How do you write a sequel to a hit TV show that was based on a novel whose author is now dead? This was the challenge for the creative team behind “The Night Manager,” the six-part mini-series based on a book by John le Carré.

David Farr, the writer who adapted the book for television, said that in his case it started with a sort of dream.

In the early hours of Dec. 13, 2020, he recalled in a recent interview, he was lying half-awake in bed when he had a vision: a black car driving toward a young boy. He sensed that it was somehow related to “The Night Manager” and that the image was a point of entry into a sequel, a way to take the story forward.

“That was strange,” he told his partner a few hours later. “I don’t know why on Earth I’ve thought of that. I haven’t thought about ‘The Night Manager’ in a long time.”

The series, starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie in a tale about a hotelier embroiled in a British government plot to take down a notorious arms dealer, was a self-contained story with a conclusive ending. Its cast and crew had moved on to other things since its successful airing four years earlier.

Then Farr switched on his phone and saw a message from his agent, informing him that le Carré had died that night. It seemed like a sign.

“It’s the story that nobody will ever believe,” Farr said with a sigh, speaking from his home in London on a sunny afternoon in December. “It’s probably just a coincidence. Or you can believe in strange animal rhythms. I’ve no idea. It’s just the truth.”

Simon Cornwell, an executive producer on the series — and a son of le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell — doesn’t really buy the anecdote. “I suspect the reality is that with my dad’s passing, he was finally liberated to begin writing his own story for ‘The Night Manager,’” he said of Farr.

But Cornwell said he fully believed that, whatever its origin, Farr was the right person to write Season 2 of the series, which airs this month on Prime Video in the United States and on the BBC in Britain.

“I would show this with pride to my dad if he were here today,” Cornwell said. “I think what we’ve achieved is a progression that’s very true to my dad’s thinking.”

The new season picks up where the first one left off, with Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston) now living under an assumed identity as a low-level surveillance officer. He then picks up the trail of a former associate of his archrival, the arms dealer Richard Roper (Laurie), who has resurfaced in London under suspicious circumstances.

It’s another sleek, seductive foray into le Carré’s trademark world of cloak-and-dagger drama and globe-trotting espionage, this time set primarily around the drug dens and cartel villas of Colombia, where Pine goes undercover. There, Pine is “playing a character — a bolder, brasher, more arrogant character,” said Georgi Banks-Davies, who directed the season. “The camera takes on that swag. The style is more confident and stylistic and sexy.”

Farr kept true to the spirit of the author’s work by grounding Season 2 in “the wonderfully unglamorous le Carré spy world,” Farr explained, and by cleaving to some of le Carré’s abiding interests, including German philosophy, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the writings of Sigmund Freud. “All of that is in there,” Farr said.

“I’m not going to lie, it was a very daring departure,” he added. “You don’t make stuff up that le Carré hasn’t done.”

Others had been open to the idea for a while, however. There had been some preliminary conversations about doing more “Night Manager,” according to Stephen Garrett, the series’ lead executive producer, and le Carré had even relented on an initial stipulation that forbade any sequels or derivative works.

“Le Carré had been absolutely emphatic that there would be no Season 2, that we were making a six-hour movie,” Garrett said. But the author was so impressed by what the team had done with “The Night Manager” that he gave his blessing for them to consider pursuing further seasons if the right idea came along.

In a recent video call, Hiddleston recalled chatting with le Carré in February 2016 after Season 1 premiered. “The man himself suggested, with a twinkle in his eye, that perhaps there might be a way to tell more of this story,” Hiddleston said. “We all knew there was no more novel to adapt, but that was when I thought, OK, there is a whisper here.”

There was one condition, however, according to Garrett: “We would only do it if it was as good as Season 1 — and ideally better.”

Hence the almost 10-year delay between seasons, Cornwell said. “Stephen and the cast and I were of the view that there was something about the first season that was magic, and we wouldn’t want to do another unless we felt in our hearts and in our bones that we were really taking the story forwards,” he said.

“It’s what my dad wanted to achieve, and what we all wanted to achieve,” Cornwell added. “And that took awhile.”

Hiddleston said that the team wanted to lean in to that delay — to play up the passage of time. “We needed to acknowledge that the world was 10 years older, that I am 10 years older, that the world is 10 years stranger and more uncertain,” he said.

Le Carré’s books have also continued to inspire new work in print. Last year, Nick Harkaway, another of his sons, wrote “Karla’s Choice,” a new installment in the author’s long-running series of novels about the spy George Smiley. Harkaway said at the time of its publication that this continuation of his legacy was his father’s dying wish.

Cornwell said that their father “gave us a very specific mandate, which I think of as a responsibility to take things forwards.”

But as to whether another season of “The Night Manager” will open the floodgates on a deluge of new le Carré material, the producers were reluctant to say.

“Look, I think my dad created extraordinary worlds, and you can imagine his characters having lives beyond the books,” Cornwell said. “At the same time, one of the gratifications for an audience is that these are stories that have an ending. We don’t want to rush into anything.”

“Then again,” Garrett said with a smile, “who wouldn’t want to see George Smiley in space?”