Anthony Horowitz's mystery-within-a-mystery novel becomes a hugely satisfying TV series starring Lesley Manville, premiering Sunday on PBS.
plays Susan Ryeland, an editor at a small publishing house whose cash cow is Alan Conway , a globally successful author of mystery novels set in the 1950s that feature a courtly private detective and German refugee named Atticus Pünd .
Susan, just back from the Frankfurt Book Fair, settles down to read the manuscript. Going slowly enough to let the book scenes play out at leisure, she discovers that the last chapter is missing from her copy, and from all other copies. It’s an annoyance that becomes a crisis as Conway — a prickly sort with a habit of turning people in his life into characters in his books, in an unflattering way — is discovered dead at the bottom of a tower attached to his big country house.
As a professional editor, Susan is alert to discordance and senses something is not quite right.
Directed by Peter Cattaneo , “Magpie Murders” works well on the screen, the visual difference between the 1955 and 2022 settings helping to keep things clear and allowing for clever cuts between the two eras. It’s not easy to sustain a mystery over six hours, but this is two mysteries side by side, and there are enough interesting side plots and well-drawn characters , to keep things lively.
Indeed, the Atticus Pünd half of the story is so well realized that I long for a series built around the character — according to the story, there are Conway’s eight previous volumes waiting to be adapted. Of course, they still need to be written. But I have no doubt that the author is up to it.
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