Neil Cross writes detectives who know the answer before the evidence arrives and killers built out of his nightmares. When the actors are as good as Idris Elba and Ruth Wilson it works; when the plot has to stand on its own it seldom does.
Fi1m perspective
Luther begins with a man on a gantry above a drop, a child-killer hanging from the edge, and the detective taking a moment too long to decide whether to help. Neil Cross wrote that scene in 2010 and, in a sense, everything he has written since. His policemen know what someone has done long before they can prove it, so the suspense is never who did it. Cross has said he stole the shape from Columbo: we see the crime, and the drama is how the good man catches the culprit and what it costs him to stay good.
He came to television from novels, starting with Mr In-Between in 1998, and did not write for the screen until Spooks around 2006, where he became lead scriptwriter on the sixth and seventh series. Luther followed in 2010 and ran until 2019, and he wrote every episode himself, so it sounds like one voice throughout, tics included. Since then: Hard Sun (2018), a crime drama with the end of the world in the background, which lasted one series; The Sister (2020); The Mosquito Coast (2021–2023), which he co-created and ran; two episodes of Doctor Who in 2013; a co-writing credit on the horror film Mama (2013); a feature-length Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023); and The Iris Affair (2025).
What works is the centre. Cross builds one large character and hands it to a fine actor, and in Idris Elba he found one who could make staring at a wall look like thinking. The best thing in Luther is the long flirtation between Luther and Alice, the woman Ruth Wilson plays and whom Luther is sure has killed her parents, conducted across interview tables and park benches by two people who find nobody else interesting. We were unsettled by the first of those scenes more than we expected to be, and though Wilson did the unsettling, Cross wrote the lines and the pauses she did it with. Keeping two characters circling each other across five series is harder than it looks.
What does not work is nearly everything around them. Cross has said his villains are built from his own fears, and it shows: they wear masks, follow rituals and behave as if they had wandered in from a horror film. Once, that is a jolt. Case after case, it is a formula, and by the third such murderer in Luther we were bored, then irritated, because the actors were plainly better than the puzzle and the puzzle kept winning. When the plot needs proof it offers Luther's certainty; when it needs stakes it puts his friends in danger. That is partly the price of the Columbo shape. Once we know who did it, something else has to carry the hour, and Cross reaches for the grotesque.
Luther is the one to watch, for Elba and Wilson, believing none of the plotting. Cross is a writer who needs a big actor and is at his best when he has one. When his next series is announced, look first at who is playing the lead.
Biography
Neil Cross is a British novelist and screenwriter. He created and wrote all episodes of the BBC crime drama series Luther (2010–2019), starring Idris Elba, and wrote the 2023 Netflix film Luther: The Fallen Sun. He also wrote two episodes of Doctor Who (2013) and served as lead scriptwriter on series 6 and 7 of Spooks (2002).
Cross began his career as a novelist, publishing Mr In-Between (1998) and Always the Sun (2004), the latter longlisted for the Booker Prize. His memoir Heartland (2005) was shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerley Prize. He created the series Hard Sun (2018) and The Sister (2021). He lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
