‘Get Millie Black,’ the TV crime drama written by renowned Jamaican author Marlon James, is being made into a six-part series to air on HBO.
The series was commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 last December, with HBO also being part of the deal.
In the drama, which began filming in Jamaica this week, Millie-Jean Black is a police detective forced to quit Scotland Yard and return to the country of her birth to work missing persons cases for the JPF (Jamaican Police Force). There, she soon finds herself on a quest “to save a sister who won’t be saved, to find a boy who can’t be found, to solve a case that will blow her world apart and prove almost as tough to crack as Millie Black,” according to the series synopsis.
This is the first work written by James to be produced on screen. The Long Song’s Tamara Lawrance will serve as lead, along with Game of Thrones star Joe Dempsie. Tanya Hamilton is set to direct.
“This is the first major international TV show to put my home country, Jamaica, center stage, so it’s beyond awesome to have actual world-class Jamaican talent both in front and behind the camera, with our star Tamara Lawrance and Director Tanya Hamilton,” said James.
According to the 2015 Man Booker prize-winning author, his mother, who was one of the first policewomen in Jamaica to become a detective, was the inspiration for the story. “Storytelling has always struck me first and foremost as a mystery to be solved—which I’m sure I got from her. Millie, from the second she appeared in my imagination was a brilliant, mercurial, hilarious, unpredictable force of nature; someone who was always there, just waiting for her story to be told. I didn’t create her, I found her,” he said.
The series comes from Motive Pictures, the production company run by Simon Maxwell, former Channel 4 international drama boss.
Maxwell, an executive producer on the show, said the talent line up “showcases some of the most exciting acting talents from Jamaica and the UK.”
Jamaica-born Marlon James is one of the most well-known Caribbean authors of this decade. His most famous work to date, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) centered on the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica in 1976 and its aftermath. The book was awarded the 2015 Man Booker Prize, marking the first time that a Jamaica-born author won the prize. HBO had also shown interest in making the book into a TV series.
James lives in the United States and teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
