Magpie Murders: The Television Series

© PBS Masterpiece

Anthony Horowitz’s first book in the Susan Ryeland series, Magpie Murders, is also a television series based on the novel. Usually, I try to avoid adapted works after I have read the book because the characters are nothing like I imagined and there are adjustments to the plots and the overall narrative. I’m happy to report that this is not the case for Magpie Murders, most certainly because Anthony Horowitz did the adaptation himself. It is also useful that his producer, Jill Green, is his wife, which helps to ensure that Horowitz’s vision has a much better chance of becoming a reality on television.

While the novel itself is set in distinct sections, the television series easily traverses between the Atticus Pünd novel and Susan Ryeland’s investigation into the missing final chapter of the last Pünd novel, Magpie Murders. While the novel feels a bit more like it is Atticus Pünd’s territory, most likely because it is what we first read after a short introduction to Susan from Ryeland’s POV, the television show feels distinctly like it is Ryeland’s story, with the Pünd novel weaving in and out of her narrative.

Horowitz’s television version of Susan Ryeland (Lesley Manville) comes across with an even more powerful persona. Manville takes the role and runs with it, affording her character a great deal of control, even when she is trying to figure out how to solve a mystery when so many men around her are less than helpful. While the characters in the Pünd novel try to circumvent Pünd’s detecting abilities, the characters in the television series lie to Susan, since she is a Pünd substitute in her narrative. While both Pünd and Ryeland solve their respective mysteries, one can’t help feeling that they are kindred spirits, which is reinforced through the images of them sharing fictional and real spaces several times throughout the narrative. Ultimately, Susan Ryeland emerges as a triumphant amateur sleuth, almost as if she has graduated from the Atticus Pünd School of Detection.

I am pleased to see a larger number of female detectives in books and on television. The world of mystery is the perfect realm for the older female. It is usually after 40 that women, or at least women from Generation X and Baby Boomers, hit their stride and learn it is okay to take control of their lives. They don’t mind speaking up and don’t worry about ruffling feathers which makes them perfect investigators. They don’t have the energy for lies and want straight answers. By the novel's end, Susan Ryeland has learned a lot about herself. She’s more than just an editor or a detective, she’s her own person.

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