PBS & Channel 5 Team Up for 'The Puzzle Lady' Starring Phyllis Logan

Channel 5 has announced the commission of a new cozy-crime series, The Puzzle Lady, based on the best-selling series of novels by the late Parnell Hall (1944-2020). Described as "Miss Marple on steroids" or "Jessica Fletcher meets Groucho Marx." Hall started publishing the series with A Clue for the Puzzle Lady in 1999; The Puzzle Lady Mysteries ran 20 installments, with the last book, Lights! Camera! Puzzles!, arriving in 2019. The series will now get a massive boost as it's turned into a six-episode mystery series starring Phyllis Logan (Downton Abbey) as the titular sleuth, set to air on PBS.

Logan will play Cora Felton, who (in the novels) is a nationally syndicated crossword puzzle maker based in New England. (The series will relocate her to a small U.K. village, natch.) Her small town is proud of its famous puzzle-creator resident, enough to overlook her gin-and-cigarette habit, but when a body is found with a crossword in its pocket, and more begin arriving, her niece, Sherry Carter, and the local police chief, Dale Harper, turn to her for help. The books are singular in that they contain actual crossword puzzles for the reader to solve along with the characters (and in later installments, Soduku puzzles as well)*.

(NYT Games enthusiasts will note Will Shortz, the long-time editor of the paper's crosswords, is credited with helping Hall create many of the novels' puzzles.)