Authors penning hit TV shows? It’s no longer a novel concept

This story is part of the April 1 Edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

You’ll be forgiven if you don’t know the name Tom Rob Smith right off the bat. He’s not, after all, a top Hollywood actor, a high-profile film director or even a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He’s just – if that’s the appropriate word – a bestselling novelist and the screenwriter of several hit TV productions, whose critically lauded work speaks so much louder than any instant name recognition. Which is how Tom Rob Smith prefers it anyway.

So, without further ado: a roll call of the British writer’s major works to date. Smith is the best-selling author of the 2008 thriller, Child 44 (more than 2 million copies sold), which spawned two sequels, The Secret Speech and Agent 6, and was followed in 2014 by another psychological thriller, The Farm. He wrote the screenplay for the second season of the true-crime series, American Crime Story – The Assassination of Gianni Versace – which won a 2018 Golden Globe and an Emmy for best miniseries. He penned the miniseries London Spy, starring Ben Whishaw and Charlotte Rampling – its opening episode alone was viewed by 2.5 million Brits – as well as MotherFatherSon, another miniseries, this one starring Richard Gere and Billie Howle.

From left: unlike the film version of Child 44 (starring Tom Hardy), Tom Rob Smith had full script control of London Spy (starring Ben Whishaw and Edward Holcroft).Credit:

Those who admire Smith’s work will be pleased to know he’s about to have another big moment with the recent release of his new novel, Cold People, the streaming next month of a limited TV series, Class of ’09, which he wrote and produced, and the imminent announcement of a new miniseries based on The Farm. Oh, and in late May, he’ll be in Australia for the Sydney Writers’ Festival. If Smith sounds prolific, that’s because he is. And he’s still only 44 years old.

When I speak to Smith via video from his New York apartment, he’s wearing frameless glasses and a fawn jumper with colourful motifs of bottles and plants. He’s boyish-looking, with permanently tousled dark-blond hair and an accent that’s mostly British, with US West Coast inflections (the London-born writer has spent much of the past few years commuting between the UK and the US). Outside, it’s a crisp winter’s evening: through a large glass balcony door, the twinkling lights of Manhattan beckon. He’s not long back from an early-evening walk, along footpaths lined with dirty clumps of snow. “I walk everywhere,” he explains. “I pretty much never take taxis unless I’m going to the airport. I love looking at the buildings, the people; it allows me to think.”

In recent years, the word “storyteller” has been co-opted by podcasters, documentary-makers, advertising creatives and, dare I say it, journalists to describe their use of the narrative device to tell real-life tales. But Smith has the virtuosity of the classic campfire storyteller, one who uses his extravagant imagination to dramatise true-life stories to compelling effect.

In his screenplay for The Assassination of Gianni Versace (based on the award-winning book, Vulgar Favors, by investigative journalist Maureen Orth), Smith makes serial killer Andrew Cunanan’s fast and violent cross-country murder spree – driven by his steep, psychological descent – feel as real as waves crashing on a rocky shore. In London Spy, we’re inside a dark tunnel where people are not what they seem, as the central character, Danny, has his life turned upside down after discovering the body of a man he’s fallen in love with, only to learn that his murdered lover had worked for the Secret Intelligence Service.

As a novelist and screenwriter, Smith’s talents dovetail with the demands of a fast-shifting TV, cinema and publishing landscape. He’s part of a crop of younger novelist-screenwriters who recognise that streaming miniseries offer enough screen-time to create fully fleshed-out plots and characters that evolve beyond stock types. The novelist-screenwriter is nothing new (think Truman Capote, Stephen King, Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury) but shrinking advances for novels combined with fat pay cheques for those at the table in TV series writers’ rooms have propelled the trend more recently.

“Screenplays are pretty quick to write,” says Smith, stroking his wispy beard thoughtfully. “Once you have the outline, you can push out the first 60 pages or so of a draft. That’s completely different from writing a novel: there’s no way you can get the first draft down quickly; you can’t cheat the prose in that way.”

He hastens to add, however, that screenplays, which are driven by dialogue and visual explainers, can typically go through 30 or 40 maddening rewrites. “I’m a big rewriter,” he says. “I don’t think any of my novels’ first drafts were quick. The Farm was probably the quickest because I knew Sweden [where it is partly set] so well. That first draft came in under a year.”

Still, Smith believes novels can do things creatively that other media can’t. Although he’s produced his share of original award-winning screenplays, he admits to leaning back to the novel as a source for filmed material for the very reason that a book contains so much more character description and background, giving greater insight into the inner workings of the protagonists, thus providing texture and depth-of-field for a script.

“What if we were all put in that situation ... (where) status, inherited property, the dividing lines of nation states – were suddenly wiped away?”

Smith learnt early on to seize the creative reins when one of his books was being made into a film. His first novel, Child 44, published just after he turned 29, was an instant bestseller and awarded Britain’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller of the year. Inspired by the true-life story of Andrei Chikatilo, a serial killer dubbed the “Red Ripper” in the Soviet Union, it was made into a feature film starring Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman. The film was a box-office bomb and a critical failure, however, and from then on, Smith was determined to write the scripts for any more films made from his books.

Smith’s new novel, Cold People, is about the end of the world – at least as we know it. It’s a stark departure from his earlier work, which had mostly centred on crime. In Cold People, an unseen alien species with vastly more advanced technology has come to Earth and given the entire human race 30 days to evacuate to Antarctica. But the real battle to survive begins when the refugees attempt to carve out an existence in the most hostile place on Earth.

While Tom Rob Smith’s 2008 publishing debut, Child 44, and his 2014 book, The Farm, were both thrillers, his latest work, Cold People, ventures into sci-fi .

Smith tells me he’s long been interested in themes of dispossession and displacement: peoples being invaded, robbed of their land and shoved onto another inferior slice of territory. Human history has been built on conquest and replacement but, as a writer, Smith wasn’t interested in exploring one specific story of injustice. Rather, his interest lay in the wider issue of what it means to lose your ancestral home.

“What if we were all put in that situation?” he asks. “What if an imposed mass migration of the entire human race meant that all the things we believe in – status, inherited property, the dividing lines of nation states – were suddenly wiped away? What if some superior intelligence ordered us to evacuate to the worst piece of land on the planet?”

Smith was in London in March 2020 and booked to go on a three-week trip to Antarctica (“Nothing gruelling or adventurous, just a boat trip down to the Antarctic Peninsula from Ushuaia”) when the world stopped. “The pandemic hit, I went into lockdown in London, so at least I was given a lot of extra time to write the book,” he says, laughing.

All Smith’s works, whether novels or screenplays, are firmly grounded in their location. How important is this sense of place in his work? “Very,” he says. “In Japanese horror mythology, there’s this thing where terrible events can leave a spiritual imprint on the buildings where they happen.”

As a screenwriter, he’s intrigued by how a scene between two actors can be reframed by their location, affecting how they physically interact. It will be an interesting process, I suggest to him, if Cold People is turned into a film. “In Antarctica, there’s this enormous sense of space but because the conditions are so hostile, people are huddled together,” he says. “Which results in a strange mix of both claustrophobia and physical emptiness, which is rare.”

From left: Smith penned The Assassination of Gianni Versace (with Édgar Ramirez and Penélope Cruz) and MotherFatherSon (starring Richard Gere).Credit:

Smith grew up in South London, one of three children to a Swedish mother and an English father, both antiques dealers. Within a year or so of graduating from St John’s College in Cambridge in 2001, he scored a job as a scriptwriter and editor with the BBC.

Smith was inspired by his mother’s psychosis (she’s since fully recovered) to write The Farm. The main character, a 29-year-old gay man called Daniel, is distressed by a phone call from his father in Sweden, who claims his mother has had a psychotic episode. But when Daniel’s mother lands on his doorstep in London, her vivid, highly detailed accounts of his father colluding with a sleazy, bullying neighbour, sexually harassing young women in a local village, seem plausible, leaving him divided between his parents’ starkly different versions of events. Smith still remembers the night his mother came to his door, bearing a hospital band on her wrist and accounts of persecution. “As a storyteller, my mother was absolutely compelling,” he says.

While he was in a live-in relationship with British TV executive Ben Stephenson for some time, Smith says he’s spent the past few years “bouncing around a lot because of work”, including spending eight months in Atlanta filming Class of ’09. “I work a lot because I love it. But at some level, I’d like to put down roots.”

Wherever he finally settles – and it will probably be back in his home town of London – he has his books. Smith is a compulsive reader, especially when taking a break. The one-on-one relationship with a book, he says, is when he feels most at peace.

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