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?”
