The BBC’s second season of Magpie Murders, called Moonflower Murders this time around, begins at a wedding. There are the usual hallmarks: billowing gazebo tent, hideous bridesmaids’ gowns, equally hideous headpieces, flutes of champagne, rickety events chairs, bountiful florals and a lush summer’s day (how far off those feel).
Then a disorientated housekeeper from the nearby hotel runs in and ruins the blushing bride’s wedding dress with a sopping red handprint. There’s been a murder!
Since the show is entitled Moonflower Murders plural, there is more to come from this highly ornate six-parter. So we jump forward eight years to a setting that looks more like a tropical postcard than the B-roll for Bake Off, where Lesley Manville is roaming the wilds dressed like a woman discovering herself.
This is Susan, living out a Mamma Mia fantasy running a hotel on Crete with her boyfriend Andreas (Alexandros Logothetis). Those who watched the first season will be up to speed with who Susan is (a former publisher) and what’s going on (she left publishing for Greece after discovering her book boss was in fact a homicidal maniac who did away with their star novelist). Those who did not will need a moment to find their footing.
The mother and father of the bride pitch up in this idyll because their wedded daughter Cecily has gone missing after reading a whodunnit, which Susan edited, loosely based on the murder eight years ago. Something in the book made her believe the wrong person, an ex-con maintenance man, had been put behind bars.
Susan, having had it with one kitchen nightmare too many at their rustic B&B, agrees to help search for Cecily. On the flight back – a suspiciously roomy and tranquil affair for a budget airline – Susan reads Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, the novel Alan Conway wrote after she coaxed him with details of the real-life hotel murder.
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As if enough wasn’t already going on, at this point we are hurled into the world of the '50s-set novel. These are gorgeous scenes with lovely period detail: a ballooning vintage Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car, with a retired Golden Hollywood starlet wearing dainty driving gloves behind the wheel. This is our fabulous next murder victim, who owns a boutique hotel in Devonshire and is being ripped off by just about everyone around her.
Once she’s been quite viciously dispatched with a telephone cord, Atticus Pünd is put on the case. Played by Tim McMullan, he wears quintessentially English clobber and has something of Hercule Poirot about him. Susan has visions of him as she races through the chapters of the book.
So here’s everything on the till: a present-day disappearance, a murder eight years ago and a fictional murder which may be able to link the two.
Perhaps to get their money’s worth, the cast of the modern-day murder mystery is repurposed to all the figures in the '50s, so Daniel Mays plays both the vape-smoking DCI looking for Cecily and the bumbling DCI who doesn’t think to check out alibis in the '50s. He’s doing a most distracting Suffolk accent in both.
In the crowded murder-mystery market, Moonflower Murders clearly tries to stand above its run-of-the-mill rivals. Based on Anthony Horowitz’s novel of the same name, this murder within a murder is a many-layered and many-charactered triumph of plotting. But it is also – as you may already be experiencing – fairly head-spinning.
The doubled-up cast produces that finger-pointing sensation of recognizing an actor you’ve definitely seen in something else, only to realise it’s from the other half of this show. Given they’re not exact one-to-one matches every time – the woman murdered in the '50s is Cecily's very-much-alive sister in modern day – it can all be quite confusing.
Or revealing? Will Tudor plays missing Cecily’s husband, but in the '50s fiction is a swindling hit-and-runner, so our money's on him.
Perhaps because only so much can be head-scratching, a lot of the dialogue is very exposition-heavy stuff. It probably goes without saying that Manville is very good, so much so you have to feel for some of her less-experienced scene partners.
Moonflower Murders is admirable in its high concept but labyrinthine as a humble viewer trying to parse exactly who killed whom and in which bloody timeline.
Moonflower Murders will be available on BBC iPlayer from Saturday, November 16, with episodes airing weekly on BBC One from that evening.
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Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
