Now that Christopher McQuarrie has been promoted from Jack Reacher writer-director to full-time Tom Cruise Whisperer, Scott Frank has lost his competition as premier screenwriter and sometime director in the field of adapting literary pulp.

Frank has worked with Elmore Leonard books (adapting Get Shorty and Out of Sight into beloved films), X-Men comics (co-credited on screenplays for The Wolverine and Logan), and his own version of Sam Spade (for the recent TV series Monsieur Spade), among other projects that keep their focus trained on characters amidst their noirish thrills.

His new Netflix series Dept. Q continues that lineage, adapting a series of Danish crime novels about a scrappy but talented cold-case unit, relocating the action to Edinburgh, Scotland.

It’s a premise seemingly

See Full Page