3 Rules for an Ann Cleeves Mystery

(Warning, spoilers.)
Ann Cleeves is a British mystery writer, who has won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award, and has two of her detective series, the Vera Stanhope books and the Shetland series, adapted for BBC television. Her books are extremely popular. I was finishing up one of the Shetland books, Blue Lightning, earlier this week, and I was reminded that there are three rules for a Cleeves mystery.

• Rule 1: There will be no likeable characters introduced.
• Rule 2: If Rule 1 is broken and you like a character, that character will be murdered sometime in the next two or three chapters.
• Rule 3: If both Rule 1 and Rule 2 are broken, the likeable character will lose the thing of value they’ve been seeking or protecting over the course of the entire novel.

Rule 3 means that they may survive but their relationship will be destroyed; they will lose custody of a beloved child who will go live in the south somewhere; they will lose their home, their promotion, their political cause or the funding for their research. These rules prove out with great consistency across both series.

As I read along in Blue Lightning I thought, “Wow, that Jane, I really like her.” Oh, no! I tried to take it back, but too late. You know what happens.

I really wondered why I bothered to keep reading. The book was the opposite of escapism in many ways. Everything in the “real” world is terrible. Everything on the remote island is terrible too. If people aren’t terrible, they’re dead. Why was I bothering? No, seriously, why was I? I finally teased it out. I continue to read Ann Cleeves now and then because she does an extraordinary job of evoking a sense of place. In the Shetland series, whether it’s interiors or exteriors, there is a palpable sense of the spaces around us.

The “locked room” or interior in Blue Lightning, at least for the first death, is a decommissioned light house converted to a field center for bird study. The space is more than the tower of a lighthouse. It’s got a couple of flats, two dormitories, a large kitchen and dining area, a common room and a space converted into the “bird room” where the scientific work is done. Without drawing us a floor plan or stopping to describe the place in a long passage, Cleeves let me see and feel the building, mostly through character-based details. I imagine the long, fully stocked kitchen from the actions of the center’s cook, especially when she is serving from the “hatch” into the dining room. When a character glances through the open door into the bird room, I get a sense of how it and the common room attach without being “walked through it.”

Rarely does Cleeves have a character look around a room and describe it to themselves, and when they do, it serves more than one purpose. A person who lives at the field center takes a moment to describe her room to herself in detail, from the windows to the fact that the sheets on her bed (which we can’t see) are ironed. She thinks about this because the room is a haven, a sanctuary, and she loves it. See Rule 3.

The nature of the Shetland Islands, and especially their weather, play a large role in any of the Shetland series, and this one is no different. A driving storm that lasts for two days adds to the challenges and atmosphere of the place, particularly after the first murder. The weather is acknowledged for what it truly is, an elemental force to be respected and reckoned with, not mastered or controlled. Transportation stops. Businesses pause, and people hunker down.

For the Shetland series, Cleeves created a character who is a painter, and who brings the eye of a visual artist to new places. Cleeves gets a lot of mileage out of this, without it being obvious, because this multi-book character always sees things, particularly landscapes, as paintings. The artist actually creates some of the paintings, adding a bit of realism and blurring the expository function a bit.

Whenever I pick up one of these, I know I probably won’t like very many people and the ones I do like–those who survive–will be standing amid the splintered ruins of their lives at the end. Still, I reach for one now and then, because I want the taste of snow, the play of dawn light on the rugged hills, the smell and feel of a snug croft with a peat fire in the stove. Cleeves will almost always draw me back for that.