On television, Ann Cleeves gives us detectives whose company is more dependable than their cases. We prefer Vera, but both it and Shetland need their leading actors to make up for uncertain plotting.
Fi1m perspective
Brenda Blethyn makes Vera Stanhope's awkward manners worth watching in Vera (2011), even when the police work takes too long. We enjoyed her company because Blethyn gives the detective warmth without smoothing away the awkwardness. That is where Ann Cleeves's work serves television most reliably: she creates investigators interesting enough to spend time with between questions. The series puts considerable faith in its central character, and for the most part we share it. But our liking for Vera does not make the slower stretches pass any quicker or the strained plotting easier to believe.
The Crow Trap (1999) introduced Vera in a novel first conceived as a standalone psychological thriller. The breakthrough came with Raven Black (2006), which introduced Jimmy Perez and began the Shetland novels. Matthew Venn followed in The Long Call (2019), the start of the Two Rivers series. Place comes first in Cleeves's work: enclosed communities shape the characters and their reasons for committing murder. That interest in ordinary people drawn into crime gives the television adaptations something to explore beyond the identity of the culprit.
Shetland (2013) benefits from that interest in the lives surrounding a case: the wartime history gives its opening enquiry something worth pursuing beyond a list of suspects. Douglas Henshall makes the patient Perez persuasive company, and the landscape has a presence of its own. We found the opening mystery frustrating because the acting promised a more demanding case than the crowded plotting delivered. The shortage of suspense matters, and attractive scenery cannot do much about it.
We would not judge the novels' plotting by every weakness of the programmes. Cleeves's preference for outsider detectives gives the actors something useful to work with before the first question is asked. The difficulty is keeping the people around them equally interesting, and Vera too often gives its supporting cast too little to do. Begin with Vera for Blethyn, provided a tightly worked puzzle is not the evening's chief requirement.
Biography
Ann Cleeves OBE is a British crime writer. She created the Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez detective series, both adapted for television.
The ITV series Vera began in 2011 and the BBC series Shetland in 2013; Cleeves is credited as creator on the former and as novel writer on the latter. She won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger in 2006 for the novel Raven Black, the first in the Shetland series.
