‘It’s a Labyrinth’: A Meta Detective Story Comes to the Screen
“Magpie Murders,” a new series on “Masterpiece,” is a mystery within a mystery, based o
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‘It’s a Labyrinth’: A Meta Detective Story Comes to the Screen
“Magpie Murders,” a new series on “Masterpiece,” is a mystery within a mystery, based on a book by Anthony Horowitz
.By Roslyn Sulcas
Oct. 13, 2022, 12:02 p.m. ET
LONDON — It’s 1955. The great detective Atticus Pünd is heading to the picturesque fictional Suffolk village of Saxby-on-Avon to investigate a murder. A bright red MG sports car zips by, and Pünd nods to himself with a slight smile. The car is driven by Susan Ryeland, who inhabits an entirely different world — the present. And she is returning from Saxby, where she was searching for the missing final chapter of the book in which Pünd solves the crime.
Confused? It’s one of the many meta moments in “Magpie Murders,” a Russian doll murder mystery that sets a 1950s fictional detective story inside a contemporary inquiry into the death of the author who wrote it. The six-part series, which debuts in the United States on PBS’s “Masterpiece” on Sunday, is based on the novel of the same name by Anthony Horowitz, who also adapted it for television.
“The plot is so detailed and cleverly constructed that only Anthony could have picked it apart and put it back together,” said Lesley Manville, who is set to appear as Princess Margaret in a new season of “The Crown” and is the heroine of the new film “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris.” In “Magpie Murders,” Manville stars as Susan, an intelligent and witty editor at Clover Books, a small publishing house with one star author: the unlikable Alan Conway (Conleth Hill), whose Atticus Pünd series has made him famous and rich.
Conway delivers the latest Pünd novel, which Susan begins to read, taking us into his fictional 1950s world, complete with an Agatha Christie-esque scenario: murdered lord of the manor and a large number of suspects. “There is nowhere more dangerous than an English village,” Conway writes gleefully at the beginning of Episode Two.
“It’s the notion of the fictional detective investigating crimes in sedate 1950s rural England, with roses and chintz and seething hatred underneath!” said Tim McMullan, who plays Pünd — a German refugee of Greek-Jewish origins, who has survived concentration camps.
But then Susan discovers that the last chapter of Conway’s book is missing. “Is there anything more useless than a whodunit without the ending?” she exclaims in a fury. And the author is found dead. Did he jump from the tower of his manor house, or — as Andreas (Alexandros Logothetis), Susan’s boyfriend, asks, tongue firmly in cheek — was he pushed?
Susan begins to investigate while also searching for the missing chapter. Soon, she and Pünd are discussing — perhaps only in her imagination — the case he is investigating in Conway’s novel, as well as the mystery of the missing chapter and Conway’s death.
The series, Chris Bennion wrote in an admiring review in The Telegraph after the show was broadcast in Britain, is “a whodunit about whodunits within a whodunit.”
In a video interview, Horowitz, best known for his Alex Rider teenage spy novels, but also a prolific television screenwriter (“Foyle’s War,” “Midsomer Murders”), said he had not thought about adapting the book for television until his wife, the producer Jill Green, suggested it.
“It was a very, very complicated task,” he said. “The book has two worlds, two time zones — fictional and real — and multiple suspects in both worlds; it’s a labyrinth. The task was to make it easy for the viewer to understand.”
In the novel, the 1955 tale comes first, then the narrative switches to a contemporary time frame. Green said she felt strongly that for television, the narratives should be interwoven, and that Susan’s story be “more complex and personal.”
It took “many, many drafts,” Horowitz said. He expanded the character of Conway after Hill was cast in the role (“he is so vile and entertaining”), and created a new history for Susan. “Once we had an actress like Lesley, it was obvious to me she had to have a whole story,” he said. “It’s great to have a woman of a certain age, who is completely fulfilled, with a big life of her own, at a crossroads.”
A major breakthrough, he said, was the idea that many of the actors would appear in both time frames. Among others, Conway’s boyfriend, James Taylor (Matthew Beard), becomes Pünd’s amiable sidekick; the belligerent Detective Inspector Locke (Daniel Mays) is Inspector Chubb in the 1950s scenario; the lawyer Sajid Khan (Sanjeev Kohli) is the village doctor; and Claire (Pippa Haywood), Alan’s bedraggled sister, is also the hapless sister of the murdered Sir Magnus Pye in his novel.
“It makes perfect sense, because part of the plot is that Alan puts the people he knows, barely disguised, in his books, creating enormous resentment,” Horowitz said.
Kohli said he had “never been asked to do anything like” playing two characters, in different centuries, in the same show before. “It’s so good in letting you showcase your range,” he said. “My lawyer was home counties, a bit posh, and Dr. Kamal was much more Indian because I figured in the U.K. at that time, he would have been.”
At the same time, Mays said, the actors had to show a connection between the characters, to demonstrate how Conway “has exaggerated or embellished, mostly unkindly, what he perceives their personalities to be.”
Peter Cattaneo (“The Full Monty”), who directed the series, said that the double casting “made my directorial heart shine.” He added: “mostly, as a director, you work hard not to show yourself. Here, there were some great flourishes to make, playing with the two worlds, which had to have distinctive looks but feel like a coherent whole.”
The differentiation between the two time frames came in part from using different kinds of camera lenses. “A lot of television that deals with that golden age of crime can get a bit chocolate boxy and twee,” Cattaneo said. “We looked at Hitchcock and tried to give it that old-fashioned grade, colorful without feeling garish.” The modern world of the series has a cleaner feel, he said.
Manville said that she was drawn to Susan’s vitality and independence of spirit. “She isn’t playing by what society thinks the rules should be,” she said. “She has chosen not to be married or have children, loves her work and is very stylish. A lot of what I do, like Princess Margaret or Mrs. Harris, is very far away from me, and I love that stretch. But Susan’s drive and wit felt closer to me and my own voice.”
As Pünd, McMullan tried to avoid “mannerisms and props” that “might be a bit close to another well-known fictional detective of the period,” he said. “I thought, playing a German, I want to make him very soft-voiced and un-Germanic, a gentle character who has been in a labor camp and has a very empathetic perspective on the human condition.”
His dreamlike interactions with Susan forge a subtle emotional connection as their mutual investigations proceed.
“I am a great believer in the detective being an outsider,” Horowitz said. “They are the dark knight, coming from nowhere, and their job is to heal a community and then leave it.” He added that with Pünd there is an extra layer to that idea.
“He is very aware he is fictitious,” Horowitz said. “He knows when you turn the last page, he is gone.”
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