With Crave’s Get Millie Black, Booker Prize winner Marlon James has crafted a contender for best TV detective show of the year | Canada Voices

Back in 2014, Marlon James published A Brief History of Seven Killings, an engrossing, multivoice, not-at-all-brief novel that spanned decades with a narrative that swirled around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley.

It won the Booker Prize.

But now, a decade later, the Jamaican writer has pulled off what may be an even harder trick. James has created a TV series that’s a contender for best detective show of the year.

There’s much more competition in that field in our streamer-saturated times than there is in sweeping polyphonic literary fiction, truth be told.

Get Millie Black, a British-American coproduction between Channel 4 and HBO that dropped the first of five episodes on Crave in Canada this week (new ones every Monday), has everything you want in a small-screen whodunit.

First of all, it has your necessarily complicated, compelling cop at its centre.

Millie Black (a terrific, trope-upending Tamara Lawrance) is a missing-persons detective for Jamaica’s police force who believes her deep-seated passion for protecting kids gives her licence to bend whatever rules she likes.

As the series starts, Millie and her closeted partner, Curtis (the empathetic, poker-faced Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), are trying to track down a teenage girl named Janet, whose disappearance was reported by one of the nuns who teach her rather than her nonchalant mother.

This is one of the things that gets Millie Black – gets her goat, that is. When she was a girl growing up in Kingston, she tried to protect her younger brother from her homophobic mother – stepping in when she was reaching for the strap. That led to her being dispatched to live with extended family in London, England.

As an adult, Millie first joined Scotland Yard, eager to chase after those who hurt children. But she moved back to Jamaica after learning that her sibling was not dead, as she’d been told.

Her sister was in fact alive and now named Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen).

It’s an original take on an old backstory: A haunted detective, but no ghost. What do you do with a saviour complex when the loved one motivating it says she doesn’t need to be saved?

The second thing Get Millie Black has going for it is its fresh setting. Kingston hasn’t been done to death, in this genre anyway – like the London council estates or all those not-so-idyllic coastal towns of British cop shows.

Though James’s series spans just a handful of episodes, it has the sociological breadth of a season of The Wire as the search for Janet sees Millie traverse from the uptown mansions of wealthy white families to the storm-drainage systems known as the Gully where Hibiscus is part of a community of unhoused LGBTQ Jamaicans.

Yes, this a country where being gay or trans is a crime, but the complexity of the place and its history is never glossed over.

Director Tanya Hamilton, born in nearby Spanish Town, takes the viewer from Catholic schools run by nuns to a strip club called the Hot Pinky, but she doesn’t shoot any location exotically. Canadians viewers aren’t going on holiday at an all-inclusive (though the mouth-watering jerk chicken on display in certain scenes might make you check flights).

The third thing that makes Get Millie Black such a pleasure, is the best of all: The writing.

Yes, there’s the delicious dialogue delivered in Jamaican and British accents. Indeed, Millie code-switches between these to connect with the rich cast of characters she encounters.

She also uses this skill to intimidate. When Scotland Yard’s Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie) shows up from England to intrude on Millie’s investigation owing to its apparent connection to an international gang, she puts on her patois to push back: “You come to colonize our case?”

Each episode of Get Millie Black has a new narrator, a novelistic trope that James has adapted perfectly for television. The voice-overs set the tone – but they don’t overwhelm the story or take the overall focus off Millie.

This narration may be beautifully written, but it’s also part of a sneaky structure – there to throw the viewer off as much as lend a different perspective to the proceedings.

Indeed, James and his co-writers have put together a mystery with twists that come frequently, but in an irregular rhythm. You don’t see them coming, but when they do, you slap yourself on the forehead for not having spotted them in the distance.

It’s hard to do that – surprise viewers, without manipulating them.

So is Get Millie Black the best detective show of the year? We’ve got to wait to see if it sticks the landing, four out of five episodes were made available for review. My mouth’s watering for the last one.