"Wild Fire" by Ann Cleeves: Everyone is an Island

The Shetland Islands have provided novelist Ann Cleeves an ideal backdrop for mystery. Their remoteness from the mainland and isolation of their small communities from each other narrows the range of suspects to a few that readers get to know well. Cleeves has found ample opportunity for atmospheric word painting in the stark contrasts of the Shetlands' landscapes and weather. (Read my blogpost, "She Knows Her Place" 11/28/2014.) For Wild Fire, last in her series, she makes certain characters' emotional remoteness a theme that resonates with the setting.

The most sympathetic of these characters is Christopher Fleming, an eleven - year - old on the autistic spectrum. He appears at the end of the first chapter, a small boy drawn to a bonfire set up by local teenagers; they turn to mock him. Soon we learn that Christopher, obsessed with fire, once lit a small fire at school, fueling townspeople's malicious gossip aimed at the boy and his parents, newcomers from London.

Least sympathetic is a young woman named Emma. Nanny to children of another family, the Moncriefs, she has had an ill - concealed relationship with Christopher's father. At that same bonfire, she watches with a small smile while the bullies torment the child. When she's murdered soon after, none of the other characters seems to be broken up about it. She, too, was emotionally guarded and secretive, though she drew attention by hand - made dresses emulating high fashion of the late 1950s. "Her life was a performance" says one character (111); "if you got through the style and the make - up, there was nothing there" (113).

Even the lead investigators are estranged from each other. In the first Shetland books, Detective Jimmy Perez met Fran, an artist, married her, then saw her killed. Blaming himself, he fell into a depression that became a drag on the series. Cleves refreshed the story when she introduced a new supervisor for Jimmy, free - spirited Willow. But now, as their relationship deepens, Jimmy in his guilt retreats into his corner again, leaving Willow to commiserate with Jimmy's affable lieutenant Sandy:

He looked at her. 'Are you two alright?'

'Of course,' she said and then, thinking he deserved more than that, 'just a couple of things we need to sort out. Sorry, it must awkward for you.'

'He's not an easy man,' Sandy said. There was a long pause that he clearly hoped she'd fill with more information. When none was forthcoming, he added, 'But if anyone can handle him, it's you.' Another pause. 'You brought him back to us, after that business with Fran. I'll always be grateful for that.' He turned away from her, suddenly embarrassed by the intimacy of the comment. Only the beetroot tinge to the back of his neck stopped her from becoming emotional herself. But seeing his awkwardness, it was a struggle not to laugh. (190)

If other characters are enisled, Sandy's a natural bridge. His humility, compassion, and increasing competence make him the single most delightful character in the series.

While Cleves maintains her third person narrative voice at all times, she gives us the action from different characters' perceptions, sometimes covering the same scene from different perspectives in consecutive chapters. For example, Jimmy glimpses Christopher's parents through a window, and feels that he was "intruding on a moment of intimacy" (64); the next chapter, opening up that moment from the wife's perspective, shows that it was anything but. The first two chapters set up the pattern, as we see the scene of mob cruelty to Christopher at the bonfire, first through Emma's perceptions of it, then via the man at her side.

Cleeves makes a structural use of that bonfire scene. Probing memories of the bonfire time and again throughout the novel, she adds layersa of significance to the details, until our picture of that event is completed at the same moment that the story reaches a climax packed with action and emotional resonance. Shifting the perspectives on the action adds suspense.

In a remarkable chapter, Cleeves takes us into Christopher's strange and beautiful mind. His mother was the one to discover Emma's body in one of the Flemings' outbuildings, and the detectives are searching the grounds. Christopher, who seeks comfort in routine and computer screens, finds "the magic of the screen didn't work":

He was still troubled, not by the break in routine, but by pictures that came into his head, blocking the familiar images on the screen, so he found it impossible to concentrate. This had never happened before. He got to his feet and began to pace backwards and forwards across the bedroom floor, from one window to the other, in an attempt to shake the pictures loose, to send them on their way. It didn't work. Whatever he did, Emma Shearer was lodged in his head.

He walked quicker and tried to order the images, to control them. He decided to treat them like the Pokémon cards he collected. He liked to place the Pokémon characters in the order in which he'd collected them....So he allowed the pictures of Emma Shearer to flash through his head and he sorted them chronologically. (163)

By this device of chronological images, Cleeves efficiently gives us more of Christopher's perspective than he is able to give to the detectives. Christopher remembers that bonfire:

Then, he hadn't seen Emma at first. He'd sat at the top of the bank and watched the wild bird shapes of the flames and felt the sharp, stinging heat. Then they'd turned and seen him. Emma had laughed with the rest of them. Her thin face turned towards him, sharp - edged. She'd looked like a bird herself, pecking towards him, mocking.(164)

This peek into Christopher's efforts to control his mind endears him to us, even while it intensifies our image of Emma's character.

I've often felt in the Shetland books that Cleeves has left herself too much for the detectives to explain following the denoument; but in this one, everything comes together in a way that feels inevitable, and the reveal makes sense, leaving little to explain. Instead, we have a sorting out of relationships, a very satisfying conclusion to the series.


Ann Cleeves. Wild Fire. New York: Minotaur Books, 2018. See links to my posts about many other works by Ann Cleeves on my Crime Fiction page.