@jean I haven’t seen much of either Vera or Shetland and read just one of Anne Cleeves’s books, so I can’t really compare. I always felt that John Thaw played Morse as too refined and intellectual — though he was certainly capable of playing thuggish, as he had done in The Sweeney. It didn’t help that the producers of Morse made him a Mozart lover (because Mozart’s music was free of royalties and Wagner’s wasn’t). But yes, I was overgeneralizing when I said that most adaptations are rubbish. Many are.