I first came across Ann Cleeves’ books in Lees library – Lees is technically a village, but that wouldn’t be apparent to anyone driving through it unless they saw the town sign as they passed . I’d moved to Lees from another area of Oldham, and it was as if a fairy waved her magic wand over me. I moved into a beautiful new place, I was unexpectedly married to a great bloke, two children appeared, it was as if a fairy godmother had sprinkled me with lovely things!
Anyway, back to Lees library. It was a great library with a great variety of books on all subjects and a good children’s section, an excellent crime section and a very sociable book club. It was here that I first pulled an Ann Cleeves book off the shelf, one of her Palmer-Jones series, or maybe one of her Inspector Ramsey mysteries. She wrote eight of the first series and six of the second – and I wouldn’t have read them in order as they were library books which no doubt other people borrowed. I may not have read all of them at the time, but I certainly have read them all now.
I guess real Ann fans will have read both of those series, but far more people will have read the Shetland series, particularly because it was so successfully made into a TV series. I am a real Ann fan – so have watched Douglas Henshall as DI Jimmy Perez. Great actor as he is, I was disappointed in his casting as in the books Perez is seen as something of an outsider with his Spanish name and dark hair among the blond Shetlanders and Douglas is a blond. However, I wasn’t disappointed in the series, although like most TV adaptations, they veered away from the original stories.
I borrowed the first of Ann’s Vera Stanhope series from Lees library, and then we moved, so I began to haunt Weston-super-Mare library as more in the series were published. The Vera books have also been dramatised, and like Shetland, they are extremely popular, although I also have problems with Brenda Blethyn in the title role, as she doesn’t seem to me to be remotely like Vera in the books. (I loved the Two Rivers trilogy too, and TV series, but no sign of a fourth one!) I am now reading the latest Vera novel, ‘The Dark Wives’ which was only published very recently. I’m afraid I’m staying up way too late reading, but as ever with Ann, it’s almost unputdownable!
Lois Elsden 