“Harry Styles fits that completely.” In the adaptation from page to screen, there have been additional leniencies. “Tom is this enigma, and Marion and Patrick make him up as their fantasy figure,” Roberts explains. Tom is described as blond and strikingly broad, two characteristics that don’t fit Harry Styles, but the physical difference is remedied by their shared spirit as handsome cyphers.

Rogers’s partner, film and TV producer Greg Berlanti, came aboard the project, and a couple years later, so did director Michael Grandage.

“I could just see he really loved the book, and it meant a lot to him personally so it felt like, ‘Okay, you’re going to protect it,’” Roberts says. The seeds for this adaptation were sown around eight years ago when Robbie Rogers, the second professional male soccer player to come out in Britain, reached out to Roberts, enquiring about the options to turn her novel into a film. A self-described “middle-aged bookish type,” Roberts knew the star’s name, but it took a Google search for her to realize the scale Styles would bring to the project. Roberts chalks up the avalanche of attention for her book to one man: Harry Styles, who was cast to play policeman Tom Burgess, the titular character for whom unfulfilled Marion (a poised Emma Corrin) and besotted Patrick (the remarkable David Dawson) both ache. A reimagining of this endurance of love resulted in My Policeman, which follows a dashing closeted man of the force, his tolerant schoolteacher wife, and a slightly older museum curator who becomes his secret lover.Ĭharting a tug-of-war between wife and lover, My Policeman’s timeline ricochets between Marion’s 1999 contemplation of her unsatisfying marriage and Patrick’s clandestine 1957 diary entries of a surreptitious same-sex affair, stifled by the illicit nature of gay relations in ’50s Britain. “That idea took hold in me, I wanted to write about how you get to that point,” the author shares. Forster’s life-a distinguished gentleman, his love affair with a policeman, and the doting wife who cared for him until his last breath-that provided inspiration.

The genesis of the novel can be traced to Roberts’s youth, specifically her obsession with James Ivory’s A Room with a View and its lush depictions of vacationing in Italy. Chronicling a trio of lovers, My Policeman is a reflection of insatiable desire and its repercussions. Following its initial 2012 United Kingdom release, the book has now been released in “15 or more translations has a whole new life that I never expected,” Roberts tells me, seated in front of an impressive wall-tall bookshelf in her Brighton home. It has taken nearly a decade and the announcement of a film adaptation starring one of today’s biggest pop stars for Bethan Roberts’s third novel, My Policeman, to be published in the United States.

My policeman book online