Looking for Jimmy Perez on Shetland

Scottish Noir

My partner and I spent Hogmanay welcoming in 2019 on Shetland. Visiting Shetland came about because of the television series based on the crime novels by Ann Cleeves. I hadn’t read the novels when I came by chance on the DVD of the first series and thought it looked interesting and so bought it. From the opening credits and music, I was hooked and was also determined that I would go to Shetland at some stage.

This wasn’t the first time that a fictional Scottish police officer had been the inspiration to visit a particular location. In May 2012 while travelling through the Highlands, I made a point of visiting the little coastal village of Plockton which, in the nineties, had stood in for the fictional village of Lochdubh in the series Hamish Macbeth. This series was based on the books by M.C. Beaton. In late 2018, a few days before landing on Shetland, I had a pint and a wee dram in the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh, a pub frequented in fiction by Ian Rankin’s Rebus, my favourite curmudgeonly Scottish copper.

The Shetland Islands

A little geography lesson. The Shetland Isles are located in the North Sea and form an archipelago. To the south lies the Orkneys and the north coast of Scotland. To the north lie the Faroe Islands, a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark. To the east is Norway and the Norwegian city of Bergen, almost due east from Shetland. The main town of Shetland, Lerwick, is closer to Bergen than it is to Edinburgh, Aberdeen or Glasgow. There is a strong Norwegian influence in Shetland, including street names in Lerwick such as King Harald Street and King Haakon Street and smaller settlements with names such as Gulberwick and Veensgarth.

The Lodberries

For anybody who has seen the series, the house where the main character, Jimmy Perez, lives is an iconic building. It is probably now one of the most photographed buildings in Lerwick. The Lodberries are a series of buildings along the Lerwick Harbour front that are built right over the water and contain doors that would have been used once to load items directly on or off the small boats that would be rowed between ship and shore.

Ann Cleeve’s Shetland Series

While on Shetland, I decided to upload Ann Cleeve’s books to my Kindle reader. Although I had watched the television series, I had never read any of the books. I think I read four or five of them while we were on Shetland and I was hooked but then again, Scottish Noir is one of my favourite genres. One of the interesting features of the books, for those who have watched the television series is that are quite different. The character, Jimmy Perez, doesn’t sound at all like the actor Douglas Henshall (who plays the lead role of Jimmy Perez). The characterisation is pretty similar but the character in the book is described as being shorter and thinner than Henshall with olive skin and a beaked nose which is a result of his Spanish ancestry and would make him stand out more against the fair skinned and blond or red headed Shetlanders who have a lot of Nordic ancestry.

The Shetlanders are proud of their Viking ancestry and there are a number of historic archaeological sites throughout the islands and right up in the north, near Haroldswick, there is a reproduction of a Viking long ship just sitting on the side of the road with a reproduced Viking house that was closed the day we were there.

There are also some differences in the timelines and story arcs between the books and the television series and, without giving anything away, one of the key plots in one of the books is how Jimmy met his wife and how she died. In the television series all of this happened before the first episode and his wife has died of cancer and her daughter, Cass, is a young adult. In the books, Cass starts off much younger and her mother meets a different end that is linked in the television series to the episode at the bird sanctuary on Fair Isle.

I called this blog ‘Looking for Jimmy Perez’ and of course, I wasn’t looking for Jimmy, but it was interesting to re-watch the series on my return and recognising so many iconic pieces of scenery. There is the beach at St Ninian’s bay which is a spit of land connecting the Main Island with St Ninian’s island with water on either side. There was a monastery chapel on St Ninian’s that was destroyed by the Vikings and, if you trek a little way up the hill, there are some stones that formed part of the doorway that is all that remains of the monastery. There is also the rugged coastline in places around Eshaness that features a lot in the series and the Sumburgh Lighthouse that doubles as a hotel in one episode. Lerwick itself is full of recognisable places from the series and the books and the apartment we rented was just around the corner from the Police Station where Jimmy works and a short walk to the bar the characters often drink in and the Peerie Café, where they sometimes get coffee (peerie means small in the Shetland dialect).

Getting There

We flew to Shetland from Edinburgh in a SAAB 340 operated by Logan Air. Australian readers would know the little SAABs as the same aircraft operated by Rex. Logan Air’s aircraft are delightful with their tartan livery on the tail. There are regular flights to Sumburgh (the main airport in Shetland) from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness. The flight took less than two hours from Edinburgh. Alternatively you can take the Northlink ferry from Aberdeen. It is an overnight trip and takes around twelve hours I believe. We hired a car on Shetland and this is a must if you want to travel around the islands. The inter-island ferries run by the Shetland Council are inexpensive and run frequently. There are some great pubs and we chose a self-catered apartment in the centre of Lerwick so we could cook our own food – local Shetland lamb and haggis was highly rated.

Glenn Stuart Beatty