Believe it or not, if you look past all the zombie nonsense they keep churning out well past its sell-by date, the American basic cable channel AMC has become the gold standard for multi-part adaptations of dense, complicated books.

This first occurred to me in 2016 when the channel aired The Night Manager, an adaptation of John le Carré’s 1993 best-seller. Not only did the program boast fine direction,

writing and impeccable production values, it also featured an A-list cast (Tom Hiddleston, Hugh “Wait, he’s English? Laurie, Elizabeth Debicki, etc.). What’s more, whereas most filmed novels are forced to gut the source material due to time constraints, AMC’s The Night Manager, clocking in at six hours, had sufficient time to breathe, which translated into much deeper character and plot development.

As if The Night Manager wasn’t a big enough treat for fans of reading good books, AMC recently launched yet another terrific adaptation of a personal favorite: Dan Simmons‘ 2007 novel, The Terror, an intriguing piece horror fiction that speculates on the fate of the 129 men lost without a trace on the doomed 1845 British expedition to discover a Northwest Passage.

Like The Night Manager, the production is second-to-none — the cinematography, set design, costumes, visual effects and sound design all impeccable — and its cast reads like a who’s who of semi-recognizable but very talented British/Irish thespians, including Jared Harris, Ciarán Hinds, and Tobias Menzies. While only eight of its 10 hours have been televised as of this writing, it’s apparent the folks at AMC have nailed the mise en scène, not to mention the mounting dread, paranoia and utter hopelessness of the situation dreamt up by Simmons’ prose.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I would’ve rolled my eyes at the prospect of such adaptations. After all, TV pretty much sucked back in the day, its boxy aspect ratio and low-resolution fine for sitcoms but little else. In terms of book adaptations the quality was spotty at best — for every The Wind of War extravaganza, there was a pile of excrement such as ABC’s 1992 adaptation of Scott Turow’s The Burden of Proof.

Of course, some tried to push the envelope in terms of making the format more filmic — Michael Mann’s Miami Vice comes to mind, as does Mystery! and Masterpiece Theater on PBS (Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect,  Jeremy Brett‘s as the definitive Sherlock Holmes, Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, Sam Neill in Reilly, Ace of Spies and, of course, Alec Guinness in le Carré’s Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, etcetera) — but television, especially the three American networks, was where mediocre talent went to die.

Over the last decade and a half or so this has changed dramatically, a development I suspect could be linked to HBO’s boundary-stretching (The Wire, The Sopranos, Band of Brothers, etc.) and the rise, in the mid-2000s, of high-definition television. With a bigger, sharper, more colorful canvas to work with (not to mention one more revealing of flaws), production values quickly improved. So much so that the best TV now visually rivals what you’d see in a movie theater. And with the format becoming more filmic — more glamorous, if you will — A-level talent has taken the plunge. Add to that basic cable’s ability to push the boundaries of language and violence and where once television might’ve turned The Terror and The Night Manager into garbage, it’s now the best medium by far to mount complicated adaptations of certain book properties.

Which brings me to the one adaptation I would love to have an AMC or FX or TNT tackle, that of Rose, a 1996 novel by best-selling author Martin Cruz Smith.

Surely you’re aware of Cruz Smith; he’s the writer behind Akardy Renko, the Moscow homicide investigator from the novel Gorky Park who, over the course of seven additional novels, finds himself continually butting heads with the power elite, from ruthless Politburo/KGB officials back in the 1980s to present-day Russia’s shady oligarchs.

Rose is something of departure for Cruz Smith. Instead of Moscow and its environs, he turns his perceptive eye towards nineteenth-century Wigan, a town in northwest England and once the epicenter of the country’s coal-mining efforts.

Sound dull? I promise you it’s not. Not convinced? How about this: since the book came out in 1996, I’ve read it 14 times. That’s once every 1.5 years, folks. Am I nuts? That’s for you to decide when you buy it on Amazon. Anyway, a quick synopsis:

Jonathan Blair, an American mining engineer most at home in Africa searching for gold, finds himself under investigation in London by the Royal Geographic Society, the (false) charge that he embezzled missionary funds while on expedition to the Gold Coast. Luckily, he has an ally of sorts, a man who not only sponsors Blair’s forays into Africa, but also heads the RGS, the rich and powerful Bishop Hannay.

The Bishop makes Blair an offer: travel to his hometown of Wigan to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the town’s curate, Rev. John Edward Maypole. It seems Hannay’s daughter, Charlotte, was betrothed to Maypole, much against Hannay’s wishes. Therefore, the Bishop wants to know what’s become of the reverend so his daughter can put her mourning aside and find a more suitable husband. If Blair succeeds, the whole embezzlement affair will be forgotten and passage to Africa assured.

Blair travels to Wigan and grudgingly sets about his task, aided by Leveret, Hannay’s faithful estate manager. Progress is slow; it seems no one is particularly interested in finding the missing curate. If anything, Blair’s amateur investigation raises the hackles of all he interviews. In no time, he finds himself disliked and, in some cases, physically threatened, by a panoply of richly drawn characters, including Reverend Chubb, Maypole’s old boss; Constable Moon, the town’s ruthless police chief; Charlotte, the Bishop’s cold-hearted daughter; Bill Jaxon, a brutal miner with a secret to protect; Lord Rowland, the Bishop’s insane, shotgun-loving nephew and heir; and, of course, Rose, the mysterious red-headed pit girl who may have been the object of Maypole’s secret affection.

The situation only becomes more complicated when Blair discovers that, on the day Maypole went missing, a catastrophic explosion in the Hannay coal mine killed 76 men, a small detail the Bishop (conveniently) forgot to mention.

Thus the game is afoot, weaving in and out (and down and up) Wigan’s dimly lit streets, smokey ale houses, vast coal yards and pits, spare miner’s homes, the opulent Hannay’s estate and, memorably, the canal system for shipping coal throughout England.

In lesser hands it might’ve been a snoozefest. Luckily, Cruz Smith is a master of evocative prose, his descriptions effortlessly conjuring vivid mental images of character, such as this introduction of the sinister Constable Moon…

Chief Constable Moon had an indentation in the middle of his forehead. “Brick.” He pulled a sleeve back from a white scar that ran the length of a meaty forearm. “Shovel.” He lifted a trouser leg. His shin was cross-hatched with scar tissue and punched in as if shot. “Clogs. Enough to say that today when there’s a set-to with miners we wear stiff leather leggings.

…and place, such as this journey a mile into the earth as Blair inspects the Hannay mine…

The cage started slowly, down through the round, brick-lined upper mouth of the shaft, past round garlands of Yorkshire iron, good as steel, into a crosshatched well of stone and timber, and then simply down. Down into an unlit abyss. Down at twenty, thirty, forty miles per hour. Down faster than any men anywhere else on earth could travel. So fast that breath flew from the lungs and pressed against the ears. So fast that nothing could be seen at the open end of the cage except a blur that could whip away an inattentive hand or leg. Down seemingly forever.

Between its core mystery, vibrant characters, unique setting and snappy dialogue, Rose is nothing if not “cinematic.” Page after page of Cruz Smith’s narrative fairly scream to be filmed. Take, for instance, this passage describing “purring,” a brutal form of fighting engaged by miners involving only spike-tipped clogs:

Ballet, Blair thought, as danced in Wigan. The first kicks were so swift that he couldn’t follow them. Both men were bleeding from the knees down. With each hit a violent red blush spread on their skin. The Irishman tried to cave in Bill Jaxon’s knee from the side. As Jaxon slipped the Irishman slashed his clog up, slicing Jaxon from knee to groin.

Jaxon leaned away and hammered his forehead down on the other man, whose shaved head split like a porcelain bowl of blood. Jaxon sidestepped a blind, retaliatory butt and swung his own leg from the outside, scooping the smaller man into the air. As the Irishman hit the ground Jaxon swung his foot with his full weight. Clog and ribs met with a crack. A moan rose from the men below the banner of the harp.

The Irishman rolled and coughed black phlegm onto the dirt. As he hopped to his feet he struck back, stripping skin from Jaxon’s flank. Jaxon’s next blow caught the Irishman in the stomach and lifted him into the air again. The Irishman bounced from the ground to his knees and swayed. A bright effusion of blood flowed from his mouth. In that moment the fight was already over, except that it wasn’t.

Jaxon announced, “The man who bothered Rose, he’s put me in a mood,” and his kick swung forward like the blur of a wing.

Or how about this passage:

They moved through stands of larch and oak. Beside Rowland, Blair, Chubb and Moon ranged gamekeepers on either side. Amid a fine rain fell heavier drops from branches. Wet leaves muffled the men’s steps and soiled their trouser cuffs.

After being underground, Blair enjoyed the open air in spite of the company. Rowland bragged about his shotgun, a gift from the Royal Geographical Society. It was the custom product of a London gunmaker, with narrow double barrels and a breech engraved with lions and elands like the head of an elegant cane.

A woodpecker made an undulating flight across a clearing and alighted on the trunk of a larch fifty yards on. The bird crossed its black-and-white wings behind its back and had started to probe beneath the bark when Rowland fired and nailed its head to the tree. “A tight pattern,” he said.

A finch panicked across the clearing. “Too far,” Blair said.

Rowland shot and the bird split like a pillow, golden feathers wafting to the ground.

Page after page of Rose contains such gems. Why the book hasn’t been adapted befuddles me. Could it be that, back in 1996, executives were scared away by the complication presented by a particularly jaw-dropping reveal, which, when it comes towards the end of the book, causes the reader to rethink everything that’s come before? It’d be tricky for sure, but in this day of photorealistic CGI, I’m sure a way could be found.

Sadly, I doubt Rose will ever see the light of day on the big (or small) screen. Too bad because a guy like Cary Fukunaga of True Detective fame could do the book some real justice. Alas, it seems I’ll have to break out my well-thumbed copy and experience it anew (for the 15th time) via old-fashioned reading.