Marlon James complicates the haunted detective story with Get Millie Black

Marlon James’ Get Millie Black immediately subverts expectations: The HBO drama, which premiered November 25, is a detective story, not, as you might expect from a collaboration between one of the greatest novelists of this century and one of the biggest purveyors of fantasy shows, a sweeping epic (though James does have such an adaptation in the works). Its protagonist, played with grit and humor by Tamara Lawrance, is the latest in a line of female TV detectives consumed with righting a past wrong. But she seeks justice for the most vulnerable in Jamaica, a country still in the midst of casting off the long-term effects of colonialism. Though the Jamaican-American author admits he embraced certain tropes in making his first series, the victims and the avenging angel in this story are unlike the ones that usually populate these stories—on TV in the U.S., at least.

But do a little digging and you’ll find that James has always seen the act of writing as “detective work,” whether he’s combining genres in his Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History Of Seven Killings or meticulously building a fantasy world inspired by African history and lore in his Dark Star trilogy. Having previously asked him about his role in a post-apocalyptic society, The A.V. Club spoke with James about ghost stories, ambiguity in endings, and how we sell the television medium short when we insist on seeing it as anything other than TV. 

The A.V. Club: Let’s take a cue from the series premiere and start at the beginning. What inspired you to make a TV series?  

Marlon James: I am a novelist, but I’m also a writer and I’ve always been interested in other mediums, other genres. I’m still trying and failing to write my comic book. [Laughs] It’s not going to happen. I keep trying. I’ve been trying to write a comic book [since] before I even tried to write a novel, but ultimately, I love stories and I love the many ways in which I hear stories and see stories. I am a Gen X kid—I was raised by television. My nanny was Sesame Street, so I’ve always been drawn to the medium, the language, the stories.

I rarely come across a novel where I wish I wrote it, but I’ll watch something like I May Destroy You or Six Feet Under or the first season of True Detective or, in particular, Happy Valley and go, “Damn, I wish I wrote that.” And there is a way in which a character can quietly unfold in [a] series of TV episodes that just doesn’t happen in any other medium. Also, I write novels. I can do a lot of things, but I can’t make a character come alive. Readers do that, but actors also do that. And to see a story being animated in a dramatic setting has always been powerful for me. I’m still in many ways inspired more by drama than by fiction. My second novel began as a play, so I’ve always been inching towards this, I think.

AVC: Can you break down Millie’s opening monologue that goes along with that intense montage at the start? “This is just another story about Jamaica. It won’t add up, it won’t make sense, but like every story about this country, this is a ghost story.”

MJ: I said this when I was talking about A Brief History Of Seven Killings, which was like three novels ago: When I’m in Jamaica, I don’t trust facts. I trust rumors. I trust hearsay. And part of that is because of this love of gossip. But part of it also is the longstanding Black tradition of the oral story. The oral tradition is a huge part of Black storytelling, of African storytelling, of how we carry our traditions down. So, there’s a lot of legitimacy in the stuff people tell you. That doesn’t mean it’s going to add up. 

The great thing when you read African stories is that the characters who were heroes on Monday are villains on Tuesday [and] victims on Wednesday. It’s a comedy on Thursday, it’s a tragedy on Friday, it’s a musical on Saturday. And so when I say it won’t add up, if you are Jamaican, you’re not expecting it to add up; you’re not expecting it to totally make sense. And the reason why it’s a ghost story is that if we’re going to talk about any country throwing off colonialism, slavery—I mean, if you’re in America throwing off Jim Crow—your stories are going to be haunted. 

There are too many ghosts; there are too many spirits that are not at rest. Whether I am a slave on a plantation or I’m one of the four little girls who got bombed in Alabama, there are a lot of restless spirits out there. And for Millie to confront the past, even her own personal past, she has to confront those ghosts, those things she’s haunted by. And that’s why in a lot of ways it’s a ghost story. Millie, in a way, is chasing a ghost. She’s chasing the ghost of her brother.

AVC: It’s interesting to combine that kind of ambiguity with a detective story, especially a detective story on TV, where viewers might expect a clear ending. Modern audiences seem to struggle with ambiguous endings; there’s a whole cottage industry around explaining the ending of a film or a TV series. Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but did you aim to retain that ambiguity in the ending?

MJ: I actually think in a lot of ways our ending is pretty clear, but I think it’s also pretty clear that the story hasn’t ended. It’s not necessarily that there’s confusion or ambiguity. But I think it’s also pretty clear that this is not an ending—that certain stories have stopped, but they haven’t ended, and that there is a lot of unfinished business. There’s a lot that’s incomplete because, one, that’s just the nature of family stories. They never really end, not even with death. And it was very important for me to show that in this story, there is still unfinished business, if for no other reason [than] to give people a reason to watch another season. But [there is] also just the incomplete work that’s done when you’re working on relationships. And that’s the thing: Even when the plot resolves itself, none of the relationships [get] resolve[d].

AVC: And if this is in part a story about the effects of colonialism, it seems almost impossible to end on something conclusive.

MJ: Because even if you get to a resolution on one thing, there’s something else that’s raw and open. There’s colonialism, but there’s also self-determination. And there’s also: What do we do with all our queer people? There’s also Millie as a working woman and a professional. What does that mean for somebody who puts her life on the line daily ? What is behind all of that? And these are questions that…some of them get answered, a lot of them don’t.

AVC: In part because it’s on HBO, there have already been comparisons to shows like Mare Of Easttown and the most recent season of True Detective. Millie herself seems to follow in that line of female protagonists who are flawed but incredibly dedicated to their work, who are trying to fix the past by helping others in the present. 

MJ: She is trying to fix the past, and it’s an impossible thing because the past has passed. But again, that’s the thing. When I’m teaching creative writing, one of the first lessons I give my students is remembering humans are the only animal[s] that, even when they know better, can’t do better. And she knows better. A ghost is what drives her. In some ways, the impossibility is what makes her keep doing it and what drives her to do stuff. And she ends up going off the rails in a lot of ways as the story progresses. But I am always interested in how ordinary people get pushed to the limit. People who do things you wouldn’t expect. People who surprise or disappoint or end up doing things that surprise even them. And I love uncovering the psychology of that: when good people do bad things and what’s behind that.

We have a character who enters as a victim and midway becomes a villain. But we never lose them and we never stop feeling for them because we know the desperation at the core that guides our actions. I like when readers, when viewers, have a complicated relationship to our character—they can’t totally love them, they can’t totally hate them. They like them here, they hate them there, and they go through a whole emotional roller-coaster with the character. To me, that’s the best thing.

AVC: Something I felt that their storyline explores is this idea that morality is often determined by your circumstances. If you never have cause to steal, if you never have a need to do x thing, you probably won’t, right?

MJ: Yeah. And it is not just the need—the need teaches you this warped lesson that there are haves and there are have-nots; and your job is to become a have, even if it means taking it from somebody else. That’s the lesson a lot of people learn. And next thing you know, we’re in over our heads in a bad deal, even though we think we’re essentially good people.

AVC: In an interview with Esquire for Moon Witch, Spider King, you said you try to avoid certain pitfalls or tropes in fantasy writing. Did you have a similar strategy with Get Millie Black? It’s a detective story, which also has so many tropes. Were there any you were trying to avoid or any that you embraced?

MJ: There are, but also there’s some that I totally loved and wanted. I knew I wanted the voiceover, which is a trope. But I knew I was going to subvert it by having a different narrator every episode. These narrators are trying to push the plot forward, but they also have their own agendas. Janet absolutely has an agenda. Hibiscus has an agenda. Hibiscus doesn’t want to be seen, and it’s the people closest to her who aren’t seeing her. There were aspects of the genre I wanted to pay attention to because I do love detective stories. But there are also things I thought we could subvert, tweak, invert. The great thing about the crime story is that it often shows human beings at their very worst and at their very best. And it’s a great way to examine the human condition. We use it as almost a springboard to go into talking about sisters and that dynamic between them, especially when it’s a relationship that’s been poisoned by their parents, by their mother.

AVC: The setting also quickly sets it apart from other detective stories. Get Millie Black joins a growing number of shows about the Jamaican diaspora: There’s also Hulu’s Queenie and Netflix’s Champion and Top Boy. You’ve only recently entered the TV industry, but are you heartened by that development? How would you describe the way we talk about representation right now?

MJ: I think it’s always been pretty fraught. It’s a weird underspoken [yet] overspoken topic. I think once we talk about representation, a lot of people think, Oh, we’re just trying to be woke again. Or we just are trying to fill a quota or please somebody. It’s always interesting that there’s this idea that any attempt at diversity results in mediocrity, which I’ve never understood. I think, how many stories about whiny mediocre white men in New York do you need? How many white men in midlife crisis who have a wife and a mistress do you need? Talk about fantasy! [Laughs] So it’s fraught, the sort of reaction against representation and [representation] as an end in itself. It’s not just that we want more gay characters; we want characters who have complicated gay lives. We want complicated Black women’s lives. We want complicated women’s lives. I want to see more stories about women who choose not to have kids.

We have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by more representation, by more stories. I don’t know if people start to think that it becomes a political topic, and it’s not. It’s that after a while. I write fantasy and I’m a big fan of fantasy, but at one point I realized to read fantasy [stories] is to come to terms with the fact people like me are never in them. I’m not saying I read stories to see myself, because then I wouldn’t read 99-percent of the stuff I read, but after a while you do start to wonder: Am I not good enough for a story?

For a gay kid, you’re not seeing [yourself] and after a while, you’re going to think, What? I’m not good enough for a story. So, I think these different stories are important. And I think when people realize the universality of “we are all born, we all go to school, we have all fallen in love, we all experience heartbreak, we experience death” and so on, and the ways in which the stuff that we have in common is what also I think lets us appreciate the stuff that makes us singular and different. I hope in the present political situation that we don’t have this backlash or frontlash where we think less representation is what we need. I fear that that might be something that happens. And I think that’d be really sad because there [are] still so many stories that are just waiting to be told.

AVC: Something I’d like to get your thoughts on as an author is one of the highest compliments paid to a TV show these days is to describe it as either “cinematic” or “novelistic,” terms that are both rooted in other mediums. It’s almost like people don’t really want to see TV for what it is, if the way we compliment the best TV is by relating it to film or books.

MJ: I understand those terms and, as a novelist, I think it is a compliment that people think you have achieved a certain point in your art when you write something like what I write. But it makes me wonder about what you do with a television show whose pleasures are purely TV, like Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I don’t think it’s cinematic. I can tell the limited budget from every episode. [Laughs] I don’t think it’s novelistic at all, not even YA novelistic. It’s a TV show, and that’s what’s so great about it. 

I didn’t jump to TV to write film novels. If I wanted a film novel, I would’ve written Millie as a novel. The problem with the whole idea of “novelistic” is that it assumes that all the miracle work that happened in a TV show happened on the page. I’m a writer and I’d love to take credit for a lot of that, but it’s just not true. A huge part of what makes a TV show great is simply the acting. And some of these actors are bringing things to the story that, as a writer, I didn’t think about. I get [why people use those terms], but I’ve come across some of these novelistic TV shows and I’m bored silly. I’m not here for the TV show that becomes great at episode four. I’m not going to lie. Television is its own medium and it has its rules. I think there are things about TV that make it great, and it’s not the way in which it’s like other genres but the way in which you realize this story couldn’t be told any other way.