Goalpost Options Mulla Nunn Detective Novels for TV Treatment

Goalpost Pictures has optioned the award-winning Detective Emmanuel Cooper book series by the Australian-South African writer Mulla Nunn.

The four darkly romantic and morally complex Detective Emmanuel Cooper crime novels are set in 1950s apartheid-era South Africa. The series, titled Detective Cooper, centers on the unlikely investigative alliance a damaged World War II veteran-turned-detective forms with a conflicted Zulu police officer who has the ability to communicate with spirits of the dead and a guilt-ridden German-Jewish doctor.

The British-Australian writer James McNamara is creating the series for television and writing it with Nunn.

Goalpost’s Kylie du Fresne, producer, said: “Malla Nunn’s books Detective Emmanuel Cooper are irresistible page-turners. The action is driven by murder, passion and corruption and the stories are layered with the moral ambiguities and the smoldering undercurrents of a racially divided nation. They are stories that have resonance not just here in Australia and in South Africa, but around the world.

“Goalpost is thrilled to be working with Malla Nunn and with James McNamara to adapt these stories for the screen and to extend the world of Detective Cooper.”