Vera Series by Ann Cleeves: Everything You Need to Know, with Brenda Blethyn

my name is ann cleaves and i'm a crime writer and the author of the vera books and vera is set in northumberland which is where i live and it's the most beautiful county in england it's bleak and wild and vera grew out of these hills the vera character appeared in a book called the crow trap the first vera book and it wasn't going to have a detective in it it's about a third of the way through because i don't plot i got really stuck and raymond chandler said if you're stuck with a plot have a guy burst through a door with a gun i don't do guns but i thought it would be quite interesting to just have a door fly open and see who came through i was writing a funeral scene so in the chapel the doorbell's open and in came vera stan up and that's how she came about the series that i started didn't begin being very successful the first book saw very very few books and i suppose it was the television that helped push vera into the limelight and that was a lovely chance because somebody went into an oxfam shop looking for a book to take on holiday the person who picked up the crow trap in the oxfam shop in north london was a woman called elaine collins who was books executive for itv studios and they were looking for a show to take over from frost on a sunday night they were wanting a serious character who was a woman an older woman and that's how vera came to be on the television hello i'm brenda blethen and i'm going to read a short extract from and cleaves the darkest evening it was dark and freezing and vera was starting to panic halfway home she'd known the journey was a mistake she should have listened to the team and spent the night in kimistan waiting for the storm to blow over but she'd thought she knew better she'd mocked her colleagues for their anxiety told them that extreme weather was unusual this this early in the winter even in rural northumberland and when was the weather forecast ever accurate i'm very happy with the adaptation the tv series if somebody says that a double oscar-nominated actress is going to play a character that you've created i think everybody would be overjoyed and brenda has turned vera into her own we've become very good friends and i think we think of her as aloe vera now that she's created i don't write the books thinking that they might be adapted for television i write very much for myself as a reader sometimes when i'm writing dialogue i can hear brenda's voice in my head when i'm writing the words and i think oh i do hope the scriptwriter keeps that in because i'm going to love hearing brenda say that and now she was close to it vera could see that the car was unharmed she was about to return to the land rover and continue her drive when she heard a noise a cry she shone her torch into the back of the car and saw a toddler strapped into a seat vera i think grew out of the formidable spinsters that i knew when i was growing up i was born not that long after the war and there were women who were middle-aged who'd either lost sweethearts during the war or who had decided that they would rather be single in 1950s housewives because they've been allowed roles and responsibilities that they might not otherwise have been given she was a one-off character and i thought she would just appear in one book but then i did fall in love with her and brought her back and i'm still bringing her back and here she is again in the darkest evening you

Channel: Pan Macmillan

Views: 54,709

Keywords: Pan Macmillan, reading, books, booklover, publishing, publisher, publishing house, author, Brenda Blethyn, Ann Cleeves, Vera Stanhope, Vera, DCI Vera Stanhope, book series, vera series, detective series

Id: EPovTNLX5Uk

Length: 4min 9sec (249 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020