精东传媒

December 22, 2020

My favourite detective: why Vera is so much more than a hat, mac and attitude

Writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and on screen

Vera stands on a windswept headland contemplating the disgruntled North Sea. She鈥檚 clad in her usual garb; the battered hat, the annoying scarf and the tent-like mac that swirls around her stocky legs and scruffy boots.

When I first met Vera Stanhope in the crime fiction of , I liked her, but not so much. It wasn鈥檛 until Brenda Blethyn brought her to life in the 2011 ITV series that I became truly enamoured.

Ten seasons later, with series 11 already commissioned, Blethyn has made Vera well and truly hers through a variety of mannerisms that are easy to mock but hard to get right.

A woman with quirks

Emily Taheny recently on Sean Micaleff鈥檚 Mad as Hell but didn鈥檛 quite get there. Vera is much more than the hat, the Columbo mac and the attitude.

Blethyn鈥檚 version of Vera includes a wide range of audible 鈥渉mmphs鈥�, the interrogative 鈥渉mmmms?鈥�, and a chesty cackle. Blethyn also does a lot with her eyes. There鈥檚 Vera鈥檚 hawk-like gaze that can spot a lie at a hundred paces. There鈥檚 the evasive sidelong glance when she鈥檚 got something to hide, usually her drinking or a sugar fix.

And let鈥檚 not forget Vera鈥檚 walk, that determined short-legged stride that somehow gets her where she wants to be faster than anyone else.

^{Brenda Blethyn鈥檚 Vera teeters on the verge of comedy at times, but she pulls it off.}

In terms of genre, Vera sits within the tradition of the elderly female sleuth. This would include Miss Amelia Butterworth who first appeared in Anna Katherine Green鈥檚 first published in 1897. Thirty years later, picked up her knitting and nosed onto the scene of crime.

The key difference is that Vera is no amateur, but a Detective Chief Inspector in charge of a major team whom she routinely berates like recalcitrant school pupils who haven鈥檛 done their homework.

No doubt about it, Vera can be rude and impatient. She鈥檚 also partisan, favouring her young male colleagues over her female ones, while torturing Detective Constable Kenny Lockhart (Jon Morrison) with endless boring routine investigations. Sometimes she鈥檚 hard to like.

But Vera also has extraordinary empathy with the hard done by in an area where people have been doing it tough for a very long time. The North East of England is a region of spectacular beauty, deeply scarred by the effects of the industrial revolution that ended with the closing of the mines and the shipyards in the 1980s. It鈥檚 also my home, although I left it a long time ago.

 

Places of imagination

One of the now well recognised pleasures of reading crime fiction or watching a TV crime drama is the . Whether the location is evoked on screen or on the page there is always a significant relationship between the characters and the environment that has shaped them.

In a fascinating essay on the , cultural heritage professor Stijn Reijnders outlines the difference between two sorts of places: the lieux de m茅moire (places of memory, as described by Pierre Nora) and his concept of lieux d鈥檌magination (places of imagination).

While the former are 鈥渞eal鈥� locations that serve as places of pilgrimage to memorialise past events (think Gallipoli), lieux d鈥檌magination are the places we visit that are associated with fictional happenings, such as the Morse tour of Oxford or the Wallander tour of Ystad.

Such forms of cultural tourism enable readers, or indeed viewers, to pass from the real world into the fictional one and back again on a journey of the imagination.

As convincing as Reijnders鈥� argument might be, it doesn鈥檛 quite encompass how I relate to the landscape inhabited by Vera which evokes my own lieux de m茅moire.

Vera鈥檚 stone cottage on the moors reminds me of our family holidays in Northumbria where I would ride the moors on a grumpy, rotund, Shetland pony that might well have been called Vera.

^{From the moors to council flats, Vera evokes a strong sense of place.}

Every time Vera goes to Newcastle, I鈥檓 fascinated by how much cleaner the quayside looks since I last stood on the sooty pavement and contemplated the mucky Tyne bridge, the junior sibling of the Sydney harbor bridge: two bridges that connect where I was then with where I am now.

And I鈥檓 particularly delighted when Vera ends up in South Shields, my home town, and has an intense conversation with a witness or a suspect on the foreshore when there鈥檚 no reason to be outside except to capture the view.

Although I take great delight in the familiar locations, I鈥檓 constantly arguing with the geographic logic of the series while being surprised that it鈥檚 not raining 鈥� although in my memory it always is.

And so I oscillate, between the fictional and the remembered, with Vera as the character who tethers me to both through a narrative that takes me to another time and place where the answers will always be found by a smart, dumpy, older woman in a raincoat.

, Senior Professor of Communication and Media Studies, 精东传媒 of 精东传媒

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