But if you mean political in the broader sense, meaning the sum of the choices or decisions which create the society in which we live, then I'd say that it was absolutely essential and unavoidable. You can see the distinction very clearly in the work of Chandler and Hammett. Both were left-leaning and disturbed by the corruption and abuses they saw in the society they wrote about, but there is no overt political agenda in their books. Most of my readers seem to love some of my books and loathe others, but the titles concerned are always different. I wouldn't really want to know, anyway.
Films are a poisoned chalice for writers, particularly for crime writers.
But it's a short and slippery slope from that position to starting to write books that are clearly designed specifically to be filmed, and which therefore don't work as books. Because despite their superficial similarities, the two media are actually quite different. I love movies for their own sake, in their own terms. I don't want them to be books, and I wish fewer people wanted books to be movies, and regarded the text version as a kind of low-tech substitute for the real thing. There were two teachers I had at school who were very important.