(slow melodic music) - [Director] Action!
- Have you read "Magpie Murders"?
- It's a crime thriller, a whodunit, in two different time zones, the present day and in the 1950s.
- The modern day storyline concerns the famous author Alan Conway, who is famous for writing the Atticus Pünd murder mysteries.
- Who has recently died, apparently committed suicide.
And who's left the final Atticus Pünd novel unfinished.
- Right now I think we should be concentrating on what happened to the missing chapter.
- Well, how do we even know he wrote it?
- And so it's about what happens when the final chapter of his latest book goes missing.
And we crisscross between the dramatization of the book and the chief editor, played by Lesley Manville, trying to kind of become a detective herself.
- Both of those storylines run parallel to one another.
So the structure and the form is mixed in.
They're like kind of threads that constantly interweave with one another, which lends itself to this amazing canvas really to play on.
You know, there's murder, there's intrigue, there's comedy, there's tragedy.
There's loads and loads of amazing different colors to play with within "Magpie Murders".
- Everybody in the book is based on somebody in the author's life and one of those people has murdered him.
So it's a sort of a whodunit inside a whodunit, and it's also a murder mystery about murder mysteries.
- The thing with whodunits is you go round these circles, you're like, no, he's too obvious.
But then maybe it's too obvious to make it someone who's not obvious.
And then maybe it is the obvious one that's so un obvious.
- It was possible perhaps to have more fun with the murder mystery format.
To write not just a whodunit with a solution, the butler did it.
But a whodunit that actually informs you about the world of literature, about why we read whodunits.
The idea was to write a tricksy whodunit, that at the same time posed interesting questions about the world in which it existed.
- Also, I think you've got a collection of very good characters.
So you start to be interested in the characters, some of whom you'll care for, and some of whom you'll make terrible judgments about.
- The characters are so vivid and they're painted so brilliantly by Anthony, and you know, they're delicious.
You wanna spend time with them.
