“Down Cemetery Road,” now streaming on Apple TV, is yet another dark British crime series involving guns and government conspiracies and endangered small children, but it’s distinctive in two key ways. It’s based a Mick Herron novel that got its title from a Philip Larkin poem, lending the enterprise two levels of literary cachet, and it stars Emma Thompson as a private detective. To be more specific: a private detective named Zoë who marches around decisively in a leather coat, spiky short hair and too much eyeliner, making extremely wry and Emma Thompson-ish remarks while brilliantly being able to figure out exit strategies from dangerous situations. Have I sold you on this show already?

Seriously, Thompson was all I needed to get pulled in, and her Sahara-dry delivery of the line “I don’t go in for the Philip Marlowe cosplay thing” almost made up for the series’ undeniably slow spots. But “Down Cemetery Road” has another not-so-secret weapon up its (leather) sleeve. Ruth Wilson, who first caught my eye a couple of decades ago as the wonderfully feral-eyed hero of the BBC miniseries “Jane Eyre,” co-stars with Thompson, and the two women together make a formidable team. Wilson’s slow simmer and eloquent silences (she’s got a beautifully expressive straight line of a mouth that speaks volumes without words) pair nicely with Thompson’s sardonic ease. When they’re on screen, “Down Cemetery Road” is a rare pleasure; when they’re not, which is unfortunately too often, the show veers more toward tastefully generic thriller.

Wilson plays Sarah, an Oxford art conservator (one of many changes from Herron’s book, in which she doesn’t work outside the home) married to an upwardly striving twit (Tom Riley). Kindhearted and lonely, Sarah gets pulled into a mysterious chain of events beginning with a house explosion in her quiet neighborhood. Searching for help after a child from that home seemingly disappears, she finds the office of Zoë’s investigator husband Joe (Adam Godley), a curiously retro establishment equipped with a dusty Rolodex. Zoë, emerging from the inner office where she’s been yelling at her husband (their marriage is, we quickly learn, rather complicated), eyes Sarah with little interest. “Let me guess. You’ve got a husband, he’s got a secretary. Am I warm?”

The two women make an unlikely duo (“Are you deliberately mean or is something wrong with you?” an exasperated Sarah demands), but soon they’re on the run together, drawn into what turns out to be a far-reaching and dangerously violent conspiracy, and … honestly, I watched all eight episodes and I’m still not entirely certain, among the series’ rich lineup of baddies, exactly who did what to whom. But it didn’t matter at all. Written by Morwenna Banks (whose writing credits include “Slow Horses,” the Emmy-winning Apple TV series also based on Herron’s work), “Down Cemetery Road” has some deliciously breathless action sequences and an abundance of dark, sly wit. Thompson gets most of the good lines — when Sarah protests that 10 in the morning is a bit early for a stiff drink, an unperturbed Zoë replies, “You’re very prim for an outlaw” — but Wilson more than holds her own. And the series isn’t without helpful life advice, most notably from a minor character improbably named Wigwam: “Never trust a man who juggles.”

I suspect “Down Cemetery Road” is one of those shows that it’s best to wait and binge all at once, rather than the one-episode-a-week diet currently being provided; I watched it all together and still found the government-conspiracy plot both slow and muddy. (It doesn’t help that none of the other actors on the show, with the possible exception of sweet-faced Ivy Malaika Quoi as the imperiled child Dinah, reaches the level of Thompson and Wilson’s charisma; then again, like I said, they don’t get the good lines.) But the show left me wanting more. Herron wrote several novels featuring Zoë; here’s hoping Thompson might dust off that dashing leather coat — complete with incongruously theatrical red lining — and solve a few more crimes in the future, meanness and all.

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'DOWN CEMETERY ROAD'

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Apple TV+

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