Vera and the Crow Trap

I can’t be bothered with American police dramas, but I’ll watch British crime all day long. Well, not all day long. But I really like British detective shows. 

“Vera” is one of my very favorite British TV shows of any genre. It stars Brenda Blethyn as DCI Vera Stanhope, a brilliant, quirky, irascible detective. Vera and her crew of Detective Constables and Detective Sergeants are a veritable murder-solving machine in Northumberland, which is apparently a hotbed of homicide. 

I love “Vera” for lots of reasons - the bleak but beautiful Northumberland landscape, the far north accent that sounds like a blend of Manchester and Scotland, the clothes and interiors, …but mostly the characters, and especially Vera herself. I love the way the characters look. Even the most beautiful actors (David Leon, Clare Calbraith, Wunmi Mosaku, Kenny Doughty, Brenda Blethyn herself) look like normal, real people in this show. Vera’s rumpled clothing and her careless appearance are sometimes the subject of comments or jokes, but not mean or critical jokes. The other characters, and by extension the viewers, know that Vera is perfectly comfortable as she is, and that her unorthodox fashion sense and her refusal to conform with a boss-babe appearance standard do not make her less powerful or less effective in any way. 

Vera is complex. She lives alone, and has very few relationships other than with her subordinates, with whom she is very demanding, and sometimes mean. In almost every show, she has a moment of kindness or humor that softens her enough that we viewers still love her, but we’re also still glad that she’s not our boss. We learn a little bit at a time about Vera’s lonely and difficult childhood and her early career, and we see her at home in the isolated cottage that she once shared with her alcoholic father, but these personal moments are few and far between. Most of the show’s action takes place in the police station or at crime scenes, and most of Vera's interactions are with fellow police officers, or criminals and victims and witnesses. 

*****

“Vera” is based on the crime novels of Ann Cleeves. She wrote a series of novels about Vera Stanhope, and another series of novels on which the series “Shetland” was based. I also liked “Shetland” quite a bit - and now you know what I did during the pandemic - and I thought it might be time to read an Ann Cleeves book, just to see if I like them. I started with The Crow Trap, the first Vera novel.

Vera is a very static character in this first novel - we see her rough edges and her rumpled appearance but we don’t know what she’s thinking. She is not even mentioned until about a third of the way into the book, unless you count her brief appearance at a funeral, where she’s described as a mysterious middle-aged stranger. Those of us who have seen Vera on TV will guess, as I did, that this unnamed stranger was Vera but readers who are beginning at the beginning won’t have a clue.  

The Crow Trap is about three women who live in a rustic cottage together while they complete some field work for an environmental study. The three are not friends. In fact, they don’t like each other much. When the youngest of the three is murdered, Vera comes in as the lead investigator. The book formed the basis of one of the show’s early episodes, but I couldn’t remember what happened until the very end. Like any good mystery writer, Ann Cleeves throws lots of red herrings in with the clues, keeping us guessing until the end. But I don’t really read detective novels and on the rare occasions when I do, I don’t really care who the killer is. I just like to become absorbed in a compelling story with interesting characters and great writing, and Ann Cleeves delivers all of this. Vera herself is not so much a character as a personage with whom everyone is forced to contend; and their reactions to her reveal something about themselves. While Vera is fairly static (she comes out of this whole story exactly as she is at the beginning) the other characters, even the minor characters, are complex and interesting and flawed and unpredictable. 

I have two more Ann Cleeves novels in my Kindle queue, so maybe I do read detective novels now. Maybe I’ll start gardening and watching birds. Maybe I’ll find a diner and go there every day and order nothing but soup. I’m 60 now and it’s time to embrace my elderly lady era. Vera Stanhope can be my fashion inspiration.