Happy Valley (BBC One) and Hinterland (BBC 4) - TV reviews

Happy Valley, on BBC One, and Hinterland, on BBC Four, have now been running for three episodes each. Happy Valley is a single story, divided into hour-long episodes, whereas Hinterland features a different case over an hour and a half each week, but although the two shows are quite distinct, they have some things in common, most importantly good writing. From a personal point of view, I'm familiar with (and very keen on) the settings of both shows. Happy Valley is filmed around the Hebden Bridge area, the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, close to the Pennines. Hinterland is set in and around Aberystwyth, and features places like Borth and Devil's Bridge as well as the beautiful, if often brooding, Welsh landscape.

Some critics have compared the bleak mood of Hinterland with that of the various Scandinavian noir shows that have proliferated in recent years, and it doesn't suffer by comparison.This is an unusual show, because the stories were shot first in Welsh and then in English, which must have been hard work for everyone involved, but the result is worthwhile. Hinterland may lack a Kenneth Branagh, but to my mind, mid-Wales is at least as enticing a backdrop for a crime series as anywhere in Scandinavia, and I'm surprised we've had to wait so long for it to be used to such good effect. I don't think the quality of the murder mystery plots is quite at the level of those of, say, the Wallander stories, and it's a shame that the interesting novels of Lindsey Ashford, who lives in Borth and has set her enjoyable books in that area, have not been adapted for television as yet. Overall, though, Hinterland is definitely worth watching.

Happy Valley unquestionably delivers on plot, and much else besides. The series is written by the gifted Sally Wainwright, and stars Sarah Lancashire as the thoroughly decent small town detective who finds herself mixed up in a kidnapping case in which she has a personal reason to hate the worst of the bad guys. There were some uncertainties of tone in the first episode, in which an accountant makes a spur of the moment decision to encourage a criminal acquaintance to kidnap the daughter of his boss. At that point, I wondered if we were in for a black comedy, or perhaps some form of criminal quasi-soap opera (an unfeasible number of the characters suffer from serious illness or other misfortunes.) But since then, the story has settled down and become a powerful thriller with plenty of twists in the plot and subtlety in the characterisation.

Sarah Lancashire may be best known as a former soap star, but she is a very good actor, and her performance in Happy Valley is terrific. I'm also impressed by the way the dynamics in the relationships between the kidnappers are shifting. There are a few light moments, but on the whole, the story is pretty dark, and certainly gripping. I am really eager to watch next week's instalment.

Stephen Booth and others

I recently added a number of blogs to the blogroll. They include Dorte’s excellent blog – if you haven’t read her post on the rules of feminist detective fiction, which she mentioned here in recent comments, you may be interested to check them out. Another blog well worth a look is the much-visited blog run by Kate Sutherland. I came across it by chance, via a link from John Baker’s blog. This is one of the things I like about the blogosphere – all the unexpected connections. Wandering from link to link, I sometimes feel like a child entering a vast, sometimes unfamiliar and daunting, yet nevertheless utterly entrancing world.

A third blog that I’ve only recently encountered is that of the East Midlands crime novelist Stephen Booth. Over the years, I’ve done one or two events with Stephen, and the highlight was when we were both in the short-list of six for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Prize for best crime novel of the year, at Harrogate in 2006 (The Coffin Trail was the book of mine that got me there.) Also on the short-list were Susan Hill, Lindsey Ashford, Ian Rankin and the eventual winner, Val McDermid. The last time I saw Stephen was one evening in autumn when we had a drink together in the bar of the Bouchercon hotel in Baltimore. He’s a journalist whose sales success enabled him to become a full-time novelist.

I first came across Stephen through his well regarded debut novel Black Dog and I’ve read several since then. My favourite is The Dead Place, a really excellent mystery that handles the death motif very well. I once told him that, after that book, I felt I couldn’t go ahead with a planned Lake District novel I had in mind, called The Dead Shop (after the old morgue in Appleby). And at that point, he told me he’d once contemplated a book involving a coffin trail…..

Finally, I want to mention my sadness at the passing of a notable member of the crime community, Barbara Franchi. I had the pleasure of meeting her, though all too briefly. She reviewed one or two of my books very positively, and since she was by no means a bland reviewer, I was definitely in her debt. Many others who knew her much better than me have paid warm tributes to her on the internet and elsewhere, making it clear that she will be much missed.