Murder mystery masterclass

I write this slightly bleary-eyed, having just binge-watched all six episodes of this brilliant series. Honestly, I couldn’t stop myself. I just had to get to the end.

Based on the 2016 book by Anthony Horowitz and adapted here by him, it is in every respect a perfect piece of television. Horowitz of course co-wrote Midsomer Murders, and this has more than a feel of that much-loved series, that sense of an outward gentility concealing a festering darkness.

It’s clever, witty, intriguing, beautifully cast, classily produced and elegantly scripted. It’s also a joyful and unashamed celebration of that most beloved and enduring of genres, the murder-mystery.

There are elements of all the great detectives here – Marple, Poirot, Holmes – and nods to the many sidekicks, clichés and plot twists that have, over the decades, kept us all guessing. It’s a masterclass in how to write the perfect detective story, written by one of the masters. Every character, every clue, every tiny detail, woven together into a flawless narrative. I savoured every scene.

It helps that Lesley Manville is the star. She is one of our more modest national treasures, less showbiz than someone like Joanna Lumley or Helen Mirren but no less iconic. She inhabits her characters with an honesty and charm that never fails to engage – she could read the telephone book and I’d still be transfixed. I especially loved her in Mum, the bittersweet comedy from Stefan Golaszewski (another brilliant writer for television) about a suburban widow and her bonkers family.

Here she plays Susan, a successful literary editor, unmarried and childless but without any of that awful whiff of bitterness that so often seems to accompany characters like hers. Instead, she has a devoted Greek boyfriend (in episode one he surprises her by turning up at her hotel during the Frankfurt Book Fair, dressed as a waiter and proffering Champagne), a stupendously stylish wardrobe and an eye for detail that even Sherlock Holmes would find impressive.

She also has a bit of a problem: her star author, the arrogant and rather pretentious Alan Conway (a gloriously catty Conleth Hill), has submitted the manuscript of his latest detective novel – but the final chapter is missing. Soon after, he winds up dead in a flower bed, having fallen – pushed, obviously – from a great height.

Enter Atticus Pund, played with supreme relish by Tim Mcmullan (above left, with Manville as Susan). Pund is Conway’s fictional detective, a German survivor of a Nazi concentration camp whose literary endeavours have made his newly deceased author – and his publishers – very rich. Yet he’s an unprepossessing fellow and, in the tradition of literary

detectives, very much his own man. His task is to work out who killed the local squire, an obnoxious brute with even fewer friends than his creator.

Together they embark on solving both murders, Susan in the real world, Pund in his parallel fictional one. It’s a fantastic conceit, one which allows us to see inside the mind of the writer, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction and taking us on a journey that flits back and forth in time and place.

This may sound a tad pretentious, not to mention confusing. Far from it. The whole thing is so beautifully written and executed with such elegance and directorial skill, it works like a dream. The rarest of treats.