– At least one more book, she promises NTB on the phone at home from Northumberland – the same landscape in the north-east of England in which “Vera” is filmed and where the 11 crime novels about her take place.
Cleeves came out with the first book about “Vera” in 1999, while the last one so far came out in August. At the same time, she is also behind the “Shetland” series. She believes viewers and readers are attracted to the smaller places she depicts.
– People there take care of their neighbors and know each other, and have a kind of cohesion in the local community, something we perhaps feel is about to fall apart in the wider world? she ponders.
Always have a solution
– But they just as easily turn loose on each other and kill in the series’ small local communities, and we allow ourselves to be entertained by that?
– That it gives us joy is, in one way, a strange phenomenon. Maybe because we live in such uncertain times? Traditional crime fiction always has a solution. It gives a sense of clarification, of justice being done to the full – and order being restored, says Ann Cleeves:
– And isn’t that what we are all longing for at the moment? Getting back to normal? Traditional crime fiction can give us that. That’s why I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’ve moved away from gritty crime, which isn’t as popular as it was – the world is dark enough as it is.
Police first
Ann Cleeves reveals that she is most concerned with people’s doings and actions – and less with the plot and the story.
– I am very curious about people. In today’s Britain, the police are usually the first to be called to the scene when there is a crisis – whether it is a runaway child or a psychotic episode. It allows me to portray what I am interested in – such as the cohesion of a society.
Cleeves used to work as a probation officer and met murderers – who she says are “mostly pathetic, inadequate little men with no self-control”.
– Murder of strangers is rare, although many people like to write about it. I’m much more interested in looking at families and what holds them together – and what tears them apart.
Have compassion
Ann Cleeves says she created the Vera character to have “a woman of a certain age who was not dependent on a man, who was not married, who was not concerned with raising children, but who could be very independent, authoritative and skillful”.
– But she has compassion. One of my great heroes is Georges Simenon, who wrote the Maigret books. He said of his detective that his role was not to judge but to understand. And I think that’s what Vera does. She not only wants to understand the victim and the witnesses, but also the perpetrator. She wants to find out what made them kill.
– And then she calls everyone “pet”?
– Everyone up here does that; it’s what locals call someone they like.
Changed with time
When asked if she has allowed the Vera books to change with the times, Cleeves replies that the latest book – “The Dark Wives” – deals with a very current topic in Britain.
– It is that many of the institutions that were previously run by the state or local authorities have been privatized and are run by profit-driven, private organisations. The book deals with the unfairness of people making money from troubled teenagers, it says.
It will also be recorded – but then it’s over, because Brenda Blethyn – who gave life to Vera Stanhope – has said that now it’s enough.
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Christmas lights in the summer
– Series 14 will be the last. I think Brenda still has some regrets about leaving – because she loved coming up to the North East coast. But she’s spent almost every summer for the last 15 years up here filming, and I think she wants some time with her family.
Precisely the fact that the “Vera” recordings took place in the summertime led to certain challenges when the series’ first Christmas special was to be filmed on Holy Island – i.e. Lindisfarne. It can be seen both on BritBox from 27 November and on NRK TV until Saturday.
– The islanders were very cooperative and put up Christmas lights and other decorations in their houses – even though it was the middle of summer!
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Three book series for TV
Ann Cleeves (70) estimates that she has written 37 books, mostly crime fiction. The author’s debut was in 1986, and the first “Vera” crime came in 1999.
Both the “Vera” and “Shetland” series have found their way to the TV screen. It also has a third crime series, “The Long Call”, which she unleashed in 2019 with police inspector Matthew Venn.
She has won a number of awards, and in 2021 was honored with the British order OBE, Order of the British Empire, for “her services to reading and libraries”.
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