You’ve probably never met anyone quite like Millie Black, the detective protagonist of a new Jamaica-set crime thriller. But Marlon James has. James is the acclaimed author of five novels, including 2014’s Booker prize winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings, and now he’s making the move into television, as Get Millie Black’s creator – with a disputed source of inspiration. “I keep telling my mother it is not based on her! She thinks I’m in denial,” he tells me down the line from his art-filled Brooklyn apartment.
James’s mother, Shirley Dillon-James, was “a pioneer”, he admits: one of the first women to make detective in 1950s Jamaica, “so she was basically working for the queen. She dealt with colonialism, sexism, all of that stuff.” Jamaica gained independence from the UK in 1962, but the “colonialism” and “sexism” parts still figure for Millie Black as she negotiates a career begun in London’s Metropolitan Police, and now transferred to the Kingston Central Division. But also: “Millie may be more influenced by me than by my mom,” says James. “In the sense that I’ve always looked at writing as a form of detective work. It’s always been, how am I gonna solve this mystery?”
Ultimately, it is neither the writer nor his mother who will for ever be associated with this instantly iconic TV cop. That honour goes to Tamara Lawrance, who stars as Millie – and she couldn’t be happier about it: “If this became the thing I’m known for, I’d be so thankful,” she says. “It really changed my life.” The series opens with a flashback to Millie’s childhood in Jamaica, and the close sibling bond that was severed when their mother sent her to London to live with relatives. Now back in Jamaica for more than a year, Millie is attempting to rebuild family ties and, in the meantime, has become close to her detective partner, Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jr), a gay man who must keep his sexuality secret from the rest of their colleagues.
Lawrance was raised in north-west London by her Jamaican mother and always felt connected to her roots through food (“I grew up eating dumpling, callaloo, corned beef and rice – all the staples”) and music (“My mum was a big fan of Sizzla Kalonji, Capleton, Queen Ifrica, Buju Banton”). Still, the show’s shoot was the first time she’d been to Jamaica since she was a toddler and it had a profound effect: “My mum has always been very open and warm, people gravitate to her, and when I went to Jamaica, I saw that in almost everyone I encountered,” she explains. “I felt a lot of who I am sort of synthesise, […] to see that this might come from growing up on an island, not having to be ‘a Black person’, but [in a place where] you form your identity around your personality, rather than your skin colour.”
It was also Lawrance’s bone-deep understanding of the nuances of British-Caribbean identity that helped land her the role. She’s so good as Millie Black – competent but fallible, assertive yet vulnerable – you could easily believe it was written with her in mind. In fact, there was a lengthy casting process, says James. “I don’t even think I knew who she was; we were seeing so many people. Then the casting director sent us this video and I’m like: ‘Oh my God! It’s Millie!’” Lawrance wore a shoulder-length, straight-hair wig to audition, “which is not what Millie would wear at all”, but her innate Millie-ness shone through. “Because, more than anything else, Tamara didn’t need cues as to when to switch to Jamaican.”
He’s referring to Millie Black’s blend of British-accented English and Jamaican patois, a fairly common way of speaking in many British-Jamaican households. “It was a relatively instinctive choice for me, because of who I understood Millie to be,” says Lawrance. “Somebody who is trying to reintegrate herself, but is ultimately going to be perceived as foreign in Jamaica.”
Rapid code-switching is just one of the ways Get Millie Black explores its central theme: the knotty, centuries-old, back-and-forth relationship between Britain and Jamaica. James is a Jamaican national who now lives in the US, where Get Millie Black aired to rave reviews on HBO Max at the end of last year. But “the primary relationship [for Jamaica] is still the UK”, he says. “My Aunt Enid lived there, my Uncle Oscar lived there, my Aunt Pearl lived there … and my Uncle Errol was literally on the Windrush.” That is, the HMT Empire Windrush passenger ship, which landed on British shores in 1948, and became synonymous with postwar Caribbean immigration.
“That Steve McQueen series, Small Axe, hit hard because so many of my family went through it, and yet at the same time so much of that world was totally foreign.” The popularity of the London-originated lovers rock reggae sub-genre, for instance. “They have this big moment where everybody’s singing [Janet Kay’s 1979 UK hit] Silly Games, like it’s a major anthem. Me and the other Jamaicans were like: ‘Do you know that song? I’ve never heard of it …’”
Even growing up in Jamaica in the 1970s and 80s, studying Shakespeare and Dickens at his prestigious all-boys high school, James felt the influence of the erstwhile “mother country”. “The first time I came to London, I realised I sounded like the butler, because of the English I learned … So why the UK? Because there’s unfinished business.”
Namely, the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy, which finds contemporary parallels in the international human-trafficking case Millie and Curtis stumble into. “The slave trade never really ended,” says James. “Yeah, sure, it’s a reverse trade; now we’re going to Europe instead of the quote-unquote ‘colonies’, but it’s still people being trapped. It’s still people being tricked. It’s still people being forced to do things they don’t want to do.”
In the show, when Scotland Yard catches wind of Millie’s investigation, they send out a white British detective, Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), to assist. Or should that be “take over”? Millie’s relationship with him is occasionally collaborative but mostly antagonistic, an aspect of the writing Lawrance particularly appreciated: “We see a lot of Black characters on TV, especially British TV, that assimilate,” she says. “I don’t think we see very many Black characters that are very pro-Black, in a way that hasn’t become cartoonish or comedic. But Millie is, and she doesn’t give a heck, really, what this guy thinks about her. In terms of what those two characters represent in world history, that’s a very powerful thing.”
As well as being attuned to such reverberations through history, Get Millie Black is interested in the here and now of how queer people are marginalised, and sometimes violently persecuted, in Jamaican society. (Though this, it has been argued, is itself a legacy of British colonialism.) Through the character of Hibiscus, an impressive performance from trans Jamaican actor Chyna McQueen in her first screen role, Millie is connected to the Gully. This is the local nickname for the storm drains below Jamaica’s New Kingston financial district which, until recently, provided refuge to a real community of LGBTQ+ people. Nowadays most of the former “Gully Queens” have moved on, says James. “Jamaica has come a long way with homophobia – I speak as a queer Jamaican who is there all the time. At the same time, trans women don’t feel safe. A lot of the trans women, including in our cast, have already fled.”
Meanwhile, back in the UK, Lawrance, who also identifies as queer, sees Get Millie Black as part of an exciting effort to diversify the stories told about Black Britons on screen, alongside another of her recent, acclaimed projects, Mr Loverman. “You know, I’ve never seen love and relationships explored with that sensitivity or honesty before on British TV,” she says of the BBC adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s novel about a closeted Antigua-born Londoner reaching crisis point. “And likewise, I’ve never seen Chyna McQueen on TV before, y’know?”
Even within Get Millie Black, multiple perspectives are included, a technique readers of A Brief History of Seven Killings will know well. Also characteristic of James’s style is the deep appreciation for Jamaican music, evident from the opening bars of the theme tune, a new mix of Shanique Marie’s Ring the Alarm that is surely destined for the UK charts (“No, but listen, what a banger!” says Lawrance).
It all adds up to a cop show that depicts Caribbean culture with a thrilling intensity still too rarely seen on British television. The anti-Death in Paradise, if you will? James, personally, has nothing against that long-running cosy crime drama, set on the idealised island of Saint Marie. “I think Caribbean comfort food is always welcome,” he says, diplomatically. But Millie Black? She would definitely insist on a little more hot sauce.
Get Millie Black is coming to Channel 4 next month.
