Make British crime dramas longer and we can take on the Nordics, says the Rebus writer

Surely I can’t be the only British crime writer who looks on jealously as another 20-hour Scandinavian crime drama hits our TV screens to rave reviews and ecstatic tweets. The BBC announced recently that it was a bit bored with gritty homegrown detectives, yet the appetite for foreign coppers seems bottomless.

Is it that the settings are radically different, the weather more pleasing to the eye, the main characters a breath of fresh air? I don’t think so. The winning ingredient of these imports is their length. One story – albeit a serpentine tale peopled by a large and beguiling cast – is allowed to play out over many episodes. This gives everything – plot, location, characters – room to breathe, and gives the writers a chance, too.

A criticism often levelled at crime fiction is that it is plot-driven at the expense of theme and characterisation. On TV this is made more palpable when the script only has 45 minutes to an hour to tell the story. When my Inspector Rebus novels were televised, they began life as two-hour films on ITV – that was 100 minutes of screen time, with 20 minutes of adverts. A change of approach brought that down to 45 minutes, with 15 minutes of ads. One minute of screen time equates to a page of script, so a novel of 400 pages had to be stripped down to its bare bones by the screenwriter, leaving little scope for character development or sub-plot.

Is it that our attention span has diminished? Do producers not trust viewers to remember from one night (or week) to the next what happened in the preceding episode? The success of The Killing and The Bridge seems to have given the lie to this, which is good news, potentially. Maybe our broadcasters will take the risk and opt for longer shows, as they often do already with so- called ‘quality’ fiction, where three hours or even six may be available if you have the right name.

Sky in particular has already shown willing to turn the books of Martina Cole and Mark Billingham into screenplays that stretch past a single hour. But I yearn for the good old days, when I could settle down to a Prime Suspect knowing that the next few nights or weeks would allow the actors to inhabit their roles more fully, those roles crafted by writers who knew they had the pages at their disposal to give the characters oxygen.

Crime drama shouldn’t just be about the plot – it should be about how characters react to the world around them, leading to a deeper exploration of the society in which crimes are allowed to occur and recur. More length, please, we’re British.