Harlan Coben on Missing You and his next series: "A little more of a ghost story"

With delays for translation and export, though, they can take years to reach foreign audiences. "But with Missing You on TV," he enthuses, "on 1st January, someone at Netflix presses a button and this show will be on in 190 countries. I love the international aspect of it."

Geographical spread is significant in another way when it comes to Coben’s TV work.

Missing You, adapted from his 2014 novel of the same name, moves the story of a cop mourning her dead father and vanished lover from New York to England, a consequence of the author’s collaboration with Manchester-based producer Nicola Shindler, who previously relocated his novels Stay Close and Fool Me Once, which is one of Netflix’s top-rated series globally and has been watched by over 98 million viewers.

"I’ve done a number of books with Nicola and the same team," Coben, 63, says. "We talk to the writer [adapting it for the screen] about making the book their own and that may mean moving the story to England. But I’ve got shows coming up set in Poland and Argentina. A lot of effort goes into deciding which book goes where."

Some novelists take the TV cash and an executive producer credit and stay at home writing the next book, but Coben is keen to be part of the screen team. "In the British shows, such as Missing You, I’m very involved," he says. "With a foreign-language one, I’m more at a distance."

The linguistic promiscuity of Coben adaptations has been there from the start. His first screen work was Ne le dis à personne, taken from his book Tell No One, followed onto French TV by Une chance de trop (No Second Chance) and Juste un regard (Just One Look).

Why such a strong French connection? "I’m one of the few American writers who sells more outside the US than in it, so I’ve always had a big relationship with European audiences. Tell No One was supposed to be a big American movie and I really didn’t like the script. Meanwhile, [director] Guillaume Canet kept calling me with ideas for the book and there came a time when I was able to get the rights back. I found a little home making shows in Europe, and now Netflix has been able to make that universal."

Coben’s TV CV is now so long that he says some people only know him as a TV showrunner rather than a novelist. I suggest that a big draw of TV for authors is that the medium offers a limitless number of hours. "These adaptations, like a book, can be as long as you need them to be. Some can be eight episodes, some can be five."

Also, whereas network TV has fixed slot lengths, streamers, like literature, allow for unequal chapters. "On these Netflix shows, an episode can be 39 minutes or more than an hour. It’s great to have that flexibility."

Some novelists, fearful of having second thoughts about sentences or plots, never reread their old books. Coben, however, is forced to. "It’s an interesting experience to be checking over your own stuff again. There are certainly moments of, 'What was I thinking there?' I don’t think anyone likes reading stuff they wrote ten to 15 years ago.

"Luckily, I get to see it through the eyes of producers and writers who are newer to it and tell me it’s still great. Sometimes, if it’s a long time ago, I can’t always remember the plot. With Missing You, a part of me was going, 'What are you doing here?' I could remember the ending but had forgotten the role of certain characters."

A paradox in adapting best-selling suspense books for TV is that readers tuning in may remember the ingeniously withheld solution. "Sometimes, as in the case of Missing You, the book was quite a while ago. If I’ve forgotten bits of it, hopefully they will have, too? Usually, though, I throw in one extra surprise for TV. But Missing You has four different twists, so hopefully you wouldn’t remember them all and, in the TV versions, it’s often the emotional resonances of the twists that come through, being moved by the character’s predicament."

In Missing You, Rosalind Eleazar (Slow Horses) plays a detective who, 11 years after her fiancé left without explanation, sees his photo on a dating app. Sudden disappearance and reappearance are often key to Coben’s plots: his debut novel, Play Dead (1990), began with the disappearance of a sports agent; in Tell No One (2001), a man receives an email from his dead wife; Long Lost (2009) and Home (2016) feature missing people who unexpectedly turn up; and Think Twice (2024) starts with a man who has been dead for three years being named as the FBI’s prime suspect in a recent double homicide.

"Yes, that’s fair. I really like writing about missing people," Coben acknowledges. "I prefer missing to murdered because, with missing, there’s hope. I don’t want to get too deeply psychological about this, but there’s something of wish-fulfilment about it. Both my parents died fairly young – younger than I am now – and I miss them greatly. I think a lot of the stuff in the books about people coming back or turning up is, what if they were still alive? What if they could share this moment? Those sort of emotions play into the sense of hope in the books."

Has new technology given a new twist to old mystery plots? "Yeah. But it’s funny, I’m not really tech-savvy. I don’t know much about it, but it’s the world we live in. Someone going out on a date now, they’re going to google the guy. It would be unrealistic if they didn’t, like writing a book in the 1980s and someone didn’t have a landline. I’m always wondering what I could do with different technologies – like a nanny-cam to watch a kid. Or someone who put spyware in his kid’s computer to check on him. What can I do with that?"

Coben seems to have an unstoppable annual flow of stories for print and screen – is there a file in his laptop with dozens of plot ideas? "Each time I finish a book, I’m the emptiest of vessels. Nothing left. I’m like the defeated boxer who thinks he’ll never lift his arms again. I fear I’ll never have an idea again. If I do have one while writing a book, it goes into the book I’m writing, which may be why I’m plot-heavy and twisty. I’ve just finished a book and have no idea what I’ll do next."

Because he now has parallel page and screen careers, does he sometimes wonder where to use a new idea? "It’s a feel thing. I just finished filming a series called Lazarus with Bill Nighy and Sam Claflin [due later this year on Amazon Prime]. That was an original idea. I thought, ‘I could write this as a novel, but I’m seeing it as a TV series.’ It’s a little more of a ghost story, very visual."

It feels natural to him to move between page and screen. "My generation of writers are still asked in interviews what are the key books that inspired us. There will be those, but you can’t get away from the fact that we grew up watching TV and movies. The Sopranos might be as significant as Dickens, and that’s bound to have an effect."

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