Does it matter whether adapted books and TV series are true to their source material? The book-to-TV-series route is common, and the results can be terrific, as with the Andrew Scott version of The Talented Mr. Ripley and HBO’s Bosch series. Or they can be mixed, as we’ll see with Dept. Q, adapted from Jussi Adler-Olsen’s 2011 thriller, The Keeper of Lost Causes.
But the novel inspired by a true-crime documentary is a little rarer, which is what happened with Megan Abbott’s new book, El Dorado Drive. It borrows liberally from the HBO documentary Murder on Middle Beach (2020), about the still-unsolved case of a Madison, Connecticut, woman named Barbara Hamburg who was brutally murdered at her home in 2010.
Barbara’s story plays directly into Abbott’s affinity for the powerful—but often fraught and knotty—bonds among women, expressed here through something called “the gifting tables,” essentially a pyramid scheme for suburban housewives. Aspiring members gained entry to the group’s dinner parties with a $5,000 “appetizer” donation to the person who invited them; then, if they kept recruiting other members who had to pay the same fee to get in, they would eventually ascend to the “dessert” level and collect $40,000. This was illegal, and a couple of the top organizers ended up in prison.
One of the most striking things about the documentary is that it was directed by the victim’s bereft son, Madison, which adds a layer of emotional immediacy to the project. Madison is skeptical about the local police department, which looked at everyone from him and his sister to Barbara’s fellow gifters to her slippery ex-husband, but has never made an arrest. Madison was hoping to get some answers while making the film, but despite his dogged persistence, nothing has changed.
Then, in April, seemingly out of the blue, the governor of Connecticut offered a $50,000 reward for information about the case. Perhaps he was tipped off about El Dorado Drive, which could revive interest. Abbott retains many of the Hamburg story’s details, but relocates it to the wealthy suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in 2008, when the financial crisis decimated Detroit’s auto industry and, along with it, families who saw their prosperity and privilege dissolve in an instant.
Abbott grew up in Grosse Pointe, and she missed nothing. She summons up its totems—the Lilly Pulitzer shift dresses, patchwork pants for the men, Old Fashioneds, luxury cars, riding clubs and country clubs—with immersive power. Always a vividly sensorial writer, she lures the reader into this outwardly ordinary but inwardly seething world like a sorceress of suburbia. She also brings sneaky Hitchcockian energy and makes some apt allusions to Edgar Allan Poe—in the title, for one (look up the poem), and in several references to “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
At the center of her reimagining are the Bishop sisters, charismatic Pam (the Barbara character), Debra, and Harper, once pampered daughters of the 1 percent, now middle-aged and living in cruddy rental houses, trying to stay above water. Pam’s high-flying husband has abandoned the family, Debra is drowning in her husband’s medical bills, and Harper is a debt-ridden equestrienne now reduced to living in Pam’s sad rental.
Then the Wheel (the gifting-tables equivalent) rolls in, a life-changing opportunity. Even though it’s obviously a pyramid scheme, the desperate housewives are seduced by the illusion of sisterhood it brings, a twisted promise of empowerment through cash “gifts” that substitutes for a true sense of purpose. Who could resist the silver Christmas tree gilded with money, a Money Cake made of rolled-up dollar bills, a cape encrusted with cash? These are the rewards of fealty to the Wheel, bestowed on its supplicants at giddy, booze-fueled parties. “I know a woman who believes in her power! / I know a woman who is ready for change!” goes the chant.
This can’t end well—at some point you run out of women with the cash needed to keep the scam going—and Pam’s murder brings everything crashing down. But not before Abbott has turned the sisters’ relationships inside out, exposing the envy and the loyalty, the rage and the tenderness that pulse beneath the surface. I like to think that Madison Hamburg and his family, who have endured so much, would approve of Abbott’s attempt to bring these women to life with sympathy and understanding.
Much as I hoped for great things from Dept. Q and admire actor Matthew Goode and writer-director Scott Frank, their overhaul of The Keeper of Lost Causes is not as successful as Abbott’s work. In departing from the book in some significant ways, they’ve overshot the runway, making the plot more complicated and jam-packed with characters than it needed to be, and harsher in tone.
Maybe this is because they’ve moved the action from Denmark to Scotland. In a smackdown between Danish and Tartan noir, Tartan wins every time, being bleaker, nastier, and swearier than the Danish brand. In the nationality transfer, they’ve made the police detective Carl Morck English, so automatically an outlier in the Edinburgh police department. Morck has been traumatized by his part in a raid in which his partner (Jamie Sives) was shot and partially paralyzed, and a young policeman killed. It’s a shocking, well-choreographed scene that gains power from repetition, as Morck plays it over and over in his head, impeding his recovery.
To keep Morck out of the way, his boss has banished him to a disgusting basement lined with urinals to head a new cold-case unit called Dept. Q. If he was abrasive before the shootings, he’s borderline impossible now, a dismissive boss to the two outsiders who work for him and a cranky father to his stepson.
Since Morck can’t be bothered to read the files himself, the cold case that catches the eye of his Syrian assistant, Akram (Alex Manvelov), is a missing-persons case about a high-profile prosecutor named Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie), who disappeared from a ferry four years earlier.
We’re shown that Merritt is still alive, but imprisoned in a torturous situation that’s both excruciating and ridiculous. The camera drops in on her enough that her suffering becomes normalized, and her ordeal comes across as tedious. Let’s just say it works better in the book without all the steampunk equipment and Korean-horror-movie look for Merritt. They also seem to be making Carl’s exile to the land of urinals an echo of Merritt’s confinement, which is a bit on the nose.
This series could have used some Danish rigor; six of Adler-Olsen’s books have been made into 90-minute-ish movies (with four more upcoming) that were big hits in Denmark and got the job done without the resources available to Frank. But Goode is up to the task of making Carl tolerable, and even magnetic, as he processes his rage, and viewers have been enthusiastic, so I’m guessing there’s a Season Two in the offing. With some tightening—maybe six episodes instead of nine—and dialing back the kind of egregious violence that mars the drawn-out ending, Dept. Q could have a long run.
Oh, and if you like the show, may I politely suggest that you read the book that inspired it? As history has taught us, the book is almost always better.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books at Air Mail. She lives in New York City
