SPOILER ALERT!! This review contains spoilers of The Seagull by Ann Cleeves and Vera S9E4 “The Seagull” because I couldn’t write a review about reading and watching without commenting on the differences. STOP after the plot synopsis if you don’t want spoilers. I absolutely recommend both the TV show and the book if you’re a fan of police procedurals!
The Seagull (Vera Stanhope #8) by Ann Cleeves
Publisher: Minotaur
Genre: Mystery
Pages: 397
Format: Paperback
What it’s about: When Vera gives a lecture in a local prison, she runs into a familiar face: former detective superintendent John Brace, locked up on corruption charges. He has information about a decades-old disappearance, but it’s not one of his former cases. Rather it’s one of his old friends who was also close with Vera’s own father. Suddenly Vera’s past is wound up in a murder inquiry and she has to dig through lies, unknown identities, and a seedy nightclub on the coast to find the solution.
British police procedurals are often the shows I enjoy watching the most on television. My favorite is Lewis, and anything else in Colin Dexter’s Morse universe tends to be particularly excellent. Vera is set in the northeast of England in the coastal suburbs of Newcastle, and the murder cases tend to have a bit darker vibe (not that murder isn’t generally dark). There tends to be more drug use, gangs, sex work/trafficking, and other related crimes. But the follow a detective inspector who is a little dumpy and middle-aged and ever so clever. She uses her deceptive appearance to get information that witnesses and suspects don’t give up immediately. And she has a wonderful team that both respect and challenge her.
I’ve been watching Vera on and off for a few years now. I don’t think I’ve seen every episode—when I was in college, my parents would watch them without me and I didn’t always have the means or time to catch up. Luckily, it’s not a series that you have to watch every episode in order. They all stand alone.
And luckily for me, the books are also stand-alones. I think it helped that I was familiar with Vera as a character and the world that she operates in from watching the TV show, but there also wasn’t a major reliance on the reader’s prior knowledge of the series. The Seagull is the 8th book Ann Cleeves has written about these characters, rather than the 8th book in this series. It was the first Vera book that I had read.
I saw The Seagull on the shelf of a used bookstore in the East Bay a few months ago and I thought it would be fun to pick up and read eventually. Then my hold for the DVD of series 9 came in at the library last week and I found out that that story was going to be told in the fourth episode. So I quickly picked up the book and we watched the episode the day that I finished it!
First, a short review of the book. I really enjoyed it. I’d give it 4 stars. It wasn’t mind-blowing or an immediate favorite. I had a lot of expectations based on watching the TV show, so I was surprised when the characters weren’t quite the same. For example, I honestly like the Vera on the TV show better than how she is portrayed in the book, where she’s a bit more bumbling rather than cunning and private. I do love a good police procedural (I think it’s the sense of justice you get at the end, which isn’t always there with a psychological thriller), but I sometimes feel a bit conflicted with them. In the end of this mystery, I definitely had the impression that if I had just been able to remember everyone the detectives had talked to and everyone’s names, that I would have been able to see the solution coming. And I think that can be both a good thing and a bad thing: good because you feel accomplished, bad because it takes away the shock value of the reveal. Overall though, I thought it was a good mystery and I didn’t know for sure who it was until the reveal at the end.
Then I watched the TV episode. Before I get into it, I just want to say that I probably wouldn’t want to read the book and immediately watch the episode for this series ever again. It was so different! I usually enjoy the TV show because I honestly don’t know who did it and half the fun is coming up with theories while watching. This time, I could see it coming (more on that later because… it was bizarre) AND I felt like all I was doing was saying, “Well that’s not how it was done in the book.”
So… the differences. I’ll start off with the most minor. All the character names were different, some just slightly off and others completely changed. I understood why that had happened for some of them, namely Vera’s team of detectives. In the book, her main underling is Joe Ashworth and I believe the early episodes of the TV show featured him by that name. But TV shows can be slow moving and actors can get cast in other roles, and it’s really not that big of a deal to change her underlings with new actors and new names. If I’m honest, I just imagined her current underlings’ faces with new names when I was reading. But then there were the other characters! Scott Keane instead of Gary Keane. The Siddens own the club instead of the Sinclairs. It was Robbie Marshburn instead of Robbie Marshall. I can only guess that they did that because there was some level of a copyright claim against using the character names since they also changed the plot a fair bit.
Plot changes include: stumbling upon the bodies in a work site instead of being tipped off, the undoing of a major motivation for the crime, and, oh yeah, A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MURDERER. Granted, the murderer in the TV show was essentially a replacement character for the guy from the book, so it wasn’t like they picked a different character from the original story to do it. And the TV show character had a similar background to the character in the book. But you definitely can’t say it’s the same guy. If I’m honest, I think the murderer from the book was definitely a better one, maybe because he was way more fleshed out in the book than in the TV show.
Plus, the murder was much more closely tied to Vera and her family history in the book, and I thought that was really lacking in the TV show. Vera has vivid memories of the murderer from her childhood in the book, and she’s not allowed to explore that or her relationship with her father in the same way in the TV show. Simply because the book allowed a lot more depth of character, I would say that the book is better than the TV show. One thing that I especially liked about the book was that we spent time in the heads of Joe and Holly (members of Vera’s team) in addition to Vera herself, so we could see their actual feelings about the case. I feel like we rarely see any of Vera’s team without her being the primary presence in the TV show. (In Lewis, we often see DS Hathaway interviewing witnesses without DI Lewis, by contrast.)
And there was one final difference (other than the fact that no one set themselves on fire in the TV show, thank god) that I was really disappointed by. In the book, Joe sees a photo of the murderer near the end of the book and recognizes his face, but realizes that it’s in a very different context. Joe had actually interviewed the murderer and a related person of interest after discovering the body, but they had both given false names. Now, I can see why that would be harder to conceal on a TV show where everything is so visual compared to a book, but it was fascinating to read about Joe’s revelation and be able to think back to it and have the pieces fall into place. It was one of the more clever plot points that was just lacking from the TV adaptation.
Overall, I would still recommend both the books and the TV show. But maybe don’t watch and read right back to back.
