Undiscovered riches
Lynley screenwriter Steve Thompson and executive producer David Stern preview this upcoming BritBox and BBC crime drama, which brings Elizabeth George’s literary detective back to the screen nearly two decades since his last appearance.
Elizabeth George’s literary detective – and so-called “posh cop” – Thomas Lynley was first brought to life on screen in a 2001 BBC series, with Nathaniel Parker starring as the man who has shunned a life of wealth and privilege to join the ranks of Scotland Yard. But while 11 of the American author’s novels were adapted for the screen over six seasons of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, a further 11 remained untouched.
Now, screenwriter Steve Thompson (Sherlock, Vienna Blood) and producer Playground (Wolf Hall) have joined forces with commissioner BritBox US for a set of four new feature-length episodes based on George’s previously undramatised books.
They reintroduce Tommy Lynley (Vikings: Valhalla’s Leo Suter), a brilliant police detective but an outsider in the force – simply by virtue of his aristocratic upbringing. He is paired with Barbara Havers (Ted Lasso’s Sofia Barclay), a sergeant with a maverick attitude and a working-class background. With seemingly nothing in common and against all odds, the mismatched duo become a formidable team, bonded by their desire for justice.
Due to debut this year, the show will also air on the BBC in the UK, while international distribution is being handled by BBC Studios, which is launching it to the global market at annual sales event BBC Studios Showcase on February 24.
“Quite frankly, we were on a little bit of a hunt for new material in the crime procedural area,” says Playground exec producer David Stern. “We had gotten word that the back half of the Lynley novels were available. We looked at the books and just thought, ‘There’s such a wealth of material there.’
“It just so happened that we had just had some conversations with the folks at BritBox and found out they had been sniffing around these books as well. So I just made a call and said, ‘Why don’t we just do this together? Seems like a no-brainer.’ And they said, ‘Great.’”
Stern then met with Thompson and liked his take on adapting novels that are more than 500 pages in length. “It really needed somebody who could not only elevate but excavate what was on the page,” he adds. “Steve really keyed in on what the heart and soul of Elizabeth’s writing was and how to make those plots really sing in the format.”
Thompson jokes that he practically bit Stern’s hand off when he was offered the chance to join the project, as he knew the books – which form the basis for the drama – really well. “They’re page-turning stories. She writes these very tight plots, complex, but very character-led,” he says. “They’re all about human flaws and character flaws, and that’s what leads us through to the crime. So it was great to get my teeth into them because they were these undiscovered riches. They’ve just been sitting there for 20 years, begging for somebody to go back into them.”
But with no connection to the previous Lynley series, one request Thompson did make of the production was for Lynley and Havers (previously played by Sharon Small) to begin the show as strangers, rather than arriving already as partners with a pre-established relationship.
“I was really anxious that we came at Lynley and Havers completely fresh, and gave Leo and Sofia the opportunity to play them from the first moment that they meet, because the first moment they meet is the most exciting moment,” he says. “They’re so ill-suited as a couple. This clash was really fun to write and fun for them to act, so the only thing I said to David early on was, even though we were using the core stories of the latter half of the books, I wanted them to come with no baggage and to meet for the first time. It means we’re using the plots, but not all the serial beats, of the latter stories.”
The writer describes the relationship between Lynley and Havers as “quite dysfunctional,” at least to begin with. Yet perhaps what brings them together is the fact they are both outsiders and come from entirely different social backgrounds.
“If you mention Lynley to anybody, I hear people say, ‘Oh, posh cop. A very entitled cop.’ That’s the very first thing people think of, and yes it’s unusual,” he says. “He’s a guy who is from the nobility; his father’s an earl and he’s expected to inherit a massive estate, and actually has given all of that up in order to be a detective. That’s a really interesting place to begin with.
“He’s given up an extraordinary life, a privileged life, in order to do this job, and he does it because he’s passionate about it. He’s very, very smart. He’s very courageous. And more than anything, I think he is loyal and values loyalty.”
Meanwhile, Havers is “very instinctive, very gutsy, can make some incredibly smart, instinctive decisions, but she has no filter. Every time she thinks of something, she says it out loud,” Thompson continues. “They’re very different types of people yet, after a while, you realise they are both giving things to each other that they wouldn’t have otherwise. That creates a great team.”
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Thompson remembers a quote from Katharine Hepburn about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire: “He gives her class, she gives him sex appeal.” “There’s a sense with Lynley and Havers that, without each other, they wouldn’t be as good at their jobs as they are,” he adds.
But while Thompson was adding new material to establish the characters’ relationship from the outset, the challenge of adapting such voluminous tomes was what to leave out. Other characters in the drama include DCI Brian Nies (Daniel Mays), the astute, suspicious senior detective at Three Counties Major Incident Team whose aversion to Lynley is partly born of his own insecurities about class and partly because he knows he’s no longer the smartest person in the room.
Viewers will also meet Helen Clyde (Niamh Walsh), an estate agent and Lynley’s former Oxford classmate, whose romance with Lynley is sparked when their paths fatefully cross on a case; tech specialist Tony Bekele (Michael Workeye); and forensic scientist Simon St James (Joshua Sher).
“Elizabeth George has a very large precinct of characters, but she uses the space to excavate all of their story. Even what we would consider to be small or minor characters have interesting backstories, interesting situations, and you’re faced with an enormous wealth of characters that, really, in a 90-minute TV drama, you can’t juggle all of them,” the writer notes. “So part of the task is working out where you want to focus your attention. For me, it was about working out what the essence of each novel was and then building from the bottom up based on that. It was a really fun experience.”
Stern adds: “If we were going to shoehorn this into hour-long or 45 minute episodes, you just basically have a show with two lead characters and a plot. This [format] not only gave us time for a little more character exploration, but also something that feels really cinematic in the experience for each episode.”
Each episode of the four-part series takes its inspiration from a different book, namely A Place of Hiding, This Body of Death, Careless in Red and With No One as Witness. Thompson praises George for writing “very tight crime stories” that also transport readers – and now viewers – to different worlds, where Lynley and Havers are both thrown into the middle of a new investigation.
A Place of Hiding is set on an island in the Essex Estuary, the writer explains. “It’s a private island owned by a wealthy individual and you get this sense of the sea and the countryside, and it’s more pastoral and much more remote,” he says. “It’s that classic idea of a cast of characters in a house together in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of an estuary on a private island that has a really quite haunting quality.
“Whereas the second episode, This Body of Death, is about an abduction that takes place right in the middle of a city, so it has a much more urban feel, much more busy, much more shoe leather for the police of knocking on doors and looking at doorbell cameras and CCTV, trying to track this abduction.”
Thompson compares episode three, Careless in Red, to a western, where the central duo arrive at a remote village in the middle of the Norfolk Broads and find a sense of lawlessness pervading the landscape.
“Then the fourth one, the finale of our series, is a serial killer story based around a church and around a religious community,” he says. “That was a really interesting thing to explore. So they’re all very different flavours, very different worlds. It’s Lynley and Havers who are our touchstones and who give the quality that we feel familiar with, but the world’s rules are different. And that’s part of Elizabeth’s writing.”
Stern says Playground’s interest in George’s novels was particularly piqued by the various worlds she writes about. An adaptation then represented the chance to make a police series that “wasn’t just a whole bunch of people in a police precinct in a dark room talking about a crime,” he says. “It was really important that the majority of our action actually is taking place with Lynley and Havers out in the field. It just adds to that cinematic quality and the transportive nature of these types of shows and of television.”
The series may be set across England, but Lynley was actually filmed in Ireland, where Playground recently shot two other series, Sky’s Small Town, Big Story and Channel 5 period drama The Hardacres. That meant the prodco already had a great crew ready to call upon to support lead director Ed Bazalgette (Marie Antoinette S2, The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die) and series producer Suzanne McAuley (Magpie Murders, Love/Hate). “Everybody is just fantastic,” Stern says, “and the landscapes in Ireland are second to none, as are the facilities.”
As a result, “every television shoot is hard, but this one was relatively easy and painless,” he jokes. “The key to that was we got really lucky about the team being on the same page about the show we were making and the reasons we felt it could be special. It’s a rare thing when that happens, and you see it on the screen as a result. As TV productions go, this was a pretty good one.”
With the series airing on BritBox in the US and the BBC sometime in 2025, Thompson is hopeful viewers will want to “hang out” with Lynley and Havers as they get to work on each investigation, developing a “fun and engaging dynamic” as their partnership deepens.
“We want to be there. We want to be alongside them, and that’s what makes it work,” he says. “It’s an interesting dynamic because there are two things going on at once. These are guys who have got a gentle banter going on at the same time as they’re digesting some pretty grim facts of a murder case. It’s just those two things playing off each other.”
Stern also believes Lynley will pull in viewers from around the world. “The big thing international television has taught us is that people like to be transported, to spend time with characters they like in places they find interesting and unique, no matter where they are,” he says. “That’s what this show does and why it ultimately will appeal.”
tagged in: BBC, Britbox, David Stern, Elizabeth George, Lynley, Playground, Steve Thompson