Taking a swipe at love

A mystery unfolds in Missing You when a woman tracks down her missing fiance on a dating app.

DI Kat Donovan, played with empathy by Rosalind Eleazar, still grieves for the boyfriend, Josh (Ashley Walker) to whom she was engaged 11 years ago, before he mysteriously walked out on her one night.

“Pictures cost a great deal of money – true,” the great crime writer Raymond Chandler said of Hollywood and the problems encountered when a successful novelist worked for the big production companies.

“The studio spends the money; all the writer spends is his time (and incidentally his life, his hopes, and all the varied experiences, most of them painful, which ­finally made him into a writer) – this also is true.”

Like many successful writers, Chandler hated the studio system, that “showman’s paradise”, and the way authors were so often callously abandoned by producers who possessed “the artistic integrity of slot machines and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur”.

Harlan Coben, one of the most successful novelists of all time having written 30 suspense novels that have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 46 languages, once vowed never to be entrapped by Hollywood’s siren song.

A few years ago, he seemed adamant. “Hollywood is a very interesting and complex creature in terms of being a writer, but it isn’t that important to me,” he said. “I write the book and that’s it. James M. Cain, who wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice, summed it up perfectly when asked if he hated what Hollywood had done to his books. He said Hollywood hasn’t done anything to them. They’re there on the shelf. That’s my attitude, too.”

He also said that a publisher had warned him off by telling him how Hollywood had “beaten the hell” out of Chandler and Scott Fitzgerald and how, “it will crush you like a bug too if you really get involved in it”.

But that all changed when after working with Netflix on two crime dramas, Safe starring Michael C. Hall and the 2015 French series No Second Chance, he signed a multi-year exclusive overall deal with the streamer for a five-year term.

As part of the arrangement, Coben relinquished rights to 14 of his novels and agreed to serve as executive producer and occasionally writer. This meant, unlike Raymond Chandler, he was granted artistic control over the way his work was interpreted for both film and television. He explained that Netflix, with its global reach, worked for his novels.

The idea was for the English-language novels to be adapted into a variety of foreign languages with the involvement of Netflix’s various production hubs across Europe.

Adaptations happened quickly in Poland (The Woods), Spain (The Innocents) and France (Gone for Good), alongside English language productions including The Stranger and Stay Close.

“I hate this term, but we had a shared vision of what we wanted to do,” Coben told Deadline. “They weren’t going to pressure me into doing a season two, three, four or five. I could make it six episodes, eight or 10. Whatever we need to make the story work.”

He added that it was all about his love of storytelling.

“I love doing this, it’s the only thing I’m good at. I have no other life. I was once asked, ‘if you weren’t a writer, what would you be?’ And one of my friends said, ‘a US senator’. I was like, ‘oh please, I’d be a duvet cover’. I’ve got nothing else.”

Missing You is the latest of Coben’s creations to be adapted for Netflix and it’s again from Quay Street Productions, with whom Coben has a lively, creative relationship. He serves as an executive producer on the project, alongside Nicola Shindler, Richard Fee, Danny Brocklehurst, and Victoria Asare-Archer, who’s also the series’ writer.

It’s Coben’s fifth collaboration with Quay, the directors Isher Sahota and Nimer Rashed, who take charge of the initial episodes, setting the style and aesthetic.

It’s also the tenth in the Netflix deal, though it’s increasingly hard to tell, so fast do they come and so quickly are they forgotten. But they are good, well produced, neatly and proficiently directed, and full of formulaic pleasures. It’s been a huge hit for Netflix, hitting the number one spot straight off, ranking in the top 10 in 89 countries and still ranking high in the streamer’s most viewed surveys. Again, of course, it’s a mystery thriller, but as Coben says it’s also a kind of a love story.

At its centre is DI Kat Donovan, a tough, highly efficient cop who grapples with loneliness away from the job. She is played with empathy by Rosalind Eleazar and still grieves for the boyfriend, Josh (Ashley Walker) to whom she was engaged 11 years ago, before he mysteriously walked out on her one night. This love story is an unrequited one with many unresolved issues.

“I like missing people because there’s more to do with the story and it stirs the heart more,” Coben says.

“What I write about really is hope and redemption and that’s more powerful. Hope can be like putting wings on your heart and letting it fly off or it can crush your heart like an eggshell, so the stakes are higher.”

They’re certainly high for Kat, who’s never got over Josh. He left abruptly, secretly and without explanation. But, then Kat recognises Josh on a dating site, Melody Cupid, an app that matches people based on their musical tastes. It’s a site her best friend Stacy (Jessica Plummer), also a private detective, has urged her to join. The mystery deepens. Kat is determined to find him. As this unfolds, a parallel mystery is established when we discover a man (Rudi Dharmalingham) running for his life across the moors. He’s soon caught and chained up in an orange jumpsuit in some kind of outhouse.

We are on our way, all disbelief suspended. Well, almost all.

The man is one of a number of kidnapped people being intermittently tortured until they reveal their financial information to a crew of brutal and sinister crooks. They are led by the seemingly innocuous dog breeder called Titus played by Steve Pemberton in a genuinely scary performance. It soon becomes clear that Titus is luring widowers with large insurance policies designed to extort their fortunes. Is he also somehow involved with the dating site?

Another plot is also revealed: Kat is looking for whoever murdered her father, Clint, played by Lenny Henry, a decorated member of the force. Then, a teenager comes to her to report that his mother is missing after supposedly leaving on a vacation with Josh, oddly enough. Kat initially thinks that the young man is jumping to conclusions, but out of curiosity begins a cursory investigation into his allegations.

Coben’s famous misdirection, red herrings and cliffhangers, the twists and abrupt turns are already in full display. It’s a juicy piece of work, and the episodes fly through, the puzzles revealing more mysteries and conundrums as viewers become more involved with Kat, wondering like her if she can ever make sense of these mysteries that seem to accumulate around her.

What is it about these stories that, even when they are not entirely convincing like Missing You, so many of us can’t stop watching? Andre Bazin, the cultural critic and philosopher once famously said of crime novels that they were “stories of anxiety, which cater for the contemporary wish to feel vaguely disturbed”. He was talking of the way crime fiction, in novels or on film, manoeuverers us into various forms of complicity. We approach them – and we certainly do with Coben – with an uneasy, not entirely unpleasurable anticipation of complicity and guilt, menace, and victimisation. The murderers may in fact be the characters with whom we most identify.

With Coben’s stories, you can never be sure, and it makes them so addictive as you just have to follow them to their twisty conclusions to find out if you were right. Then there are the “what ifs” where we imagine how we would cope in the situations Coben creates for his characters. We’re grateful it has happened to someone else and that what we have learned perhaps provides a valuable lesson. Mmmm, maybe so.

Whatever else, Coben is the great entertainer, the Plot Whisperer. As he says, “It’s a fair criticism that I twist too much. If you don’t like a twist, I’m really not your guy. But really what I’m trying to do is make every paragraph, every page, every sentence and every word more compelling. How can I make you want to turn the page even more?” And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Missing You is streaming on Netflix.