Anthony Horowitz on Moonflower Murders Episode 1: MASTERPIECE Studio

This script has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jace Lacob: Before we get into this week’s episode, a word of warning: if you haven’t yet watched Magpie Murders, please stop listening to this podcast right now and watch that series first as we’re about to discuss the ending of Magpie Murders and reveal the killer. Consider this a blaring spoiler alert before we get into Moonflower Murders. Sufficiently warned? Ready? Okay, grab your copy of Atticus Pünd Takes the Case and let’s head off to Branlow Hall…

I’m Jace Lacob, and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

Susan Ryeland doesn’t gladly suffer fools or unruly authors. But by the end of Magpie Murders, our beloved editor and amateur sleuth had been put through an emotional wringer.  Not only had her old boss, Charles, accidentally killed their best-selling author Alan Conway, but in the process of trying to cover it up, tried to murder Susan, who had unmasked her old friend as Alan’s killer. 

At the start of Moonflower Murders, however, Susan is in a very different place, quite literally. On the surface, Crete might seem like the perfect location to relax and recuperate, beautiful beaches, slow pace of life, and excellent food. But the reality is that there’s nothing relaxing about owning a hotel that’s crumbling before her eyes. 

CLIP

Susan: Andreas, we have no electricity. We have plenty of water, but it’s all over the kitchen! What are we going to do?

Andreas: We’ll manage.

Susan: We have 14 guests at the hotel. How are we going to cook lunch?

Andreas: We’ll make salad.

Unlike her partner Andreas, Susan isn’t cut out for this type of life. When she’s not putting out kitchen fires and mopping leaks, Susan browses publishing jobs online. And although it’s not exactly what she’s looking for, a new opportunity soon shows up at the hotel check-in desk.

CLIP

Lawrence: I’ll try to be as succinct as possible, Susan, but we honestly believe you’re the only person that can help us. We have nowhere else to go.

Susan: Alright. Tell me.

A missing persons case tied to a murder that happened eight years ago drags Susan right back into the world of sleuthing, and strangely enough, back to the world of books. It appears this case might have something to do with the late bestselling author Alan Conway, and his novel Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. We’re soon cast back into the world of 1950s Devonshire, a fictional world that’s eerily similar to Branlow Hall, the hotel in which the murder took place eight years earlier. 

CLIP

Alan: Tawleigh was a picturesque village in the county of Devonshire, known for its lush countryside and cream teas. In the summer of 1954, its most famous resident without doubt was Melissa James, the British actress who had climbed to the very peak of the Hollywood heights, until an accident on the set of a Hitchcock film had brought a sudden end to her career.

Our guest today is Anthony Horowitz, the creator of MASTERPIECE’s 2022 production Magpie Murders and now Moonflower Murders. With his Atticus Pünd stories, Anthony pushes the bounds of murder mysteries by taking audiences and readers to worlds within worlds, stories within stories, and murders within murders. In this conversation, we peel back the layers of Anthony’s latest adaptation, the meta-mystery series Moonflower Murders. 

Jace Lacob: This week we are joined by Moonflower Murders creator, writer, and executive producer, Anthony Horowitz. Welcome.

Anthony Horowitz: Thank you very much, Jace. Nice to be talking to you.

Jace Lacob: So, we previously spoke about the genesis of Magpie Murders, born out of the notion of crafting a new style of whodunit while also capturing what it’s like to be a mystery writer. As much as I loved reading Magpie Murders, I was skeptical a sequel would work. After all, Atticus Pünd and Alan Conway were both dead. But I was delighted when you pulled it off with Moonflower, which to me is an even more accomplished, richer, twistier mystery. Were you looking to outdo yourself, to top Magpie Murders, as it were?

Anthony Horowitz: I’m delighted by what you said, so thank you very much indeed, because one of my greatest fears in life is you have a success, so you immediately follow it up with a sequel, and the sequel somehow lets people down and isn’t as good. And it’s a problem, because for the writer, for the adapter, you have to give people what they like. So that says do the same again, but you don’t do the same again, because that would be boring, so you have to do it differently. So, it is a question of how do you do things the same, but different?

For example, in the first book, there is one chapter missing, in the book inside the story. Alan Conway has written a book, and one chapter is missing, and that chapter contains the solution to the mystery. So having done that, I couldn’t do the same thing again. So, in Moonflower Murders, Susan has now got a complete book but doesn’t understand quite what is hidden inside it, but it has led to the disappearance of a young woman and that in itself adds a sort of a beating heart to the show because there is a tension.

I’m talking about the character Cecily Treherne who has just vanished after having read one of the Atticus Pünd novels and has read something in the book that relates to her disappearance. And that is very real and very serious and adds a completely different sort of atmosphere to the show. So, that does exactly what I hoped it would do, which is to set it apart from Magpie Murders, even whilst doing some of the same things again.

Jace Lacob: Alan Conway, the writer at the center of Magpie Murders, is himself murdered within the first book. Atticus Pünd, his hated creation, has a terminal illness. How did you, after writing Magpie, come up with how Susan Ryeland would be pulled back into his orbit and solve another crime involving one of Alan’s other novels?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, the first thing I was determined upon was that we would not lose Conleth Hill, who plays Alan Conway, because he’s so brilliant and so witty and gets the tone of the show so exactly right and is so valuable to us.

But then I realized that if the story concerned an earlier book, an earlier Atticus Pünd novel, there are nine in total, Magpie Murders was the ninth in a series, but if we went back to the third, fourth or fifth, then Alan Conway and Atticus Pünd would both be alive and in good health, and one could almost start again. And I was surprised how simply that worked, how, once I’d had that thought, just go back, you lost all the baggage. I think audiences would not particularly have appreciated one of your main characters dead and one terminally ill. It’s all a bit of a downer, isn’t it? I wanted it to have that joy that the first season had had, and going back was the answer.

Jace Lacob: So, the first episode of Moonflower opens at a wedding at Branlow Hall before shifting to sun-dappled Crete, where we meet Susan Ryeland hiking in the heat. She’s left behind the editorial world to become a hotelier in Crete. Gone is the leather jacket, the MG, her signifiers, and in their place is drudgery and a sense of hopelessness. Is Susan looking for an escape route when we pick up with her in Episode One?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, drudgery and a sense of hopelessness is perhaps overdoing the dark side of it. She is in Crete, and I think that one of the great heroes of this second season, and something that definitely we didn’t have in the first season, is Crete itself. The first time we see Susan in Episode One, when she is walking across the Cretan countryside, and there are goats with their bells tinkling, and cheery farmers who greet her in Greek, and all that, you get a sense of somebody who is, yes, she has her problems, and certainly the hotel is a bit of a disaster, but she is sort of dealing with it, and she is very much the Susan that we know. But there is something missing from her life, and what is missing from her life, apart from murder and mystery, is being an editor and books.

And I think that that set up, it just sort of fitted exactly for her. You know that sort of hotel, I know it. I have stayed in that hotel. It exists. And the job we had was to make it not too funny, not too silly, not to go too Fawlty Towers on it, but to try and treat it realistically to give her the reason to want to leave and to come back to England, which of course is where the murder happens.

Jace Lacob: So, it’s still a happy “kalimera”?

Anthony Horowitz: I think she’s dissatisfied. She’s frustrated. Her relationship with Andreas is not going too well, mainly because of the rigors of running a hotel and all the problems that come with it. And she is under stress. And then what happens is that a couple walk into the hotel with this story about their missing daughter. There is a sense of urgency. She also needs money, and they offer her a great deal of money to help them. And she really has no choice. By the end of Episode One, it is quite clear that whatever her feelings are, she must go back to Britain, to the UK, because so much depends on it.

Jace Lacob: So, as you say, Susan’s hired by the Treherens to find their missing daughter, Cecily. Her disappearance is connected to an Alan Conway novel. The Treherens are themselves successful owners of country hotel Branlow Hall, which is the perfect backdrop for a mystery a la Agatha Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel. How did you arrive at setting the action at a hotel this time?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, having done a village in the first season, I wanted something that was completely different to that, but still had that sense of assembly of strangers or people who half know each other. And I think hotels just make a great setting for a murder mystery or indeed for lots of films. I mean, one of the great inspirations for me was Stephen King and The Shining. He understood perfectly well that hotels are witnesses to all sorts of evil deeds. People come to hotels and they fight, they argue, they divorce, they commit adultery, or they commit murder.

And so, the idea of a hotel being a place that has a memory and where bad things have happened in the past just came very easily to my mind as being an interesting setting. Added to which, I liked the contrast between Susan and the Hotel Trifilli, which is a disaster, and Branlow Hall with the Moonflower wing in Suffolk being the exact opposite of her experience. And I think that also, you know, she’s a fish out of water in Crete, but she’s also a fish out of water when she arrives back in the UK.

Jace Lacob: That’s one of the things I love about this, is that she does have to confront a more successful version of herself to work this case. She’s seeing herself and her business through a dark mirror. There’s another doubling in a sense in which her counterpart, Pauline Treherne, is more successful than she.

Anthony Horowitz: Well, that’s absolutely right. But the main character who I think offends her most is the sister. Cecily Treherne has gone missing, she has a sister called Lisa. And Lisa, who has a scar just like one of the main characters in Alan Conway’s novel, is extremely exorcized by Susan’s arrival, and is angry that she has been paid a lot of money to come there, and disdains everybody. The success of the hotel, she says, is down to her. And one of the things I really enjoy about this season, in fact, is the conflict between Susan and Lisa.

In fact, Susan has a pretty rough time throughout this show with people turning against her. But it’s there, very much so, in that first meal that she has with Lisa and the father where she realizes she really is not welcome, at least not by some of the people in the hotel.

Jace Lacob: You’ve spoken about your love for Crete. What does Crete represent for Susan Ryeland? Is it an illusion, a dream, a utopia?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, at the end of Magpie Murders, she was in a very bad place. She had been very nearly killed. She’d been beaten on the head and left to burn in an office. And as a result of that, her business had gone under, her author, her bestselling author was dead. The deal she had hoped for, which would make her into a managing director, a senior editor and a publisher in a successful company had regrettably gone away. And so, Crete was almost a last resort, actually.

I think that when she left for Crete at the end of season one, there was a big part of her that knew that it probably wasn’t going to work out. But right then there was no other option. So, I suppose it was a sort of a chimera is what it was. It was an illusion, but I think it was one in which she willingly partook.

Jace Lacob: In this Alan Conway novel within the novel or within the show, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, he has a different assistant, he has a different relationship with his own mortality, as you said, this is set earlier in time. Was it an opportunity then to present Atticus at an earlier stage of his life, moving Pünd backwards in a way in time while Susan moves forward in her own?

Anthony Horowitz: I don’t think the Pünd in this story is radically different to the one in Magpie Murders because I think this is a fairly concentrated part of his life and it only took place, probably the two stories are only about three or four years apart actually in time. I think the biggest difference is his assistant. He has James Fraser in Magpie Murders, but he hasn’t arrived yet. We know if we’ve read the books carefully, that he only turned up in about book five once Alan Conway met his partner and put him into the books. That was when James Fraser appeared.

But this time the assistant is a lady called Madeline Cain, who is a world apart from the second assistant. She is very sweet and she’s very ambitious for Pünd. She’s clearly devoted to him. She has an edge of comedy to herself as well. Pippa Bennett-Warner brings a wonderful warmth and wit to the part, which I think does redefine Pünd as well.

Let’s not forget that he only takes the case in Moonflower Murders with her persuasion. He’s just out there to finish writing the book he’s always writing, Landscape of Criminal Investigation. But she says, no, no, this is going to be good for your career. It’s good for your profile. I think you should take it. So, I like that new relationship, and I think it does redefine him.

Jace Lacob: Moonflower and Magpie are books and television series that explore the act of creation, stealing fire from the gods in some way. How do you view the act of creation? Is writing a compulsion for you?

Anthony Horowitz: Writing is my love. It’s my passion. It’s my life. I write, I suppose, like a fish swims or like a bird flies. I was born to write, and I was actually born for pretty much nothing else. I love every aspect of it from the thinking up of the ideas to the beginning to sort of construct the structure of the book, and then the actual writing of it. And I love everything that follows; the publication, and then the adaptation and then the television, all of it. I can’t really describe it to you.

Writing, I use fountain pens rather than a computer because I love ink. I love nibs. I love the idea that I am part of a tradition, not as great as any of the great writers I admire, but nonetheless still in the tradition of Dickens or Orwell or Jane Austen, all of whom used ink. And so, I like having dirty fingers. And I’m at the moment writing a third Atticus Pünd novel. And just being back in that world again fills me with a sort of pleasure that is hard to describe.

I often talk about it as being immersion. When I write a book, everything else in my life is forgotten. I’m inside the book trying to describe what I’m seeing, what is happening around me, what people are saying, and hopefully creating a story that will entertain and beguile audiences. And that, I guess, is what I was born for.

Jace Lacob: Hovering over the action despite being dead himself is Magpie mystery novelist Alan Conway, who stole bits of people’s lives. Like Alan, you use a fountain pen, you also put people you know into your work, you’ve killed off irksome teachers. In the novel, Susan’s hotel in Crete, the Polydorus, is an actual hotel. And you admit to this trend in The Word is Murder, you write, “This is something I often do. When I killed him off at the end of Episode Four, it made me smile.” Is Alan Conway a darker version of yourself, one who takes that borrowing to an extreme?

Anthony Horowitz: No, there’s a huge difference between Alan Conway and myself, and that is that he doesn’t really enjoy what he writes. He was inspired largely by Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the greatest detective in fiction, Sherlock Holmes, but hated him and couldn’t wait to get rid of him and very quickly threw him off the Reichenbach Falls to do exactly that.

And Alan Conway is also malevolent. You know, I’ve written 60 novels now, and yes, I’ve killed off my teachers, but I doubt if they ever read any of the books. I think they were probably dead long before the books were published and wouldn’t have read it anyway if it had my name on the cover. But I have never been willfully malevolent or unpleasant, I hope, to anybody. I try to bring joy to the world. I think that is the great thing about murder mystery stories, that despite the fact that they are about murder and often have quite a dark edge to them, they just bring unalloyed pleasure. You read a murder mystery to get to the truth, and truth in this world at the moment is in very short supply, I often think.

So, I would have said that I’m nothing like Alan Conway, but you are right, there are similarities, and it is true that I do use my life. And I’ve already mentioned that I spend a lot of time in Crete, and you’re right, the Polydorus, which is a hotel, is ten minutes away from where I live. I go there almost every day. In the TV show, it’s renamed The Trifilli, but only because, and that’s again the point I’m trying to make, in the TV series, the hotel is really sort of awful. It’s falling to bits, and nothing works and it’s terrible. And I couldn’t do that to a real hotel run by people I know and like.

The only time I ever was called “Alan Conway” was by my wife, Jill, when I bought a house in London. I moved house a couple of years ago. We bought a house, it was a little bit too big for us and she looked at it and she said, you know, this might be an Alan Conway house.

Jace Lacob: Oh, that’s amazing.

MIDROLL

Jace Lacob: With Alan’s death and the closure of Clover Books, Susan has put Pünd out of her mind, but in the hot sun of Crete, he appears a ghost in her peripheral vision. Out of necessity, their dynamic on television is wholly different than in the novels. Has it surprised you how well the rapport between Susan and Pünd, between Lesley and Tim, works?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, we lucked out with both those actors, for sure. Lesley Manville is a huge star, and Tim McMullen is a rising star who worked with us on Foyle’s War for two seasons, and I loved working with him then. And so having the two of them together on the screen is a joy. But of course, it is different, because what happened, again, this is down to the producer, my wife, Jill Green, who pointed out to me that we had to somehow run the two worlds together.

In Magpie Murders, the character of Susan Ryeland doesn’t really turn up for about 250 pages. You cannot have a TV series in which your main star, Lesley Manville, as it turned out to be, doesn’t appear until, shall we say, Episode 3 or 4. You know, she wouldn’t take the part anyway, and people won’t watch. So having realized that Lesley and Tim would have to be pretty much having their adventures side by side, it wasn’t a huge leap of the imagination to suddenly realize that they might talk to each other, that they might have some kind of interaction or a relationship.

But I think what is fun about it is that it’s hard to say quite what Atticus Pünd is when he’s in the 21st century modern world. Does he exist? Is he a fictitious character out of a book who has somehow crossed the dimensions? Is he just in her imagination? Is he her conscience? Later on in the show, there is a scene which I particularly love when Susan and Pünd are driving together and stop in a field and they have a slight argument about the case, and she takes out a cigarette and lights it.

CLIP

Atticus: May I give you one other piece of advice?

Susan: Of course.

Atticus: You should really stop smoking.

Susan: You’re not real, are you? You’re just my guilty conscience!

Atticus: Always a pleasure to see you, Susan.

Anthony Horowitz: Is it him saying it because he’s worried about her health, or is it her conscience warning her, as she knows fully well that cigarettes are bad for you?

Jace Lacob: In Susan, we have an editor who’s thrust into the role of a detective. And in Atticus, we have a detective who is a writer. To me, it’s only natural that they would have this sort of simpatico spirit, that they would complement each other as they do.

Anthony Horowitz: You know, Jace, that’s a great observation and it’s never occurred to me until now. You’re absolutely correct, of course. An editor turned detective, and a detective who writes. And it would be interesting to see what Susan would make of The Landscape of Criminal Investigation, a passage of which, incidentally, I wrote only a few weeks ago for the new book. It’s the first time I actually wrote a little extract from that book.

The big thing here is that I am not interested in writing, as it were, straightforward classic murder mysteries. I enjoy them. I admire them. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, I love all these sort of golden age authors, but I’m just trying to do something a little different. And I like the fact that there isn’t really a detective in this show. Yes, there’s Pünd, but he doesn’t exist. And yes, there’s Susan, but she isn’t a detective.

So, I like also exploring the nature of writing. I’ve always said that a murder mystery can’t just be about murder, and it can’t just be a mystery. If you’re writing 3, 4, 5 or even 600 pages you’ve got to give the reader a little bit more than “the butler did it”. And I love the fact that I can explore literature, I can explore the nature of crime, the nature of crime fiction, of why it is that a murder committed in real life on the streets of Los Angeles or New York or London or wherever, is disgusting and horrific and we all get upset about it, but a murder committed in a story makes us smile. Why is that?

These are the sorts of questions I can ask and explore. And with each book I write, I get to look at other aspects of exactly that. And it fascinates me as much, if not more, than who did it.

Jace Lacob: Pünd says to Susan at one point in this,

CLIP

Atticus: Murder is the worst of all crimes, not only because of the lives it destroys, but there are also the reverberations. It’s like a stone dropped into the sea. The ripples, they come all the way to the shore.

Jace Lacob: Do you think that is, then, why we love that vicarious thrill, the tangled net that they cast in their wake, murder mysteries, entangling not just the victim but everyone around them? Is that part of the appeal?

Anthony Horowitz: I think that is definitely part of the appeal, although Pünd does put it in language I wouldn’t use myself, I mean all that stuff about water rippling and reaching every fiber of society and life and all the rest of it, is perhaps a little bit fanciful for my taste, but that’s Pünd for you.

Jace Lacob: What intrigues me about the reappearance of Pünd in Susan’s life is that it actually precedes the Treherne’s offer and not the reverse. I could see that her return to sleuthing might resurrect him in her mind, but it’s the other way around. Why do you think she sees Pünd at that moment, and what does his phantom appearance represent to Susan?

Anthony Horowitz: It’s a fantastic question, Jace. I have to say, you know the books, I think, better than I do. I put that in because it’s a sort of… I think there’s no answer to it, and there’s deliberately no answer, but I will give you one possible interpretation, which is that, actually, she is wistfully thinking she would like to investigate a second murder, and Pünd comes to tell her it’s going to happen.

It’s a sort of a foreshadowing, if you like, a premonition. And that is why he appears there shimmering in the sunlight in a shot. It’s a beautiful little church. I was actually there when they were filming it that day, and it is way up in the hills. It is so perfectly Cretan and so beautiful, and the weather was gorgeous and just seeing it happen, just seeing Tim McMullan walking onto the set in that very non Cretan outfit just made me smile so much. And it had almost the same effect on me. I said, yes, we’re doing it, he’s back.

Jace Lacob: Moonflower and Magpie are mysteries within mysteries. They’re metafictional texts that demand to be read and reread to find the breadcrumbs you’ve placed throughout. But they also follow Susan Ryeland as she moves in a world that is shifting around her. How do you balance the cerebral with the emotional, plot with story?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, plot and story, I think, are very closely aligned. The plot is, if you like, the scaffolding, which I spend an enormous amount of time putting up in order to carry the story and to make sure that everything makes sense. And actually, what matters even more than either of those two things, I think, is character, which is what you’re talking about. When I’m talking to murder mystery writers, or to new ones, I’m always saying that murder mystery is not really about murder, it’s about character. Because if two people meet and one of them desires to kill the other, and you start exploring the motives, they’re not going to be mild.

You don’t murder somebody because you’re a little bit cross with them, or because they make you quite, in the English sense, a little bit angry. You murder them because they create huge emotions in you, which leads you to do this unspeakable act that’s, you know, this great biblical crime, one of the 10 commandments. So, it’s right at the very core of the Christian religion, thou shalt not kill.

So, the emotions are what matters, and the people are what matters. And for me, everything always begins with that little, tiny equation, A plus B equals C. A is one person, B is another person, C is the reason why A murders B. It’s all about character, it’s all about emotion, and plot and structure are, of course, essential too, but without that core, without that sort of heart to the thing, I don’t see any point in writing it.

Jace Lacob: Episode Two of Moonflower, which airs next week, features a discussion between Pünd and assistant Madeline about technology.

CLIP

Atticus: I do not like machines.

Madeline: You could say it was the machines that won us the war; the spitfire, radar.

Atticus: But Nazism itself was a machine, so it always seemed to me.

Madeline: You mean with no humanity?

Atticus: Exactly. The more mechanical the age, inevitably it becomes less humane.

Jace Lacob: This is Pünd, I feel, at his most insightful. Is he acting as a mouthpiece for the author here, and is it easier to couch such insight within the context of a mystery in 1955 Devonshire?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, it’s certainly a much better observation than the stone with its ripples spreading to all humanity, which we mentioned earlier. I think there is a lot of sense in what he says. And I think, yes, there is, in those words, something I do believe in. Particularly at the moment with social media and the way AI and the cell phone and certain platforms are taking over our life.

But you have to be careful not to be a Luddite, especially when you get to a certain age, not to say, oh, the world is so much worse now than it was when I sat down and took out my candle and my fountain pen and mummy was, or somebody was pouring me a bath in the bedroom with hot coals or whatever. I’m not saying let’s go back to the Victorian age. I just think we need to be very, very aware of what some, what quite a lot, of technology is doing to our humanity.

And if you ever go into a restaurant and you see a family of four or five, all of them on their cell phones, their iPads, whatever piece of machinery it is they’ve pulled out of their pocket and none of them are talking to themselves, you begin to see that we are fragmenting as a society, that our emotional links to each other are being weakened and tested, and we are becoming ever more isolated in worlds that can actually do us great harm.

So, I think Pünd’s words, well, it must be obvious from my answer to you, that what Pünd says in that particular moment, is true. And actually, of course, you’ve got to remember that he is a victim of the Second World War. And I think that it is perfectly reasonable and understandable why he should say that thing. but at the same time, he’s saying something which I do largely believe.

Jace Lacob: Anthony Horowitz, thank you very much.

Anthony Horowitz: Thank you.

Next time, Pünd, his efficient assistant Madeline, and Detective Chubb stay hot on the case, even when the investigation just leads to more questions.

CLIP

Chubb: I have to say, this is very good of you, Mr. Pünd.

Atticus: Oh, the pleasure is all mine. It’s one of the benefits of being a private investigator, that it is the client who pays.

Madeline: I’ll send the bill to Mr. Schultz.

Chubb: And now, who is that?

Madeline: He was Melissa James’ agent.

Atticus: Her American agent. It’s he who employed me.

Chubb: Well, I’m glad to hear. This case is a right puzzler, and no mistake. Nothing makes any sense.

In three weeks, we’ll be joined by Madeline Cain herself, actor Pippa Bennett-Warner. But until then, be sure to tune into Moonflower Murders on Sunday evenings at 9 p.m. Eastern on MASTERPIECE on PBS.