British Crime Drama: The Complete Guide

No country has made the police story as thoroughly its own as Britain. The reasons are structural: single writers scripting whole runs instead of writers' rooms, seasons of six episodes instead of twenty-two, and a national talent for finding the sinister in the ordinary, the body on the beach at low tide, the neighbour who keeps himself to himself. The result is a sixty-year tradition that runs from Z-Cars' shift-work realism to Adolescence's single-take gut punch, with the world's best detective institutions in between.

This guide covers the whole territory: the golden-age wave that began with Broadchurch and Happy Valley, the institutions from Morse to Vera, the gangster films, Belfast and Dublin, tartan noir, the novels behind the badges, and the true-crime dramatizations Britain does with unmatched restraint.

The institutions

Every Sunday night for four decades, somewhere in Britain, a rumpled detective has been walking into a crime scene with a long-suffering sergeant in tow. Inspector Morse set the gold standard in 1987, all Oxford melancholy and crossword logic, and its universe alone spans thirty-six years of television through Lewis and the prequel Endeavour. Around it stand the long-running pillars: Vera's shambling brilliance on the Northumberland coast, Shetland's landscape-as-lead-character, Foyle's wartime rectitude, and Midsomer's cheerfully absurd village body count.

Cops policing cops

Britain's great structural contribution to the genre is the internal-affairs thriller. Between the Lines got there in 1992, but Line of Duty industrialized it: Ted Hastings' AC-12, the letter H, and the long interview scenes, twenty unbroken minutes of paperwork and lies, that became appointment television for millions. Jed Mercurio's other machine, Bodyguard, compressed the same institutional paranoia into six hours and broke BBC ratings records. The lineage runs back through State of Play and Edge of Darkness, the two conspiracy thrillers every showrunner still copies.

The gangster films

British crime cinema's spine is the gangster picture, and it runs cold. Brighton Rock gave it a razor-carrying teenage psychopath in 1948; Get Carter perfected the register in 1971, Michael Caine moving through Newcastle like weather; The Long Good Friday mapped gangland onto Thatcherism in one collapsing day. Then 1998's Lock, Stock made the geezer caper a national industry, Sexy Beast contributed the most terrifying houseguest in cinema, and Dead Man's Shoes took the revenge film somewhere genuinely upsetting.

The bookshelf

The novels came first, and mostly still come first. The golden thread runs from Conan Doyle and Christie through Rendell and P.D. James, who brought psychology and literature into the police story, to the modern regional schools: Rankin's Edinburgh, Cleeves' Northumberland and Shetland, Peter May's Hebrides, Mina's Glasgow, and Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad, the most literary crime series of the century. British TV's detective institutions are, almost without exception, adaptations wearing raincoats.