Ann Cleeves takes us back 34 years to the first book in her ‘Inspector Ramsay’ series. Macmillan has reissued A Lesson in Dying which is just over 200 pages in length.
Jack Robson, the caretaker of Heppleburn primary school, telephones the police advising he has found Harold Medburn, the headmaster, hanging from the basketball hoop in the playground. Many of the teachers, parents and villagers enjoying themselves at a Halloween party in the school hall intensely disliked and feared ‘viper-tongued’ Medburn.
Detective Inspector Stephen Ramsay from the Northumberland police, still grieving over a recent divorce, is assigned to investigate. He does a rushed investigation, decides Medburn was murdered, and arrests the dead man’s widow. Jack Robson disagrees. He and Patty, his daughter, set out to find the real murderer.
This cosy crime mystery is a quick read, has an underlying sense of despondency, and one credibility lapse that’s difficult to overlook.
Ramsay comes close to being downgraded to counting the paper clips in police headquarters. It’s Jack Robson and his daughter who save Ramsay’s career. Ann Cleeves must’ve been relieved as she was able to write a further five books in the series. All have become collectors’ items.
Reviewed by Clive Hodges
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ann grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon in the UK. Her father was a village school teacher. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs – child care officer, women’s refuge leader, bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard – before going back to college and training to be a probation officer.
BOOKS
In 2006 Ann Cleeves was the first winner of the prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for Raven Black, the first volume of her ‘Shetland’ series. In addition, she has been short listed for a CWA Dagger Awards – once for her short story The Plater, and twice for the Dagger in the Library award, which is awarded not for an individual book but for an author’s entire body of work.
On 26 October 2017, Ann was presented with the Diamond Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association, the highest honour in British crime writing.
Raven Black was shortlisted for the Martin Beck award for best translated crime novel in Sweden in 2007. A television adaptation of The Long Call, the first in Ann’s Two Rivers series set in North Devon, was broadcast in October 2021. Thirteen series of ‘Vera’, the ITV adaptation starring Brenda Blethyn, have been shown in the UK and worldwide: series 12 ended on an amazing 50th episode, based on Ann’s novel The Darkest Evening. A fourteenth series is promised for 2025. There have also been eight series of ‘Shetland’, based on – or inspired by – the characters and settings of her Shetland novels, and two further series have been announced, filming in 2024 and 2025.
She was awarded an OBE in the 2022 New Year Honours List, “for services to Reading and Libraries.”
In July 2023, during the opening ceremony for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, Ann was presented with the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award, in recognition of her impressive writing career.
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