She’s been offered the chance to become CEO of the independent publisher where she works, after it’s acquired by a major corporation, but her Greek boyfriend wants her to move to Crete with him to run a hotel. Susan is outgoing and friendly, if a bit frazzled by difficulties in her personal life. The two of them occasionally interact, as Susan envisions Pünd giving her advice on solving Alan’s murder, and Manville and McMullan make for satisfying counterpoints as very different kinds of crime-solvers. But the period costumes help, and both Susan and Pünd, who don’t have duplicates, serve as helpful guides. It can be slightly confusing at first to differentiate the separate characters played by the same actors, especially since the settings are also often the same. Since Alan, who was bitter, vindictive, and generally unlikable, used people from his life as inspirations for (unflattering) characters in his novel, repurposing the actors gives Horowitz and director Peter Cattaneo a handy way to visualize those connections.
One thing that Horowitz can do in a TV series that he can’t do in a novel is cast the same actors in multiple roles, playing characters in Susan’s story and in the Atticus Pünd story from the novel. But it doesn’t take long for her to become convinced that Alan’s death, which had been ruled a suicide, was actually the result of foul play. At first, Susan (Lesley Manville) is motivated more by professional concerns, since Alan turned in Magpie Murders with its final chapter missing. In the world of the TV series, Magpie Murders is the latest novel for Susan to edit by bestselling author Alan Conway (Conleth Hall), starring his popular detective character Atticus Pünd.Īs in the source novel, Magpie Murders switches between Susan’s efforts to determine who killed Alan, and the events of Alan’s novel Magpie Murders, in which Pünd (Tim McMullan) attempts to solve the murder of a wealthy landowner in 1955. In the real world, Magpie Murders is Horowitz’s first novel featuring Susan Ryeland, a book editor and amateur sleuth. Who better to solve the murder of a murder mystery author than someone who has closely scrutinized all of his murder mysteries? That’s the clever concept of Anthony Horowitz’s novel Magpie Murders, as well as its new six-episode PBS adaptation, written by Horowitz himself.
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