Suddenly Ann Cleeves Is Everywhere

The Great Shelf Collapse of 2021 has turned into the perfect opportunity for me to go through lots of stuff that I've been keeping over the years for what turns out to have been no good reason. I've spent hours sorting through it all, and I've gladly parted with a number of books, puzzles, articles of clothing, etc. that were desperately in need of a better home. Surprisingly, it's all been kind of fun (despite the $400 closet makeover now required) because I've uncovered a few "gems" that I'd forgotten all about - especially a few books I thought I may have rashly disposed of years earlier. 

Other than that, I've been reading Ann Cleeves's first Vera Stanhope novel, The Crow Trap. My edition of the book is 535 pages long and this is one of the most complicated mysteries I've read in a while...so many characters, with so many individual histories, and so many interconnections that date back a generation or two. That means there is a lot of room for red herrings and wrong conclusions, and Cleeves makes the most of them. It also means that I'm doing something I seldom do; I'm highlighting certain passages for later reference and jotting down a few notes in the margins. I don't think I would do that with most any hard covers, but I'm reading the deluxe paperback version of The Crow Trap, and it doesn't bother me too much to mark this one up even though it's a brand new copy. (I'm weird that way.)

Ann Cleeves seems to be everywhere I turn these days. She's featured in a great interview in the current issue of Mystery Scene and Vera Stanhope is featured in a separate article in the same issue titled "Senior Sleuths." That article compares older fictional detectives like:

• Agatha Christie's Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot
• Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch
• James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux
• Ian Rankin's John Rebus
• Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski
• Ruth Rendell's Reginald Wexford
• Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder 
• John Sanford's Lucas Davenport

to a crop of older detectives "still kicking butt" in today's popular fiction. Connelly, Burke, Rankin, and Paretsky are still adding books in their own series, so the use of the word "still" is not quite appropriate, but these are the older detectives that get special attention in the article:

• M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin
• Ann Cleeves's Vera Stanhope
• Daniel Friedman's Buck Schatz
• Naomi Hirahara's Mas Arai
• Lee Hollis's Poppy Harmon
• Ragnar Jónasson's Hulda Hermannsdóttir
• Barbara Nelly's Blanche White
• Scott Turow's Sandy Stern

I've read way over 100 novels from that first bunch but only a few from the second, so I plan to explore that list a lot more. I've found over the years, probably as a function of my own aging, that I particularly enjoy reading about fictional detectives who may have lost a step or two, men and women who are having to learn little tricks to compensate for their aging if they are to stay in the game much longer.

And then Ann Cleeves popped up yesterday in a live interview as part of this year's Texas Book Festival, the annual festival started by Laura Bush way back when her husband was governor of Texas. The 45-minute interview did suffer a little from connectivity problems between England and Texas, especially toward the end, but I loved every minute of it. The interview can be accessed at this link if you have a little patience with it. You do have to register at CrowdCast, but you don't have to use that app to watch the interview because there is an option for watching it through your browser instead.

I've often envied people who only discover one of my very favorite writers really late because they then have the pleasure knowing that they have twenty, thirty, or even more wonderful books to experience for the first time. I'm starting to think this may have finally happened for me with my recent discovery of Ann Cleeves, the novelist, not just Ann Cleeves the creator of television series. 

And speaking of that difference. I've already seen the television version of The Crow Trap, and did not find it particularly impressive except for the Vera Stanhope and Joe Ashworth characters - and especially Brenda Blethyn's portrayal of Vera. I went back and re-watched the first 15 minutes of the television version last night, and I found it remarkably "dumbed down" as it's presented. I realize that there are only so many minutes to work with for television and movie screenplay writers, but this served as a good reminder that "the book is always better than the movie" and why that is so. 

Enough for now...only 58 pages to go in The Crow Trap, and I hear Vera calling me.