As the Crow Girl flies
The Crow Girl writer Milly Thomas and executive producer Tony Wood discuss their Paramount+ adaptation of this “sprawling,” dark Swedish crime novel and reveal how a celebrity fan partnered with them to bring it to the screen – Guns ‘n’ Roses guitarist Slash.
Erik Axl Sund’s novel The Crow Girl was first translated in 2017, when the original Swedish trilogy of novels was published in English in one 800-page tome. Now the psychological thriller has been translated again, this time for television.
Commissioned by streamer Paramount+, where it launches this Thursday, the six-part series stars Eve Myles (Keeping Faith) and Dougray Scott as DCI Jeanette Kilburn and her partner DI Lou Stanley, who embark on the hunt for a killer after the discovery of bodies of unidentified young men, beaten and full of the anaesthetic lidocaine.
As Jeanette and her team piece together the connections between the killings, she enlists the help of prime suspect Carl Lowry’s psychotherapist, Dr Sophia Craven (Katherine Kelly), who offers a fresh but troubling perspective on the case. With the killer inching ever closer to home, Jeanette and the team are in a race against time to untangle the web of secrets and solve this mystery.
The cast also includes Elliot Edusah as diligent rookie DC Mike Dilliston, Clara Rugaard as Victoria Burkeman, Victoria Hamilton as Superintendent Verity Pound and Chloé Sweetlove as Madeleine.
Taking on the task of adapting Sund’s novel was Milly Thomas, in her first major screenwriting role. She joined the project after producer Buccaneer’s Tony Wood picked up rights to the novel and then invited her to read “this rather incredible, sprawling diaspora of a book, this beast of a novel” with a view to bringing it to the small screen.
“It kind of consumed me,” Thomas says of the book. “I hadn’t read anything quite like it. While I think it’s safe to say we live in a world that’s saturated with procedurals and murder mysteries, and we live in an age of true crime where we consume these things on the regular, I feel like that book – the way the protagonists were portrayed, their relationship, their interpersonal relationship, their professional relationship – it wasn’t something I’d ever really seen before. It was just this incredible story that sprawled in the way that life can sprawl. It felt like an existence contained, which was very exciting to me. I was very intrigued and grateful to get the gig.”
Thomas transplanted the action from the Swedish capital, Stockholm, to the English city of Bristol, and among her chief aims when writing the scripts was to put the culture of the city and its people at the heart of the story.
“Something I find particularly interesting as a writer is our British sensibilities, and our British sensibilities when faced with the most horrible things,” she says. “That’s something that’s so important for me, that we contain multitudes, that you can have a laugh and on the same day receive the worst news you’ve ever received. That’s sort of how life works, and that’s there in the novel. But there’s a grandeur, there’s a caustic nature to it, which leans into that Swedish sensibility, which wouldn’t necessarily translate when put, say, in Bristol in 2024. So that’s the process for me.”
Thomas is no stranger to Bristol, having been a language student there. Her choice of degree meant she already had some sympathy with the task of translation and the choices that have to be made – and she found it was a similar process in adapting the novel for television. But from the outset she was clear that she wanted to retain the tone of the story and the feelings it evoked when she first read it.
“Ultimately I hope this leads more British people to the book, that they’ll watch the show and then be curious, because there’s only so much you can preserve and fight for when you are adapting,” she adds. “But what an array of things to use throughout. It’s incredible. It’s vast.”
Wood describes The Crow Girl as a “seminal” book for Erik Axl Sund – a pseudonym for writing duo Jerker Eriksson and Håkan Axlander Sundquist – that “is a huge piece of work psychologically and narratively.”
It proved to be as popular in the Paramount+ offices as it is across Europe, and the pitch and commissioning process happened “extremely quickly,” the exec says. Yet that was only the start of the journey to bring it to the screen as Thomas and Wood began to unravel the “unusually complex” story that can leave readers with different interpretations of exactly what has happened.
“There are lots of commentaries and nobody agrees on what the plot really is and certainly what the resolution to the plot is,” Wood notes. “Obviously murders take place and [we know] who has committed them, and that was really intriguing. So adapting that was a bit of a challenge.
“Then when Håkan and Jerker came on set, that was an interesting moment because we have to make it much more accessible than perhaps the novel is. The translation and adaptation also soften some of the emotions and some of the characters along the way, so Eve Myles’s character really holds the hand of the audience through it as a procedural.”
With so much story to cover across the three original novels, “I feel that we have scratched the surface of something, and what we’ve done here is very much about setting these hares running,” Thomas says. “There’s a vast world to mine should we wish to mine it. But that said, we leave people with a satisfactory ending.”
Wood adds: “We’ve brought some stuff forward from the second book, although probably what you might call the principal narrative of the second book, we’ve largely left for hopefully a second season. Then we’ve shifted some of the furniture around, as it were.
“There have been quite a few changes that were necessary, because of the different legal systems between here and Sweden. But for me, the biggest choice we faced was to decide on the psychology of the main story. You read the book and there’s an array of different psychological stories you can choose.”
The relationship between detective Jeanette and psychotherapist Sophia was particularly interesting to Thomas – a professional and personal partnership she had never seen before on television.
“Not enough is said about the bonds we make with colleagues and I find it quite important, actually, that the people working cases like these, they have lives, they have wants, they have desires. It’s really easy to forget that,” she says. “Making friends as an adult is really hard. I don’t think there’s much room for it, and it is something that as the series progresses, the lines there are going to become blurred even further. For that to happen alongside the giant motor of a murder inquiry is something very potent.”
Striking the right tone through the series proved to be “tricky,” however, with Thomas noting that while the subject matter “is quite heavy at times,” she also wanted to puncture the serious themes with moments of light relief.
Casting Myles in the lead role proved to be the key to achieving that. “She’s got this natural humour that is just aching to be released, so even when you think the situation can’t get any more tense, she’s there to undercut it, which is exactly what I was hoping for,” the writer says. “Otherwise you wouldn’t want to spend any great deal of time in those worlds. I can’t imagine anyone would. It’s really important for me that those relationships feel real and human, and that they have a laugh.”
Wood references novel-turned-feature film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when he describes The Crow Girl as being at the “Stieg Larsson end” of Scandinavian fiction. “It can be very graphic, it can be very dark, and it deals head on with a lot of issues,” he says. “We wanted to make a piece of popular television out of that, and some of the things that you might accept in a movie, you possibly wouldn’t with a piece of television like this. So the first challenge was to make sure that emotionally it could speak to a broad audience.”
He compares the novel to a “shattered mirror,” containing so many different narratives within it. “That means you have to go to so many locations – it’s a gargantuan piece to film, and we didn’t have the money to be able to move as much as we would have liked.” However, that meant the series settled into an emotional story that rests on the shoulders of Jeanette, Sofia and another character Wood is reluctant to reveal.
“But it’s always tough,” he says. “Budgets are coming down. This is an 800-page novel of unusual complexity and skill – complete nightmare.”
But the chance to adapt The Crow Girl for television was a dream for one fellow executive producer – iconic Guns ‘n’ Roses guitarist Slash. Wood had approached Niclas Salomonsson at Swedish literary agency Salomonsson Agency about the rights to the novel and learned there was another party interested in the rights. That party turned out to be Slash, who became an EP on the series and has also partnered with composers Lorne Balfe and Adam Price to create the soundtrack.
“Slash is fantastic. He’s a man of many parts and he’s been brilliant,” Wood says. “He’s on a world tour. He’s watched every day’s rushes and commented to me on them. He’s read every draft. He came on set and was a delight. And the music is great.”
Being the head writer on The Crow Girl has been an “incredible experience” for Thomas, who previously wrote on Clique and River City. For The Crow Girl, she penned the series opening and the finale, as well as additional episodes, with fellow writers Laura Lomas, Lydia Mulvey and EV Crowe also writing scripts.
Thomas is also an actor, with on-screen credits in shows including The Crown, The Feed and Sex Education. Moving forward, she hopes to balance both disciplines. “I feel that being an actor in someone else’s piece is a real privilege and a joy, and you’re only responsible for your area of storytelling,” she says. “Whereas the thrill then of overseeing an entire show from the beginningis a real adrenaline rush for me. Being able to manage both is important.”
With so many narrative twists and turns to fit into six episodes of The Crow Girl, Thomas is looking forward to seeing what readers of the novel make of her adaptation, which is distributed internationally by ITV Studios.
“There are going to be people who disagree with me, and I kind of love that. I really thrive on it because that’s often where a story exists,” she says. “Many people will agree with me and then a lot of people won’t. But the beauty of it – because we’ve transposed it to a different country, a different city that has a completely different sensibility from where it’s set – is it’s going to be more of an Easter egg hunt of what people recognise and what we’ve kept.”
Ultimately, at every step, she sought to stay true to the themes and “darkness” of the novel. “Hopefully we have done it in such a way that it’s still a piece of entertainment, first and foremost,” she adds. “That’s what television is. In that sense, that’s what it always will be. But the moral backbone of the things that are there still very much exist within the book.”
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tagged in: Buccaneer, ITV Studios, Milly Thomas, Paramount, The Crow Girl, Tony Wood