, I'm not enjoying it as much as I did and maybe I should try something new'. So I signed the notice form as well."

Out of the Army and with no idea of what to do next, Mike walked past Newcastle University and suddenly decided to give education a try.

Choosing social work because it was a two-year course rather than three, Mike was in a queue to enrol when he struck up conversation with a "massive Scotsman" who went on to be one of his best friends.

"He asked me what area of social work I wanted to work in - I didn't have a clue," Mike recalls.

"So I asked him and he said he wanted to work in probation services, and once he explained why I thought, 'that sounds good - I want to do that too'."

He got a job in Whitehaven on the Cumbrian coast and worked his way up through the probation service, helping ex-prisoners and convicts find their feet.

Then his stomach ache changed everything.

Having returned home from hospital and unable to take up the physical pursuits he had enjoyed, Mike started writing to keep himself sane and decided his sleuth should mirror his own situation.

"I did not want my character to have the alcohol problem that has been done so well by so many other writers so I gave him the same cancer I had had," Mike, now 54 and living in Carlisle, says.

"It was not something I had seen before."

Feeling motivated by his new detective Avison Fluke, Mike entered his work for the Crime Writers' Association (CWA) Debut Dagger award in 2013.

"I do not know if I would have done that without the cancer - I suspect I would have been writing still - but just for me and not let anybody else read it," Mike says.

"I think it built a head of steam and the pressure to have a go became overwhelming."

He did not win the award but got to enjoy a night out with some of the biggest names in crime writing that gave him a glimpse of a new life.

He told his wife Joanne he wanted to give it a go full-time.

"I said, 'let's give it three years and see if I can make it work', she said we could do it for 12 months - we compromised and I agreed to try it for 12 months," Mike says with a laugh.

He met a small publisher at a writers' conference in Gretna in 2014 that led to his first two books being published, which in turn caught the eye of an agent who signed him up and moved him to a bigger publishing house.

There were two novels in the Avison Fluke series, a further five featuring Mike's sleuth Washington Poe and now new thriller series set in America about to launch.

He won the highly-coveted Golden Dagger award from the CWA in 2019 for The Puppet Show, an accolade previously presented to the likes of Anne Cleeves, Henning Mankell and Ian Rankin.

He is in talks to adapt some of his work for TV and films and he is now a full-time writer - his wife now working in the industry as well.

Mike starts his newest book on 1 December with a view to publish in about 18 months' time.

He has also not forgotten his cancer story and though he says he does not think about his experiences very often, he is happy to talk about it in the hope of helping others.

He is a supporter of Cancer Research UK, which has carried out extensive trials on Burkitt lymphoma.

"The cancer was an awful thing to go through," Mike says.

"But it led to so many other things."

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