EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Horowitz believes his upcoming Magpie Murders adaptation is “the first time I’ve really got it right,” and has stated he will no longer write on classic TV murder mysteries.
The renowned UK author has adapted many of his novels for TV including Stormbreaker, The Diamond Brothers and South By South East, but Horowitz thinks PBS Masterpiece/BritBox’s Magpie Murders from Jill Green’s Eleventh Hour Films is a greater achievement.
The six-parter took two years to pen and involved around half a dozen drafts, Horowitz told Deadline, and while the mystery-within-a-mystery format threw up a multitude of challenges, the author said this is “the first time I’ve really got it right.”
“The whole book-within-a-book thing is really difficult,” he explained. “In the book the mysteries happen one at a time whereas in the show I wanted to do them simultaneously and that gave me the opportunity to do things that have never been done before. These two time periods are able to co-exist and the viewer can step from one to another in the blink of an eye.”
Starring Lesley Manville, Tim McMullan and Daniel Mays, Magpie Murders follows Susan Ryeland (Manville), the editor of mystery author Alan Conway, who is best known for his well-received series of novels centring upon the detective Atticus Pünd (McMullan). When Ryeland travels to Conway’s home after discovering his latest book is unfinished, she finds that Conway is dead, and begins an investigation of her own.
In the book, Ryeland doesn’t appear for 250 pages but Horowitz wanted her to be in the show from scene one.
“We’ve added an entire back story,” he added. “It was very important to me that Susan is an editor, not a detective, and it’s lovely to write for a mature woman as this isn’t something one sees on screen that often. To have a mature career woman involved with a physical affair and pondering between her marriage and job was very satisfying.”
Rather than helming a “slavish pastiche of an Agatha Christie novel,” Horowitz also heaped praise on director Peter Cattaneo for achieving a “mildly tongue-in-cheek tone.”
Horowitz, who has written on traditional detective shows such as ITV’s Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders, said he will no longer write on classic TV murder mysteries.
“I’m always asked why Foyle’s War can’t come back and the answer is that the landscape has changed,” he added. “Classic single title detectives like Morse, Barnaby and Taggart are over and one has to find fresh ways of doing things.”
Eleventh Hour Founder and Magpie Murders exec Green said the show is “the most distinctive crime drama I’ve ever been involved with.”
She hailed “the way it weaves a mystery inside a mystery with a ‘meta story’ about crime writing over the top,” along with its “playful tone.”
The show is one of several BritBox originals to have been commissioned by the BBC/ITV streamer, following the likes of the Cush Jumbo-starring The Beast Must Die, Irvine Welsh’s Crime and the Spitting Image reboot.