- I take it you know who I am.
Alan Conway.
Well, I'm a writer.
You might have heard of me.
- I hope nobody in the world is going to compare me to Alan Conway, I would hate to think that I'm anything like him, but I must admit, I do put a lot of my friends into my books.
Unlike Alan, however, I do it with a smile.
- Anthony does an amazing job of creating both worlds, the novel and the reality.
- I sort of have read an Alan Conway book in the sense that I've read Anthony's books.
- Agatha Christie was the Queen of Crime, and he really is the King of Crime.
Just amazing fecundity and also imagination.
- It's ingeniously interwoven narratives and incredibly complicated, but nevertheless, an utterly compelling watch.
- What Anthony is riffing on is our love of the classic murder mystery.
So Cotswold Village or a Country House Hotel.
It's classic, but it's a very clever twist, you know, and the whole idea of the dual narrative is very new.
I think he's put a really original spin on it.
- You get the 1950s half the story of the mystery in the book.
You get the Alan Conway book, as it were.
And then you get the Susan Ryeland world.
He's merged the two worlds and he does it so brilliantly and I think first time round, you know, his diehard fans are so kind of taken aback with the crossover of the two worlds being that Pund and Susan have this really rather lovely relationship.
- I've been a huge Anthony Horowitz fan since I was a child.
I kind of grew up reading all of his books.
So when I got this, I was like, "Oh gosh, it feels like "it was just like the biggest treat ever."
- I came to Magpie Murders because I've got a 15-year-old daughter who, by coincidence, read "Magpie Murders" and absolutely loved it.
It's great to get some viewing that we all love and it was just one of those very, very satisfying experiences.
And so I was a big fan of "Magpie Murders."
Then my daughter got "Moonflower Murders," the next book, and then I got the audition for the part.
- It has an amazing sense of intrigue and mystery, and there's little red herrings and clues, which Anthony lands page by page.
And you are gonna see that as a TV viewer.
- And there is a twist right at the end, right at the end, which I just went, "Oh my goodness, it's so clever."
I mean, actually I didn't guess the murderer, murderers, who knows?
- And hopefully that kind of thirst for wanting to know who the murderer is, what actually happened.
That's the thing that kind of draws you back episode to episode.
