I recently got to chat with critically-acclaimed mystery crime writer, Ann Cleeves, on a video zoom call ahead of the launch of another TV series, ‘The Long Call’, based on her book.
To date, her fictional detectives Vera Stanhope (“Vera”) and Jimmy Perez (“Shetland”) have been a hit with fans.
And with “The Long Call”, critics are lauding the series for its inclusivity, with a gay detective as the lead.
She shared: “Here (in the UK) it is quite a big deal to have a mainstream detective TV show with a gay detective – a happily married gay detective. And the press made quite a big deal out of that.
“The team were very keen that a lot of people involved with the show, the director, Ben Aldridge, who plays DI Matthew Venn, are all gay themselves and they were all very sensitive to the script.”
While she quipped about not knowing much as a straight middle-aged woman, a lot of research went into developing the main character.
And she got three of her gay couple friends to read the script just to be sure that she wasn’t going to cause offence.
The fact that critics are lauding the series, especially for its inclusivity, validates the hard work that went into the novel.
“The Long Call” is a four-part series that sees Matthew return to a small evangelical community in North Devon to investigate the death of a man. The investigation touches on old wounds and stirs the hornet's nest while, at the same time, testing his relationship.
Cleeves is without a doubt a natural storyteller. Her life experience, bolstered by an interesting choice of careers from a cook at the Fair Isle bird observatory, auxiliary coastguard, probation officer, library outreach worker to child care officer, moulded her into the award-winning author that she is today.
She politely smiled in acknowledgement of the jobs she held down and added: “Thank you, but I didn’t do many of them for very long. The only thing that really stuck out was telling stories.”
Of her job as a cook, she revealed it was a chance meeting at a pub in London where a friend of a friend, who was going off to be the assistant warden at the observatory.
“He was moaning about how windy and wet it would be and he wasn’t sure he might make the right decision and I said something like, ‘I wouldn’t mind spending a summer in Fair Isle’. And he was like, if you are serious, they need an assistant cook, so off I went and it was an adventure,” she says.
It was while trailing to be a probation officer in Liverpool that she started writing as “there was nothing much to do”.
And the passion took root from there.
Now the detective characters that she conceived have been immortalised on the small screen.
She recalled: “Honestly, I’ve been very, very lucky. ‘Vera’ was the first show to be made and that happened because somebody went into a charity shop looking for a book to read on holiday.
“And there is nothing unusual about that except that she happened to be a book executive for ITV studios and they were looking for a detective series with a strong female lead.
“She picked up the first ‘Vera’ book and obviously thought she would make a good character. They didn’t want to stereotype so having a woman who wasn’t beautiful and couldn’t run and didn’t wear high heels, which is what a lot of American female detectives do, I think, caught her imagination.”
The same production company makes all three TV shows and Cleeves counts herself fortunate in that regard.
As for being consulted on the actors embodying her protagonists, she revealed: “I got to know the scriptwriter of ‘Vera’ really well. And he told me they were showing the script to Brenda Blethyn.
“At the time, she was a double Oscar nominee, she was famous for her films, ‘Secrets & Lies’ and ‘Little Voice’. And we knew if she agreed to do it, the show would go on because she was such a huge name.
“We were absolutely delighted when she said yes,” Cleeve says.
Interestingly, Jimmy Perez from her books is a stark contrast, physically, to the screen character, played by Douglas Henshall.
Cleeves explained: “I had been to the read-through so I had met the actors at that point. And I realised that although the Jimmy Perez of my books was dark-haired with Mediterranean ancestry, the actor they cast was ginger and very Scottish looking.
“But Douglas really captured that character. He’s a brilliant actor. Just the hairs on my neck went out. It is quite hard for a strong male actor to do kindness without appearing soft.”
She added: “The book and the screen are such different forms. I was just happy to let them get on with it.”
In the meantime, her latest ‘Vera’ book “The Rising Tide”, the tenth in the series, has been released.
She added: “ I suppose it is my lockdown book. It is about a group of older people who have known each other since they were teenagers, who meet every five years on Holy Island, off Northumberland.
“It is about celebrating friendship and, of course, there is a murder and Vera comes in to investigate,” she says.
Catch “The Long Call” on BritBox. And you can catch up on “Shetland” and “Vera” on the same streaming platform.