“I love this book, it was a very, very big success for me,” author Anthony Horowitz said of his 2016 novel Magpie Murders. During a recent TCA press conference, the author talked about adapting his own work as a series, which premieres tonight on PBS as part of Masterpiece. “ I've worked with Jill [Green] for 16 years on Foyle's War, and that was hundreds and hundreds of hours of my life, and that's a show I'm immensely proud of,” he added, with his producing partner on the series also his wife. “I've also worked very much with Susanne [Simpson] and PBS as well. I know they're very, very good and a profitable partnership, which I've enjoyed over the years, so for me it was a no-brainer… It was one of the happiest productions I've ever been involved with.”
(Eleventh Hour Films/Nick Wall)
The premise of Magpie Murders surrounds the suspicious death of a mystery writer, although the novel’s structure didn’t necessarily lend itself to an easy series adaptation. “It was a hugely ambitious thing that you did, to actually take your own book and then almost sit away from it to readapt it in a very, very different way, and yet it still is the whole spirit of the book,” Jill Green shared, speaking directly to Anthony. Jill serves as an executive producer on the project through Eleventh Hour Film. “You basically threw it up in the air and made it land definitely, which is very, very hard to do, especially if you've written the book as well. And you did do it after many, many drafts and great guidance from Susanne as well, because we'd all worked together on Foyle's War, so we had a bit of a history there. But it was a challenging adaptation, and I think we got it right. We didn't want the audience to be confused. That was a very important thing for us, great clarity and seamless editing and movement from the '50s to the current day.”
“In the book, you have two completely separate worlds,” Anthony added about two of the lead characters, Atticus Pünd and Susan Ryelan. “They don't really meet. The first 100 pages is one world, the second 300 pages is the other. But in this one, each world is intertwining with the other, so it was suddenly obvious that the character of Susan or the character of Pünd would have to meet, and for me, one of the joys of writing the script was it's always a love relationship. There's such a friendship and closeness between [Leslie Manville and Tim McMullan]. Tim, of course, Jill and I had worked with before for two seasons of Foyle's War, so we knew that we were giving the part to this very safe pair of hands.”
“There's a fantastic difference that Atticus has to any other detective that we've seen, which is that he has an understanding of his own place within a fictional genre, which he has the ability to express out loud,” elaborated Tim McMullan about the fictional detective he plays, the creation of a recently deceased author who appears to Susan as she tries to make sense of what’s happened. “He talks to Susan, who he understands. He sees her driving a car from another age, and he smiles to himself. He understands that he's within a device, and yet he exists as a human being.”
(Eleventh Hour Films/Nick Wall)
Atticus Pünd is the creation of deceased author Alan Conway, who left the world with his highly anticipated next mystery unfinished, a grumpy novelist who grew to despise his own creation. “I'm fascinated by writers,” Anthony Horowitz revealed. “Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the greatest detective who ever lived, and dislikes him so much and feels he's so far beneath him that he throws him off a waterfall at the Reichenbach Falls. Ian Fleming creates James Bond and talks about him as being children's fiction, and sort of kiss-kiss and bang-bang, and somewhat has a slight contempt for him. I find that fascinating in writers who create great characters and then feel that they're somehow beneath them.” For the record, Anthony promises he has no contempt for his own characters.
Picking up the pieces is Susan Ryelan, Alan’s editor who’s left with not only an unfinished manuscript but also questions about what happened to her star author. “She knows the way to solve the crime is through the book, and the key person in the book is Atticus, and in a way they become one mind,” revealed Oscar-nominee Lesley Manville about her character. “She's not a detective, she's a publisher, but she's got these detective antennae on the go. She knows the way to get to the crime is through the book and through Atticus. I just think it's a really gorgeous thing that she can see him, and he can see her, but they can only see each other.” Lesley was also attracted to playing an uncompromising woman over 50. “She doesn't have to explain herself. She's chosen not to get married, she's chosen not to have children, she’s got a nice boyfriend who she sees when she wants to see, and she still drives an open-top sports car. She's absolutely not conforming to anything… I'm so glad that Anthony didn't write her as a 20 or 30-year-old something. It's just so great that she's got all this gravitas and experience and that she's just not conforming. It's terrific. And we need to see more women on film across the board that represent women in that way, because you can still be quite exciting even though you're over 50, oddly enough.”
Another dream collaborator on the project was director Peter Cattaneo, whose hits include The Full Monty and Military Wives. “He had never done anything in the area of mystery and crime,” Anthony shared. “I have never worked with a director who has so elevated the material and who came to the set every day with such an incredible vision of how to make these two worlds and so much story lock together in a way that was both delightful and comprehensible. Marvelous.”
With critics in the U.K. already singing the praises of Magpie Murders, you can finally see it for yourself on PBS, part of Masterpiece, airing on Sundays at 9/8c through November 20th.