In a world of emotional uncertainties, Susan notes, the Atticus Pünd novels offer the pleasurable closure of a neat resolution.

It's especially astute about the consolations of detective novels. Indeed, Magpie Murders neatly riffs on the relationship of art and life. Possessed of boundless energy - he's also written Sherlock Holmes novels, James Bond novels and the Alex Rider YA series, among others - he feels no shame in being clever and entertaining. Horowitz, who adapted his own novel, clearly feels no such artistic frustration. It was the torment of Conway's literary career that he wanted to write serious books on serious themes, but the public only wanted the cleverness of Atticus Pünd.

Buster Keaton did it more wittily in Sherlock, Jr., where he plays a wannabe detective who falls asleep and enters a crime movie Dennis Potter did it more movingly in The Singing Detective, about a man in a hospital who weaves a private eye story to help escape the pain of his life. Now, Magpie Murders is not the first time someone has woven its protagonist into a fictional storyline. As if that weren't enough, Susan even begins having conversations with Atticus Pünd, who gives her mystery-solving advice. Several of the actors appear in both tracks - for instance, Matthew Beard plays both Conway's cynical ex-boyfriend and Pünd's dim sidekick. Even as Susan looks for answers about Conway's novel in the real world, the show offers a parallel track along which we watch Atticus Pünd - wryly played by Tim McMullan - attempt to solve the murder story in Conway's novel. If Conway was murdered, his novel - and missing final chapter - may hold the answer to who did it.Īll of this makes the TV series Magpie Murders something of a hall of mirrors. Meeting with the people who know Conway, she soon grasps that his latest Pünd novel is populated with characters who are actually caricatures of them - his sister, his ex-wife, his just-dumped boyfriend, his aggrieved gardener, and so forth.

Susan desperately tries to find the missing pages.

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