In a foreword to The Long Call (New York: Minotaur Books, 2019), author Ann Cleeves is nervous to start a new series with a new detective, "almost like a teenager bringing a new girlfriend or boyfriend home for the first time." She has concluded her series about detective Jimmy Perez on the remote Shetland Islands; her Vera Stanhope series set in Northumberland is still a going concern. The debut story for Detective Matthew Venn succeeds in keeping us off-balance and engaged. For this reader, it's also fun and instructive to see how an experienced author goes about setting up for future installments.
First, Cleeves sets the place, its geography and its social strata. Her foreword tells us that this novel started when she re-visited her childhood town North Devon [see photo collage]. As this novel progresses, we get to know the windswept beach, the two rivers that converge, the seaside tourist district, and the steep street where the victim lived. "I'd forgotten quite how beautiful the place is," she writes, adding ominously, "but sometimes beauty is skin deep." Exploring the contrasts will give her material for stories to come.
In the same way, she builds contrast into her detective and his associates. He's Matthew Venn, diffident but professional, no longer religious but reared to be a leader in an evangelical sect called "The Brethren," strait-laced but not straight. Venn's husband Jon is sunny, outgoing, confident and competent. Venn's team comprises Jen Rafferty, whose house is a mess, her teenagers resigned to their mother's absence, her psychological wounds from an abusive marriage still sore; and Ross May, cocky and impatient, eager to finish work to get back to his wife, little kids, and rugby team.
The particulars of this story concern a body found near Venn's own home on the beach. The victim is identified as Simon Walden, a short-order cook, sometimes depressed, sometimes addicted, formerly homeless but boarding with two young women. Following leads, the detectives find that he has much more to him than they at first believed. He also worked at "the Woodyard," a community center where, as Venn gradually comes to realize, all the suspects and witnesses are connected, including its founding director, Venn's Jonathan. Venn feels that's "too close to home" and he's losing grip on the investigation: "Too many people circling around each other, without quite touching."
What's no fun for him is fun for the reader.
Cleeves writes in third person, alternating her chapters among different characters, including sometimes the suspects and witnesses. This way, we know a clue from one character when the next character has no clue, and that's a wicked little pleasure. She writes with sympathy for these people, even those who are pretty unlikable to each other.
In this novel, Cleeves also writes with sympathy and respect about adults with Down's Syndrome and their families. A program for adults with Downs Syndrome, also housed at the Woodyard, emerges as important to the crime. Why did Walden ride the bus to share candy and chat with one of the women during her ride home each day, being as he lived the other direction? Why did he board the bus a block away from the center, out of sight of the people there? Before these suggestive questions can be answered, another woman from the center disappears, hiking a sense of urgency that got this reader's heart racing.
Cleeves also textures her writing with interwoven themes of guilt and faith. Many of the characters have an albatross around their necks. In the opening pages, Venn himself watches his father's funeral from afar. His mother won't speak to him, blaming the father's decline on his son's apostasy and sexuality. The philanthropist who supports the Woodyard's counseling center blames himself for not recognizing the seriousness of his wife's depression before her suicide. Having killed a young girl in a car crash, Walden had an albatross tattooed literally around his neck.
Sign me up for the next installment.
[See my curated list of blogposts about works by Ann Cleeves and other crime writers on my Crime Fiction page.]
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