Ann Cleeves on Vera’s final chapter
The crime novelist reveals how the older women she knew growing up inspired Vera, and why she would love to see Brenda Blethyn return to the role one last time.
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The crime novelist reveals how the older women she knew growing up inspired Vera, and why she would love to see Brenda Blethyn return to the role one last time.
Vera was never meant to be a detective. I was writing a book, but got stuck and Raymond Chandler once said when you are stuck with the plot, have a man burst through the door with a gun. I don’t do guns, so I had Vera burst through the door and there she was fully formed. I described her as looking like a bag lady.
When I was growing up, there were older women whose men had been lost during the war and were on their own: teachers, librarians and district nurses. They inspired Vera. When it was televised, I couldn’t believe ITV found a double Oscar nominee [Brenda Blethyn] to play the character I’d invented.
I’m writing the last Vera book, but I’m not saying anything more about it, you’ll have to wait. I don’t think it will be televised: Brenda decided she had finished – she was in almost every scene with such long days. I think she made the right decision at the time. I was on set for the last day of filming and it was very moving with lots of tears.
If this last book was televised, would she be talked back into appearing? I think she would certainly do a one-off Christmas special or something, which would be fabulous. She would love to do it, but the studio is being dismantled now, so it would be far too expensive.
Brenda and I have been friends from the start and I still see her. She joined me at a writing festival this summer and we had a great time. She’s very generous and will sign books with me, which means I get a lot more people because everybody wants Brenda’s signature.
I’ve never been tempted to give up writing. Even if I’d never been published, I would still want to write. It helps me make a bit of sense of the world.
I started writing after my husband Tim and I moved to our first home on Hilbre Island, between the Wirral and North Wales. Tim was the warden and we were the only two residents. It was 11 acres – a local authority nature reserve, with no mains electricity or water. I was 23 and working for the probation service in Merseyside.
Every day at low tide I’d walk two miles through the mud to the mainland. But when I became pregnant with my first daughter [Anne has daughters aged 42 and 45], I gave up work and took up writing. For the first 20 years, I didn’t have much commercial success until in 2006 with Raven Black, my first Jimmy Perez book in the Shetland mysteries.
After 40 years of marriage, Tim died very suddenly at the end of 2017 from a heart attack and I just wanted to run away from Northumberland, where we lived. I needed a break from the sympathy.
My daughter, who was a midwife, said grief is like the waves of labour pain. It comes, it eases and then it comes back.
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