How charity shop browse gave TV ’tec big break
She might have written her last Shetland novel but Ann Cleeves will continue to create cases for Vera,, her other fictional detective. And she revealed how a chance browse in a charity shop transformed her character’s fortunes.
The current series on ITV is the ninth for Vera Stanhope, the detective, played by Brenda Blethyn.
But Ann told how only TV producer Elaine Collins’ search for some holiday reading turned things around. Elaine, who is married to Thick of It star Peter Capaldi, was in Oxfam browsing for books when she came across the first Vera novel.
Ann said: “The first Vera book The Crow Trap didn’t do terribly well and a lot of them were knocking around in secondhand bookshops. “One ended up in an Oxfam shop in North London and Peter Capaldi’s wife Elaine Collins, then the books executive for ITV Studios, went in looking for a holiday read and picked it up.
“She was looking for a series with a strong female lead to replace Frost on a Sunday night and that’s how Vera came to be on TV. It really was serendipity,” Ann said. Ann, who had already won acclaim and top crime-writing awards before Elaine’s bookshop browse, couldn’t be happier with both Henshall and Brenda as the telly incarnations of her coppers.
As Vera is filmed in Northumberland, right on the doorstep of Ann’s Whitley Bay home, she has become particularly close to Brenda who has won Baftas and Golden Globes and twice been nominated for an Oscar. And it seems Ann has a very famous fan too. “I’ve signed a book for Hillary Clinton. One of her team asked me to sign it for ‘Hillary’ and, not realising, I asked if it was one ‘l’ or two!” she said.