Booth’s Coppers Win Screen Time

Stephen Booth spent more than two dozen years as a journalist in England, before becoming a full-time novelist. Between 2000 and 2018, he penned 18 mysteries, the first two of which—Black Dog (2000) and Dancing with the Virgins (2001)—picked up Barry Awards for Best British Crime Novel. All of those yarns starred what I described, in a 2002 January Magazine interview with Booth, as “an odd police couple—the congenitally empathetic Detective Constable Ben Cooper and Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, his attractive yet designedly severe superior—based in the East Midlands town of Edendale.”

Now comes RadioTimes with the news that Channel 5 in Britain is adapting this author’s stories for the small screen:

The new TV series, titled Cooper and Fry, will be made up of 4 two-hour episodes, will be set in the Peak District, and will follow two mismatched young detectives.

One of these detectives is Ben Cooper, an affable local who is played by Downton Abbey and The Inheritance star Robert James-Collier. Meanwhile, the other is Diane Fry, a guarded newcomer played by Doctor Who and Curfew star Mandip Gill.

The synopsis for the series says: “Thrown together to investigate a string of mysterious deaths they must learn to work together to get results. As their personal lives begin to intertwine, a unique friendship begins to form ... but it won’t always be easy.”

RadioTimes goes on to say, “Each of the episodes is set to adapt one of Booth’s novels, with this first season taking on Black Dog, Dying to Sin [2007], Blind to the Bones [2003] and Dancing with the Virgins.”

I have read almost all of Booth’s Cooper and Fry tales, and can easily picture James-Collier as Ben Cooper, though I always thought of him as being younger than that actor’s 48 years. My mind is having a bit harder time wrapping itself around the idea of Gill portraying Fry, but that’s largely because she’s described by one male chauvinist character in Black Dog as being “a bit of a hard-faced cow. Could be a looker … but she doesn’t bother. Blonde, but has her hair cut short. Too tall, too skinny, no make-up, always wears trousers. A bit of a stroppy bitch.” It seems unlikely that the dimpled, Anglo-Indian Gill, almost a dozen years younger than James-Collier, would ever be described by any sane person as “a bit of a hard-faced cow.” I look forward to seeing how they’ll embody Booth’s crime-solving police partners.