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,

In 2015, the author Marlon James was in London, where he had just won the Booker Prize for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” Holed away in a hotel room after the ceremony before he flew home to Minneapolis,

Get Millie Black had me in the first two minutes of Episode 1. It’s not just the narration, which is compelling. It’s the show’s entire demeanor, a kind of mean-spirited forthrightness that sets the scene.