The clues had been turning up for months.
Beginning last year with “The Dentist” and continuing regularly throughout 2026, Tim Sullivan’s U.K. mystery novels about neurodivergent detective George Cross have been appearing on U.S. bookshelves.
And now, following the rollout of his original seven novels here for American readers, Sullivan’s latest, “The Tailor,” which finds DS Cross investigating a murder in Bristol’s bespoke fashion world, has been published simultaneously here and in Britain on Aug. 11.
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Launched in 2021, the book series, which focuses on Cross’s ability to solve crimes with a determination that sometimes confounds his colleagues, may sound vaguely reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. That’s not an accident. Before he began writing novels, the Cambridge-educated Sullivan worked on an array of television and film projects, including writing and directing adaptations of Sherlock Holmes.
“I directed Jeremy Brett, who, to my mind, is the definitive Sherlock,” says Sullivan of the late actor, who portrayed the detective in a popular run of screen versions. “You learn a lot from Conan Doyle, and I learnt a lot from Jeremy.”
As well, Sullivan’s experience as a screenwriter and director spans a wide range of projects, from collaborating with groundbreaking director Derek Jarman and writing adaptations of E.M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh novels for film to working in animation on “Flushed Away,” an unmade Shrek sequel and “My Little Pony: A New Generation.”
And all these experiences led him to write novels.
“I wanted to write a book. I’d just worked on a big Hollywood movie, ‘My Little Pony,’ and I joke that the only direction to go was crime fiction after that,” says Sullivan. “It just seemed a really good fit.”
Sullivan also cites Georges Simenon’s iconic detective Maigret as an influence on the DS Cross series, especially in the way that Cross, who doesn’t drive and plays the organ, is often misjudged by crooks and coworkers alike.
“I like to think that the ghost of Jules Maigret exists in George. I’m very influenced by it. I feel that the way George is willing to let people underestimate him, in the same way that Maigret did,” says Sullivan. “Because they lower their guard.”
Speaking by Zoom from his home office in North London, Sullivan discussed writing about neurodivergence, undertaking a unique form of research for his latest novel and making the connection that exists whether writing a BBC adaptation or an animated film.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. For readers new to the books, how do you describe the series and DS Cross?
George is on the spectrum, and that’s what makes him unique: His condition is his gift. Here in the U.K., he really seems to have been taken into people’s hearts. They love his vulnerability. They love his integrity, and I think that he fits into a long tradition of detectives on the spectrum, from [Edgar Allen Poe’s] C. Auguste Dupin to Sherlock Holmes.
He’s a police detective in the southwest of England, centered in Bristol, which is a nice part of England, in a relatively smallish force compared to, say, the metropolitan force of London, Manchester or Birmingham.
He only ever follows evidence and he does that doggedly and with real determination. A lot of people who are on the spectrum have a need for things to be correct, things to be right, which for him manifests itself in the fact that he’s quite a believer in protocol. He has a need for justice to be served.
Q. Since we’re talking about the character’s neurodivergence, I wonder what your experience with it has been, and what kind of research you needed to do to write about it?
I’ve been fascinated with autism — what we used to call Asperger’s, but we don’t anymore — particularly in the workplace. It seemed to me that in this country, the first diagnosis of what we now call ASC [Autism Spectrum Condition] wasn’t until the mid-‘90s.
So prior to that, people with Asperger’s or ASC were, I think, discriminated against, and they weren’t treated very well. I’d seen it in my work experience. I’d seen it with friends, with children who were autistic or friends who are autistic and who don’t necessarily know it, and I’d done research over about 15-20 years.
I’ve done so much research. His autism is as important to me as his job as a detective; the authenticity of that is right up there for me, along with everything else. Initially, in this country, I was told that publishers would shy away from me because I would be guilty of what was called “neuroscientific appropriation.” So I said to my wife, “Right, I’m going to self-publish, and if the autistic community pushes back, I’ll drop it. I’ll do something else.”
And quite the reverse happened. I was warmly embraced into the autism community. I’ve had so many emails from people whose lives, in some way, have been touched by autism, who found the books in some way useful to them, which has been very humbling and unexpected.
I think you have to keep very up to date with autism because our understanding of it is changing constantly. I always say to people, I am no expert in autism. There are lots of academics around the world who are real experts in this field. I am an expert in my character’s autism. That’s as far as it goes.
Q. There don’t seem to be complaints about the books or your treatment of the character.
No, it’s been quite the reverse. I’ve had emails from people saying, “How did you get into my son’s head?” I’ve had an email from a man in America saying, “I run this company across various states. We have one employee who I think is brilliant, but he’s very difficult, and managers find him difficult to work with. I read your first book, and this man is George, so I bought 10 copies of your book, and I’ve sent it to all the managers and said, “Please read this, and then you’ll maybe understand.”
That’s extraordinary. I’ve had an email from a woman in the last few months that said, “It’s so wonderful to see someone on the autistic spectrum portrayed in such an authentic way, but also in such a positive way. It may interest you to know that I’m not only autistic myself, but I’m a serving British policewoman.” So you can’t get more approbation than that.
But it’s one of those things where you’ve got to do your work. His autism is not an affectation. It’s not a writer’s accessory like Inspector Morse’s Jaguar. It’s who he is.
Q. Speaking of George, how do you write a character who’s smarter or more effective than everyone else around him?
George is interested in the mundane, and in terms of murder, a lot of murder is mundane. He is interested in the detail. It’s always the detail that others might look over.
As soon as George sees his victim, he enters a kind of partnership; he becomes their advocate. He becomes the voice that they no longer have, and he has a very deep sense of responsibility and loyalty to that victim in a way that he doesn’t have to any other living person, which makes him uniquely appealing.
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Q. You know, for each of the novels, you focus on the victim’s profession, so I’m curious about the research you did for “The Tailor.” Did you get a bespoke suit?
Yes, that’s exactly what I did! That was the justification to my wife: “It’s research. I have to do it.”
The profession thing started accidentally. I realized that George, as he developed, is really interested in processes, and I think that you can introduce the reader to a world they might not know about. In ‘The Tailor,’ it was fascinating having this suit made for me. Seeing what a baste stitch was, seeing how the inside lining of a jacket is slightly longer than the actual outside of the jacket, so that it hangs properly. So the terminology like offcuts of material for suits is called “cabbages” in the U.K. I love all that stuff.
Q. Let’s talk a bit about your film and TV work: You must be one of the only people who has worked with both the groundbreaking director Derek Jarman and My Little Pony.
Derek Jarman was one of the great enablers of life. He was one of those great guys who encouraged people. I found myself, within weeks of university, working on two film scripts with him, neither of which were made.
Derek was extraordinary. I’ve still got the scripts. I wrote in longhand, and Derek would write all over my script in red, and they’re really striking notes. Very forthright. It was like a private film school, and in the middle of doing that, I needed to make some money and got a job driving the actor Anthony Andrews, at the time he was shooting a TV series that was about to become world famous called “Brideshead Revisited.”
Q. That driving gig turned out to be important, too, right?
Derek Granger, the producer of this TV series, said to Anthony, “Why is your chauffeur always in the car scribbling? What’s he doing?” And Anthony went, “Oh, he’s writing a movie for Derek Jarman.”
We had coffee, and Granger said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to be a filmmaker. I want to be a writer.” And then he helped me. Two years later, I found myself co-writing a movie adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust” with Derek Granger.
Your career in the movies, unless you’re incredibly successful, takes you where it takes you. At the turn of the century, I was asked to go and do production rewrites on a movie called “Flushed Away” in Hollywood, and out of that, Jeffrey Katzenberg asked me to write “Shrek 4.” They didn’t, in fact, use my script in the end, which is a great shame.
And then 20 years later, I get a phone call from the producer of “Flushed Away,” saying, “I’m working on this film. I’ve just come on board. I need someone to look at the script, and I kept saying, “What’s the movie?” and she wouldn’t tell me. Finally, she went, “It’s ‘My Little Pony.’”
And you know what? I loved it, and even though it was a Hasbro movie, we got themes of racism, propaganda, political lies all through, and no one noticed until Variety went, “Oh my God, how wonderful they’ve got these things in this film,” and you thought, yes, you know, it was a great thing.
So, you know, film, whether it’s Jarman or whether it’s My Little Pony, has the same things in common: narrative drive and character, and the two sustain each other. Everything has to earn its place in the movie, whether it’s Derek Jarman, Derek Granger, or My Little Pony.
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Q. You’ve worked as a driver. Will there be a book about a murdered chauffeur coming anytime soon?
Possibly, yeah. I mean, the really weird thing is because of the way I write my books now, you’ve got to resist the temptation to figure the title first. Because I think it’s possibly the wrong way to go in.
The way I write, I start with the body, and that’s it. I know nothing more. So I know I’ve got a dead tailor. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know if he’s married. I don’t know if he’s got children. All I know is he’s been killed, and I don’t know why.
And George Cross has just got to figure it out.