Marlon James will write and executive produce a crime drama series for HBO, Deadline reports.
James, known for his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings and his Dark Star Trilogy of fantasy novels, will make his screenwriting debut with Get Millie Black, which will also air on Channel 4 in the U.K.
The series will focus on Millie-Jean Black, a former police detective in England who returns to her birthplace of Jamaica to help Kingston police solve missing-person cases.
Simon Maxwell (Deep State) and Leopoldo Gout (Instinct) will also serve as executive producers on the series.
James said the series was inspired by his mother, one of the first woman police officers in Jamaica to reach the rank of detective.
“Storytelling has always struck me first and foremost as a mystery to be solved—which I’m sure I got from her,” James told Deadline. “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.”
Get Millie Black isn’t the only Marlon James project headed to the screen. Actor Michael B. Jordan plans to adapt James’ fantasy epic Black Leopard, Red Wolf, as a movie; the sequel to that novel, Moon Witch, Spider King, is set for publication in February.
And as of 2017, a series based on James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings was in the works with Melina Matsoukas attached to direct.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
