Peter Høeg is still overwhelmingly known for a novel published a quarter of a century ago. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow featured a half-Inuit woman whose suspicion over a young neighbour’s death in Copenhagen lures her from Denmark back to Greenland. There was a film made in English by Bille August starring Julia Ormond, but Høeg, who is now 60, has hardly flooded the market since.

Readers have been committed fans since 1992, when the sometime crime reporter Michael Connelly turned novelist.

Using Hollywood stars to prop up British crime thrillers is an ignoble tradition. Guy Ritchie’s Snatch misused Brad Pitt, but John Wayne’s execrable Brannigan is probably the worst example. So one’s hopes aren’t high for Stormy Monday, a 1987 noir starring Sean Bean and Sting, aided and abetted by, er, Melanie Griffiths and Tommy Lee Jones.

Emma Banville is almost too good to be true: a human rights lawyer who houses Syrian refugees, wins the most hopeless cases of wrongful conviction, won’t be bullied by anyone – coppers, prison wardens, the system. OK she smokes, presumably for the stress, and pints of lager don’t sit quite right in her hand. And she’s trying to adopt a child with, somewhat implausibly, John Bishop. But she’s played by Helen McCrory, who can do no wrong, and her heart is in the very epicentre of the right place.

“People think babies are sweet. But this one’s bitter.” So squeaks Alice Lowe’s malevolent unborn daughter in the horror comedy Prevenge, prompting her heavily pregnant host Ruth to embark on a killing spree.

Playwrights have long migrated to the small screen in search of better pay and room to manoeuvre. Most don’t leave it as long as Conor McPherson, who was perhaps cushioned from necessity by the global success of The Weir. A quarter of a century after his stage debut, Paula (BBC Two) is his first go at television drama.

For a demoralising period towards the start of Miss Sloane, it looks as if we’re in for a high-octane thriller about palm oil. That’s right, palm oil. Everything you never wanted to know about the ethics and economics of the palm oil market is splurged in frenetic, rat-a-tat, overlapping, school-of-Sorkin dialogue. After 10 minutes your ears need a rest on a park bench.

The harsh metallic rasp of a cigarette lighter; a glamorous, vulnerable prostitute in distress; a noble lone crime-fighter standing dejected in the rain. All the familiar tropes of noir are present and correct – in fact, almost self-consciously ticked off – in this entertaining thriller from Pete Travis (Dredd, Endgame). But they’re in a jarringly unfamiliar context: this is modern-day, grimy, multi-ethnic west London – located specifically with mentions of Scrubs Lane and Kensal Rise tube station – with its relentless gentrification, luxury housing developments sprouting all around, small-time drug dealing and hints of Islamic radicalism.

Tommy Akhtar (Riz Ahmed) is a small-time private investigator – "I deal in the lies people tell and the truths they don’t," he mutters in one of the film’s sporadic voice-overs. He’s approached by high-class hooker Melody Chase (Cush Jumbo) to investigate the disappearance of her friend and co-worker Natasha, but things take a darker turn when he discovers a dead body in the Paddington Basin Holiday Inn, and he sends his young protégé Avid (Mohammad Ali Amiri) to check out the possible involvement of the dodgy-looking Islamic Youth League.

There’s an awful lot going on, and it sometimes feels like writer Patrick Neate, who adapted the script from his own 2005 novel, has just too many targets in his sights to do them all justice. But, slickly paced by Travis – despite a brief dead patch in the middle – it’s an entertaining, thought-provoking ride nonetheless, and one that maintains its sense of humour (often very self-aware in its subverting of genre cliches) despite its seedy subject matter.Where the film diverges from genre – and, it has to be said, sometimes strikes a slightly jarring note – is in Tommy’s back story: how a tragic episode from his teenage years infiltrates today’s events, kicked off when he unexpectedly encounters school mate Lovely (an oily James Floyd) at the centre of the film’s property scheme. Travis’s tender flashback sequences do raise the question, however, of how the sensitive, damaged teenage Tommy ended up as a streetwise gumshoe with a mean right hook.

Riz Ahmed is wonderfully watchable, however: smouldering, simmering but vulnerable, too, and with sudden glimpses of steely determination behind his determinedly sullen exterior. Billie Piper (pictured above) seductively slurs her way through her performance as Shelley, Tommy’s former illicit girlfriend now turned high-class hostess, and Cush Jumbo as Melody Chase is fragile but fiery. Felix Wiedemann’s restrained cinematography is a joy – colour-sapped for his grimy London exteriors, but suddenly blinding with lurid hues in the film’s pounding club scenes.

The film’s miraculously happy ending might feel a touch unconvincing, and ultimately pulls back from delivering on some of the intrigue that’s been set up. But City of Tiny Lights is a captivating offering all the same – although one that’s more absorbing in its impeccably delivered atmosphere, rather than truly suspenseful.

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@DavidKettle1

Overleaf: watch the trailer for City of Tiny Lights