England’s Carlyss (pronounced Kar-lease) Peer gets Stateside exposure as a determined Scotland Yard detective with AcornTV’s 1970s-set “Dalgliesh.”

Adapted from P.D. James’s 14 critically praised murder mysteries starring the very serious and cerebral Scotland Yard Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh (pronounced DAL-gleesh, again played by Bertie Carvel), Season 2, which begins Monday, again offers three separate cases from three of her novels.

For Peer, Detective Sergeant Kate Miskin, now a key member of the Special Investigation Squad under Dalgliesh, has been a career changer.

In Season 1, the misogyny and racism Miskin routinely faced was blocked once Dalgliesh chose her to be on his team.  “From those first episodes where she’s sidelined by the police force and then seeing her blossom with Dalgliesh with all of his talents, that’s an exciting journey,” Peer, 27, said in a Zoom interview from London.

“He sees her potential. She’s delighted to be working with someone who treats her with respect. It’s also nice that he doesn’t back off when other members of the service are not so enthusiastic about her joining them in the Met.”

Fifty years ago London’s Metropolitan police force was racist, homophobic, misogynistic.  “The 70s was definitely a difficult time for women in the police force. And definitely for people of color as well. It’s an exciting era to set that point in time.

“I started very much firstly with the scripts that Helen Edmundson had written.  I know that there have been many incarnations of Miskin before and Helen was writing from a different perspective. It’s the first time that we’ve seen Miskin portrayed specifically as a woman of color. That was an extra layer to the adaptations, a fresh, new minted version of this story, but also true to the original novels as well.”

Quite refreshing is the Dalgliesh-Miskin relationship is strictly professional, never romantic, much less sexual.

“It was definitely expected at that point,” Peer noted. “There’s a lot of comments, documentation written by female police officers, who said at the time that that was kind of expected.

“If they were married, they weren’t allowed to continue into the police force! They had to just go and be married.

“So it was a definite ‘career or relationship’ option. Many women got into the police force looking for eligible bachelors to become their husbands. So it wasn’t an unwarranted idea.

“While that was expected of a lot of people, Dalgliesh has the kind of presence of mind and the strength to just ignore it all and carry on.”