Murder most foul is afoot again as Anthony Horowitz’s quirky characters return in “Moonflower Murders” on PBS’ “Masterpiece Mystery” at 8 p.m. Sunday. A sequel to “Magpie Murders,” also based on a Horowitz novel, “Moonflower Murders” features Lesley Manville playing detective.
But her character, Susan Ryeland, is not any old sherlock. She’s a middle-aged editor turned hotelier who goes about solving murders in the six-part series with a literary sensibility.
Horowitz has a third book on the way.
“This one is called ‘The Marble Hall Murders,’” he says. “It is a variation on the theme, and the book has been extremely well received by my American publishers, my Canadian publishers and my British publishers, and, most importantly of all, by my wife.”
Jill Green, Horowitz’s wife of 36 years, is also the executive producer on the PBS shows.
“We started collaborating on ‘Foyle’s War.’ It was the first show we did together,” Green says. “When we’re working on these very complex shows, things change all the time and we have to think outside the box, sometimes very quickly. To have that tremendous work ethic is fantastic.”
The complexity she’s talking about is the fact that the narrative of the plot moves between two worlds: the real world of a book publisher and her alter-mentor, a peerless detective from a 1950s novel — a gumshoe that only she can see. This is easy enough in book form, but not as simple for television.
Even though these three novels are beleaguered by crime and his books — “The Word Is Murder,” “The Sentence Is Death,” “A Twist of a Knife” may sound profoundly deadly — the 69-year-old Horowitz insists his work is not dark.