It’s about friendship, shared secrets and shared lives...
SARAH PHELPS PROVES WHY SHE’S THE QUEEN OF GRIPPING ADAPTATIONS WITH A MASTERFUL SCREEN REWORKING OF DUBLIN MURDERS. FINDS OUT MORE FROM ITS CREATOR AND STARS
HEN it comes to crime novels, women have often led the way. More than 40 years after her death, Agatha Christie remains the queen of the genre.
Following in their footsteps in the 21st century are Ann Cleeves, Gillian Flynn and Martina Cole; we should probably add Tana French to that impressive list too.
Since 2007 she has published seven novels, six of them in the Dublin Murder Squad series; two of those have now been adapted for the small screen, and BBC1’s new eight-part series Dublin Murders is the result.
The scripts are by Sarah Phelps, who penned the Beeb’s recent takes on the Christie books And Then
There Were None, The Witness for the Prosecution, Ordeal by Innocence and The ABC Murders.
It was a huge undertaking for creator and writer Sarah, who opted to blend French’s first two novels, In The Woods and The Likeness, into one text.
It focuses on two murder investigations led by ambitious detectives Rob Reilly and Cassie Maddox, played by Irish actors
Killian Scott and Sarah Greene.
“This is about friendship, shared secrets and shared lives; it’s about compromise and heartbreak and the dark places we go to and the things that scratch at the back of our skulls!” says the writer.
“I put them together, so the consequences are overwhelming for both of them at the same time.”
The series begins with the duo investigating the murder of a teenage girl, Katy Devlin, whose body has been discovered at an archaeological site close to the povertystricken Knocknaree estate.
The local community is shocked to its core; not only was Katy a bright girl who was full of life, but it’s not the first tragedy to have struck the area – 21 years ago, three children went missing and only one returned alive.
In the second episode, which is being broadcast on Tuesday, the day after the first episode is screened, Cassie agrees not to tell anyone about Rob’s close ties to Knocknaree, allowing them to continue with their investigation.
But a ghost from her own past looks set to stir up matters.
What can its lead stars tell us about Dublin Murders?
“It follows Rob and Cassie in Dublin as they investigate a murder in 2006,” begins Killian, 34, who had to shield his own Irish roots to perfect an English accent for his part.
“And then, due to the location of the body, there’s a suspicion, between themselves, that it might be connected to a historic case 20 years ago when three children went into the woods.”
“The whole show is about their secrets!” teases actress Sarah, 35.
“They’re thick as thieves and they’re really good partners who finish each other’s sentences. But I think they have a shared guilt of surviving.
“They both survived traumas in their pasts and that binds them together,” the Penny Dreadful actor elaborates.
“They’re each other’s keeper of secrets and it might not be the healthiest of relationships between the two of them.”
“There’s an outsider quality to both of them,” Killian says of their bond.
“Rob is someone who’s really disturbed but has been managing to keep up a facade.
“It’s a performance that’s been very effective thus far, but it seems to be coming to a point now where that mask is beginning to crumble,” reveals the Strike star.
“It’s about keeping things together but there’s a breaking point.”
With high emotion, high action and a seven-month shoot that spanned Belfast and Dublin, it wasn’t just the characters that needed a breather.
“We were very lucky in terms of the company of people we had; Sarah is wonderful and it was a very easy process,” enthuses Killian, who changed his name from Cillian to avoid being mixed up with Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy.
He told the TV Times: “I changed the spelling because Cillian Murphy was also working and I’d get messages from friends going, ‘Are you in the new Batman film?!’
“When Cillian and I met at a film festival in Dublin, I told him how I’d go to auditions and they would be expecting him and then they’d be disappointed!”
Killian’s co-star says it was a very satisfying shoot, but exhausting too.
“I felt completely satisfied by the work, but I was pretty broken by the end of it. I took two months off!”
“Productions have their own energy, they become their own beast,” screenwriter Sarah joins in.
“Over eight episodes and seven months, you’ve taken people who look like normal human beings and broken them into a thousand tiny pieces.
“The theory on this one (was) no one is allowed to go to bed,” she declares. “We are in this totally immersive world and we end these characters’ stories at the end.
“We can’t end one story in the middle and start another story, they’ve got to be plaited. There’s no room to breathe.”
She follows: “This world of the wood is immersive, and it holds these two characters in this bell jar which is not going to let them escape unless one