Mark Gatiss Joins Lesley Manville & Conleth Hill in 'Moonflower Murders'

While the actors' and writers' strikes here in the States have caused TV schedules to be delayed and, in some places, outright scrapped, those of us who are fans of British TV and PBS have been far more fortunate. As we noted at the time of the strikes, neither the Writers Guild of Great Britain nor Actor's Equity was legally able to sympathy strike along with their American counterparts due to Tory mandates. Also, public television contracts with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are separate from the ones negotiated with the commercial American Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). That means filming for most of our British favorites continued, like the sequel to Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders.

Magpie Murders was Masterpiece's biggest surprise hit of 2022. Based on the mystery novel written by Anthony Horowitz, best known for the long-running fan-favorite Midsomer Murders and hits like Foyle's War, it seemed like an unlikely candidate for TV. The book is not just a whodunit but a meditation on why readers love the format of mysteries in the first place. It contemplates why reading detective novels is so satisfying, and why, over a hundred years after Agatha Christie published The Mysterious Affair at Styles, we still love these "cozy crime" stories. It does that by presenting a novel within a novel where the author is murdered, and the ending of the novel inside the novel may hold the key to who killed him.

However, the series managed to brilliantly solve this problem by having Horowitz, who is a master of TV detective writing, adapt his own work. He created a show within a show to dramatize his novel-within-a-novel, the result of which was an extraordinary piece of television for which he received an Edgar Award. Now, the series is back with a sequel, based upon his follow-up novel, Moonflower Murders, which has just wrapped filming in Dublin and Crete.