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

Mystery fiction is nothing new to tireless editor Susan Ryeland, who has shepherded finicky author Alan Conway to worldwide success with his best-selling Atticus Pünd detective series.

CLIP

Alan What else can I tell you about Atticus Pünd? He had solved his last case. The death of Mary Blakiston. Soon followed by another death at Pye Hall.

Jace But when Conway’s latest Atticus Pünd manuscript is delivered with its final chapter missing — and as Conway himself suddenly seems to have taken his own life — it’s up to Susan to put on her detective cap and start sleuthing for herself.

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Susan Charles, I can’t believe you did this to me. You gave me a book without the last chap…

Charles I know. Uh, uh, sit down, please.

Susan Do you have it?

Charles Please, Susan, sit down, I’ve…something terrible to tell you.

Susan What?

Charles Alan’s dead.

Jace Anthony Horowitz is the author of Magpie Murders, the delightfully meta murder mystery novel at the heart of this new MASTERPIECE Mystery series, and adding yet another layer to it all, he wrote the scripts for the adaptation, too.

CLIP

Fan Excuse me? Eh, are you Alan Conway?

Alan Yes.

Fan I just want to say, I love your books. When’s the next one coming out?

Alan Soon.

Fan Oh, I know it’s a bit cheeky, but I don’t suppose I can get a quick selfie with you? My husband won’t…

Alan No!

Fan …believe I…

Alan No. I’m sorry. I’m late for my train.Jace Horowitz joins us to talk murder, mystery fiction, and the surprises still in store for Susan and Atticus on the rest of his Magpie Murders miniseries.

And this week, we are joined by Magpie Murders creator, writer and executive producer Anthony Horowitz. Welcome.

Anthony Horowitz Thank you very much.

Jace So before we get into the specifics of Magpie Murders, the television series, I want to go back to the source material itself, your 2016 novel, Magpie Murders. Where did the genesis of the idea for this book within a book come from?

Anthony Well, the book actually started a very long time ago, when I wanted to write a book about writing. I’ve always been very much inspired by a brilliant book about screenwriting called, Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. And I had the idea that I would do something similar to that, and began to work on ideas. But then I discovered that writing about writing was rather boring. So I thought maybe I could do it, but not as a sort of an academic style, but as a as a murder mystery. Why not write a story about a writer? And then I thought a murder writer. And then I thought a murder writer who is murdered. And that would give me an opportunity to do the two things I most love. The first is, to construct a really, hopefully clever and twisty whodunit. But the second thing was to actually write about what it is like to be a writer, to write about the nature of murder mystery, to ask questions like, ‘Why is it that a murder in the street is disgusting and horrible, but a murder on the page or in television is something that entertains us?’ So that was really where it all began. But it was a long, long time before I then actually wrote the book.

Jace Was that sort of back in ‘97 when you were writing the first series of Midsomer Murders? Is that true?

Anthony Well, it is true. And I can actually prove it, because in Midsomer Murders, which is a show which I helped to create and indeed gave it that title, there is an episode in which a writer appears and that writer is writing Magpie Murders. And we even mocked up a copy of Magpie Murders. It must be one of the very few books ever written that appears on TV some ten or 15 years before it is actually written. But that is where it began. It was then that I was thinking about it. I was also interested in the fact that a whodunit is a very peculiar sort of form, a very peculiar genre. You know, you ask your audience to spend an hour, two hours or maybe six episodes watching a show to find out, basically, the butler did it. And I was always fascinated by the possibility that you could use murder mystery to do more than that. You could turn it on its head. You could do different things. So I was really interested, even when I was writing Midsomer Murders, to start thinking about an alternative. And that’s really where sort of Magpie Murders came from.

Jace Now, I read Magpie Murders when it was released, and then Moonflower Murders when it, too, arrived. And to me, I loved how artfully it offered up both a pastiche and a deconstruction of Agatha Christie’s novels. What was the impetus towards turning to Christie here, and what sort of tropes did you want to examine with Magpie Murders?

Anthony If you talk about the golden age of detective fiction. Various authors always get mentioned. And of course, Agatha Christie is top of the list. I mean, Dorothy L. Sayers is another, and P.D. James and various others, and you could go earlier than that and look at Conan Doyle. But Christie is still, you know, to all intents and purposes, the queen of crime. And I’ve always had a fondness for her books, I read them when I was in my late teens and sort of, you know, grew up on them in a way. And what she does so extraordinarily well, better than any other murder mystery writer I can think of, is she constructs extraordinarily clever plots. And she does it in a way whereby it’s a win-win situation. If you get to the end of the book and you haven’t guessed the ending, you don’t feel cheated. She’s clever enough to put all the clues in front of you and so you could almost kick yourself for not having seen it. But if you do guess it, that doesn’t spoil it either, because you just come away with a big smile on your face that this time, you know, you’ve got it right and you’ve been as clever as her. So when I was thinking of Magpie Murders, I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, I am going to spend at least half of this pastiching what she does, entering her world. The 1950s English villages, slightly stereotypical stock characters from sort of the Lord of the manor to the vicar, to, you know, to the blackmailer, to the gardener, etc.. But at the same time, I wanted it to be very much based in the real world and having the main character as an editor working in a publishing house in the present time allowed me to do both.

Jace And you mentioned P.D. James, I am curious here that the literary mystery world has over the last few years, unfortunately lost a number of its more prominent members, particularly with the death of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell as well, both in the last decade. How do you see Rendell and James fitting into the pantheon of great mystery writers?

Anthony Well, you know, what is this pantheon? How do you get in? Who’s going to be chosen to be part of it? I mean, they already are to a certain extent. I mentioned that because I mentioned P.D. James, because I read her work a lot when I was writing Midsomer Murders and before that. And of course, I could have gone to loads of other writers too, it occurs to me that Ellery Queen is a writer I used to admire very much as a kid and also very much in that pantheon. You know, any writer of murder mysteries that you can name is, you know, some years after they have passed has achieved something. Where those two specifically fit in is that they just continue tradition. It’s interesting, they were both female writers and there is a very, very strong female presence in the great crime writers. And I think it’s a difficult question to answer. I think that once you’re inside that world, it’s sometimes called cozy crime, although I personally don’t like that description and I shouldn’t really be anything too cozy about crime. Once you’re doing it as well as they’re doing it, and if you last, you have achieved something very special, I think.

Jace So let’s put aside that cozy moniker. Cozy murder is a is a strange, sort of weird phrasing. Magpie Murders itself has such a love for Christie, as you say, those that sort of particular style of literary mysteries that she embodies, those drawing room mysteries, the cast of sort of stock characters. You’ve written Sherlock Holmes, you’ve written James Bond. Was it only a matter of time before a Poirot-like figure entered your imagination?

Anthony Well, of course, I also wrote Agatha Christie, and I did write Hercule Poirot. I did, I think, something like 13 episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot for television here in Britain, and it’s been shown all over the world. So, yes, I mean, Christie was a big influence on me because, as I say, the cleverness of her puzzles, I think one of the things I really reject and dislike is the modern murder mystery, often on television, which has gigantic holes in it, where the audience is cheated, where the writer doesn’t play fair with the reader, where the clues are not laid out in the open. And for me, the most important part of creating a murder mystery is getting the structure right, getting it so that every single clue is there in place. And it is absolutely 100% possible that you may be able to guess the solution. But at the same time, I’m going to do everything in my power to ensure that you don’t. And I think that goes very, very much back to the Agatha Christie model. So, that is where I begin. What I’m trying to do, however, is to take the genre and turn it on its head to give people what they expect, you know, you mentioned tonight in what you just said, the sort of the cozy characters, the stereotypes, the sort of the very familiar world. But I’m going to do it in a way that nobody has done before. And to me, it’s very important not to be seen, to be just doing pastiche, just to be doing sort of, you know, warmed up Agatha Christie. I’m trying to do something which is new.

Jace No, there’s an intense meta characteristic that permeates this entire work. The characters in the book, of course, are your own creation, but they’re also the creations of the fictional Alan Conway. Does having that extra layer of distance complicate your relationship to Atticus Pünd or to Saxby Upon Avon’s residents, in that you’re creating a creator who’s creating?

Anthony And then I’m a murder writer who is murdered. Yes. I mean, I have begun to explore the world of metafiction with great relish. I mean, if you go into my next series of books, which have a character called Hawthorne, who is a detective who decides to hire a writer, and the writer he hires is Anthony Horowitz. It’s me. And so suddenly, I am no longer the author. I’m the sidekick inside my own book, you really begin to enter a sort of a meta fictional tunnel. And in the book of Magpie Murders, this was really the beginning of it. And the idea that you would have actually not just one but several different sorts of books pastiched inside this book itself. So you not only have Alan Conway’s work, you also have a little bit of actually, it’s sort of based on Martin Amis, a couple of pages from a really terrible book called The Slide that Alan Conway is trying to write. There’s also a detective novel, a chapter of a detective novel written by a writer who can’t write. And so I am really, really interested in looking at different forms of fiction in the sort of the crime world and having fun with it. So to me, the metafictional side of it is almost as important as actually the murders and the clues and the red herrings themselves.

Jace I mean, I want to pick up on that thread. One of the things to me, when I discovered the book, when it was first printed, I loved the fact, as you say, that the full text or almost full text of Alan Conway’s Magpie Murders is printed within the book, complete with a title page in it about the author. Much of this book is about the act and joy and frustration of reading. Did that give you any pause during writing the series about how that might translate to television?

Anthony Yes. I mean, before I get on to how the scripts were conceived, which was extremely difficult in the end. And what I think is interesting is how very different the television series is from the books, considering I wrote both of them, they really are very separate entities and an awful lot of what happens in a TV show isn’t even in the book, which is odd, when you think the book is 650 pages long, you’d think there’d be enough material to make six hours of TV, but actually I have decided that I have to go in a different direction. But if you want to just pick up on one thing, which is you might be interested to know that the whole conceit of the book, which begins with Alan Conway, this writer who does not like writing, is based on Conan Doyle. That’s where I actually began. Conan Doyle fascinates me as a writer who created the greatest detective in fiction, Sherlock Holmes, and felt that he was beneath him, but he had actually wasted his talents on what was an inferior genre. So what did he do after three books? He took Sherlock Holmes and threw him off the Reichenbach Falls to get rid of him, to kill him. And that is Alan Conway. So you ask me if this book is about reading, it’s actually much more about writing. And in particular, the writer who does not like what he is writing. And I find that fascinating in Alan Conway, in that he has world success, what he’s always dreamed of. But it’s not on his terms. He’s angry. He’s angry. He’s twisted. He’s bitter. And this actually leads to his to his death.

CLIP

Fan Excuse me, are you Alan Conway? I love your books.

Man Come here.

Woman Oh, stop.

Conway Get a room.

Jace I mean, to me, which begs the question then — I mean, do you find the act of writing joyful or frustrating or both?

Anthony Never frustrating, always joyful, occasionally problematic, sometimes challenging, occasionally depressing, but depressing only if I’m not pleased with what I’m doing. And then I stop and go for a walk and get my head back into gear. But writing is my life. It’s my passion. It’s what I’ve done since I was ten years old. That was when I knew I’d be a writer. It’s all I’ve ever done. It’s all I’m any good at. The fact that I’ve managed to sustain a career over something like four decades now and 55 books and hours and hours of television is something, I look at it and I think to myself, ‘This has been my life.’ and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. I’m incredibly fortunate. But writing is to me, it’s the equivalent of breathing. It is it is what I do to stay alive.

Jace I love that. That’s—so, passion.

Anthony Well —

Jace So, oxygen, so everything.

Anthony I mean, it’s chief, and what is funny is, is that some things never change. You know, I still remember writing my first book and having my first book in print, holding it in my hands for the first time when the mailman had delivered it. And that excitement, that sense of wanting to stroke it, to hold it, to possess it, and the disbelief that it was mine. The frustration that it didn’t sell enough copies, and the sort of the thirst to find the larger audience, not, I hasten to add, for money, but simply because I was like an arsonist — you know, lighting a match was great. Setting fire to the table was even better. So let’s burn down the whole house. And then the village, then the country, then the world. So that was sort of the impulse that was behind it. But I look on my sort of career with a sense of, you know, as I get older, with a sense of just gratitude and disbelief to an extent that I’m still here, still doing it. And but what motivated me all those years ago hasn’t changed.

Jace Before this next question, a brief word from our sponsors… 

Jace As a former editor of journalism, rather than books, I was delightfully surprised to see that the book’s protagonist was herself an editor — a rare example of the editor as hero. Why does Susan Ryeland offer the perfect perspective? And in an age where everyone from vicars to bakers are sleuths, what does her profession allow her?

Anthony Well, it was always a no brainer, really, that the main character in this book would be an editor, because as I said to you, it really began, the concept of this book was it was going to be about writing, about publishing, about the nature of producing books, especially murder mystery books. So having an editor as the central character was an obvious choice. And what I like about our Magpie Murders, both the book and the TV adaptation of it is that the solution to the murder is one that only an editor might spot. The fact that Susan is an editor helps her to actually unravel the mystery, but also she is a spokesperson for the sort of the meta side of the book, particularly in the TV show where she actually encounters Atticus Pünd and interacts with him, which is a very sort of fantastical and strange thing to happen in a murder mystery series. But it also gives her the authority to understand Alan Conway, to understand what drives him and to learn in the course of the six episodes over 650 pages, his absolute hatred and disdain of what he is doing. And yet she herself loves books. Books are the same for her as for me, they are her life. It is all she wants to do.

CLIP

Susan The bloody manuscript! I can’t believe it.

Andreas It was that bad?

Susan I haven’t finished it. There’s no last chapter. Alice or Jemima must have buggered up the photocopying. It’s missing the last chapter.

Andreas So you don’t know who did it.

Susan It’s not funny, Andreas. It’s bloody annoying.

Andreas I’m sorry. Can’t you work it out for yourself?

Susan No! These things are always way too complicated for me. Oh, is there anything more useless than a whodunit without the ending?

Anthony And again, when we came to do the television series, I gave her this dilemma — it’s there in the book, but it’s bigger on the TV  — of will she continue? Does she want to continue as an editor? Or she’s given this opportunity to go to Crete to open a hotel with her lover, and that’s on the table for her. Which way can she go? Can she live without editing? And that makes her very close to my heart.

Jace That does take me to my next question. As you say, she’s at a crossroads professionally and personally. Clover Books or Cloverleaf, as it is in the book, is up for sale. And she has the opportunity to take on a bigger role. But Andreas wants her to move with him to Crete. Her desire to solve what happened to Alan. Is this a coping mechanism of a sort, a delay tactic to avoid having to make this decision?

Anthony I think there is an element of that in there. But actually it’s not that because Susan Ryeland, both in the book and the TV series is not actually interested in solving a murder. In fact, to begin with, she isn’t aware that there is a murder because it looks as if Alan Conway has committed suicide. All she wants is what drives her life, which is to publish this book, to find the missing chapter because Alan Conway has been killed in the last chapter of the book has gone missing. And as Susan says, ‘Is there anything more useless in the world but a whodunit without the solution?’ So it is her professional desire to produce this book, save the company, which she then might take over, or might not. But just to complete the series that actually drives her, it is only after a little bit of time that she realizes that Alan Conway has been murdered. And even then I think her prime motivation for finding out who killed him is to find out what has happened to the chapter. I mean, what’s interesting is that she knew Alan Conway, she worked with him. She did not like him and he really disliked her. So it was a very rocky relationship and there is no love between them. Her love is reserved entirely for what he wrote.

Jace I mean, in the novels, Susan appears for about two pages before disappearing, as the reader is sucked into the death of Sir Magnus Pye in Alan Conway’s novel. She then reappears about 200 pages later. When it was time to adapt Magpie Murders, did you suddenly realize you’d have to come up with a completely different framework?

Anthony Well, that’s a terrific question. The adaptation of the book was very difficult because I couldn’t find a way in to begin with. But one thing that was obvious was that when Lesley Manville was cast, and that was very early on and we suddenly realized we had a very major talent willing to play Susan Ryeland and more than that, supporting the series, we would never have would have made it without her enthusiasm and her support. And she’s become a very good friend as a result of the show, and she is wonderful in it. But obviously, if you’ve got Lesley Manville as your star, you can’t have her turning up for one minute in episode one, and then disappearing until episode three or four. I mean, quite apart from anything else, she probably wouldn’t have done it. So I realized very quickly that Lesley Manville or rather Susan Ryeland had to appear constantly from episodes one through to six, and I played with all sorts of different ideas on how to achieve this. But it was actually my wife, Jill Green, another very strong woman, incidentally, the producer of the show and somebody who I should always listen to earlier and obey more quickly, said to me, ‘Look, she has got to carry this show. She is the person who will guide us through. You cannot spend a lot of time in 1950 with Atticus Pünd, as good as he is and as interesting a character and as well played by Tim McMullan as he is. People are going to watch this show for what Susan is doing and what she is feeling. And you’ve got to flesh out and make her a real character. And it expands this relationship with Andreas, this choice, should she stay in England or go to Crete, and all the rest of it.’ But doing that meant that I realized that I would have to run the 1950s murder mystery through the cozy Agatha Christie style story, and Alan Conway’s sort of creation with the real world of Susan Ryeland and her publishing company, and the fact with a chapter is missing that she is in financial trouble. But unless she can find the last chapter, the whole company will go under. And the two of them had to run concurrently, simultaneously. And so suddenly I realized what I was going to have to present to the audience would be two quite complicated whodunits with a whole series of characters and clues running side by side in some way. And then I began to think, ‘How can I use that?’ And I suddenly realized I have been given the most fantastic opportunity that I could cut from the 1950s to the 21st Century and back again seamlessly. And since Alan Conway had based a lot of his characters in the 1950s book on people which he knew in the present day they would be played by the same actors. And so everybody would get two bites of the apple. And we would have actors like Matthew Beard, for example, who plays the rather sort of dimwitted, you know, classic sidekick character to Atticus Pünd, to the detective in the ‘50s, but who also in the character is based on the boyfriend of Alan Conway. And so you get scenes whereby Matthew Beard hears the doorbell ring and he is in his 1950s role. He goes down the stairs to answer the door, but when he opens the door. He has become the assistant, he has crossed 50 years, changed from fiction to reality, is now a new character, but it’s the same person. And that I think is the is the unique quality of Magpie Murders and its greatest pleasure. People who have watched this show get such a buzz after watching all these different characters sort of acting against themselves, if you like, in two completely different roles connected by the books. And I want to just mention one other character, actually, in that breath, Daniel Mays, who is a very, very well-known English actor here, who’s done many, many cop shows of one sort or another, who plays both Chubb and Locke. Chubb is the sort of the not very bright detective back in the 1950s. Locke is a very hardboiled, tough, modern detective. And again, he inhabits two completely different worlds, one actor, two different characters, and has enormous fun doing it and at the same time comments on exactly what I want to talk about, which is the nature of murder. ‘It is not,’ he says, in his modern guise, ‘a game. It is not something to entertain readers. It’s horrible. How dare you pretend otherwise?’ So that seemed, sorry for the lengthy exposition, but your question led me to do what gave me the greatest pleasure in the show.

Jace No, and I would agree with that. I mean, not only do those actors help to provide sort of route markers, but that sort of doubling that plays with Conway himself, sort of stealing scraps of people’s lives rather like a magpie. We have these sort of double lives going on, actors playing more than one role, which sort of helps the viewer, but also I feel like does serve as a sort of narrative and thematic device within the show, and makes it, as you say, such a pleasure to watch.

Anthony Well, I absolutely love your analogy. It hasn’t occurred to me. If you are absolutely right that Alan Conway is actually a magpie, that is exactly what he’s doing, is stealing little bits of people’s lives for his book. But I should also add that one of the great things about the show for me writing it and this developed only as I began to write the scripts because it wasn’t originally my intention to do this, was that Susan Ryeland, the modern editor, begins to see Atticus Pünd, the 1950s detective. And I mean by see you look like who if she’s dreaming, if she’s having visions, if she’s imagining it or if he’s there with some kind of ghost or sort of spirit mentor. But as the six episodes continue, the two characters form almost an attachment. It almost becomes like a love story in a strange sort of way with Susan Ryeland, who is who knows very well. But this is the last Atticus Pünd book realizing but this is a character who is who has no future and Atticus Pünd himself trying to try to help her solve the murder was being unable really to sort of relate to her in the modern world. And the two actors, Lesley Manville and Tim McMullan, have this wonderfully gentle relationship, which again, I think is very different. And one of the joys for me about this whole process of making the show has been that, you know, I wrote it, but I look at it on the television now and I don’t believe what I did. It’s rather better than my work normally is. And that’s down to the wonderful cast, to the director, Peter Cattaneo. And to luck, you know, that everything went so well. So it has been, of all the things I’ve written, I think the greatest pleasure I’ve had.

Jace Now, I wanted to address that as well. I love the fact that it is such a huge departure from the novel, that Susan and Atticus do interact, that she does become involved in a sort of partnership, a sort of almost a truly, madly, deeply romance with a fictional non-ghost. How did you settle upon that visual strategy to tie these two halves together then?

Anthony Well, I think that was more Peter Cattaneo than me, because, you know, the visual side of it was very much the director’s view and I could say, about the producers, Jill Greene, Susan McAuley, people, you know, the wonderful production team that we had worked very hard on. In conversations, I remember it was Jill, always that, I should say, the producer of the show used to say that she thought that the 1950s should be Hitchcock and the modern one should be sort of much more realistic. That there should be something that in the camerawork, in the Dutch tilts, in the sort of games that it would play, that would be we would sort of be, visually very different. You would really know where you were. And often, you know, it is just a sudden switch, that Susan is driving her M.G. Midget along the road and is passed by Atticus Pünd going to the other way. And in the blink of an eye, you’ve gone from the 21st century back again, 50 years. And Suffolk allows you to do that because I’m actually talking to you from this area sort of 200 miles northeast of London, which is sort of timeless. It sort of, it works in both settings. You know, you out here, you can see a satellite dish, you can see an airplane, but then you can look around in a landscape that hasn’t changed in a thousand years and wonder, really which century you’re in.

Jace Now I believe it took two years for you to adapt your novel, which doesn’t surprise me, as when I read that this was happening, I was perplexed about how it could be adapted for television. And now I’ve been proven completely wrong. What difficulties did you encounter in terms of the adaptation process, and how did you and Jill and the other producers overcome them?

Anthony Well, I have to say, you’ve been proven right in pretty much everything you’ve said in this in this discussion we’re having. And I’m very grateful to you for your wonderful questions, which I which I’m enjoying answering a lot. I think I have answered this question as to a certain extent, the biggest challenge being how to fold the two worlds together and make it all work with Susan Ryeland running the show, as it were. But I think also the other big challenge for me was how to keep the audience on board. I mean, it’s all right to puzzle your audience and to intrigue them. But what I didn’t want to do was to baffle them and bore them and eventually lose them by having too much plot. So I had to make a decision to really cut back on a lot of what was in the book. A lot of the subsidiary characters had stories, the vicar’s story, the doctor’s story there was an old people’s home in there somewhere. There were lots of things that never made it into the adaptation. And in the modern story, there are actually a very limited number of suspects who might have killed Alan Conway. And you’re focusing very much on Susan anyway, and she’s carrying you through. So I think that was the sort of the most difficult thing to achieve, was to have enough mystery, but no confusion. And that’s the same in all my work. Okay, it doesn’t matter whether it’s metafiction or whatever. If I’m writing a whodunit, I do not want the audience to have to reach page 75 and ask, ‘Gosh, who is this guy? You know, Brent. Brent, what does he do? Where did I miss him? I’ve forgotten who is related to etc., etc..’ I like a story that you can relax into and feel carried by.

Jace Episode one begins with Alan Conway struggling to finish his manuscript for Magpie Murders before he snaps that rather beautiful fountain pen in half after he reaches the end. You invoked Conn Doyle earlier, and Alan Conway has given his star creation cancer, seemingly set up a final curtain for Atticus Pünd, killing him off much like Conan Doyle attempted to with Sherlock Holmes. But Conway is himself terminally ill. How did these two mirror each other then? The death of the creator and the death of the creation?

Anthony Well, I have to think about myself. I mean, you know, when I die. So does Alex Rider. When Doyle died, while Sherlock Holmes didn’t, because me and many other writers have continued to keep him going. But nonetheless, I think there is an interesting sort of symbiotic relationship between the writer and his character and the relationship between them. And I’ve mentioned really that Alan Conway really hates his creation. But to be honest with you, the sort of, the writer having a fatal disease is close to being a cliché in murder mysteries, but it was essential for Magpie Murders because I think what actually happens is, is that Conway finds he is terminally ill and that is the spark for everything that follows, it is that discovery. So it’s not just a sort of a character detail and a sort of a and a sort of a slightly sort of well used and well-worn trope. It is what motivates him, in his view, is, ‘If I’m dying, so is my character.’ I’m going to make sure he’s a little bit like Daniel Craig and James Bond, actually. And in a way, I mean, you know, nobody else is ever going to do this because the character is going to be so dead. There’s no way you’re ever going to bring him back. But for Conway, it is an act almost of revenge to kill Pünd. And therefore, the two deaths, you know, the two illnesses are clearly connected.

Jace No, and that that snapping of the pen is such a violent moment.

Anthony You might like to know that our Peter Cattaneo spent, I think, almost an entire day on that three minute sequence. He filmed hours of material. Once I had this idea that I wanted to show what it’s like to be a writer, that I told you from the very start of this that I was very interested in describing what it’s like to be a writer. It’s one of the few things in the world that I actually know. So I wanted this, I had this idea that I would do a three minute montage, pretty much without words. It would show the life of the writer from the endless chocolate biscuits to the rolling up the balls of paper and throwing it into the air, into the bin and, you know, staring into space and reading in one point actually picks out an Agatha Christie and tries to read that for inspiration. And it’s I mean, Peter made such a wonderful job. It’s a beautifully edited sequence. And the breaking of the pen, I happen to use a fountain pen for all my work, and I would never in my wildest dreams think of snapping one in half. But it just seemed right. It is exactly what Conway might have done.

Jace It is sort of the destruction of the instrument.

Anthony Whether he is self-destructive, that’s what he is. He hates writing these books.

Jace We talked about Susan seeing Pünd and episode one does end with Susan leaving London to go to Abbey Grange, Alan’s estate, to try and track down a handwritten draft of the final chapter that’s missing. She has a vision of Atticus Pünd in her car’s rear-view mirror, which sets up a sort of imagined partnership between the two. When you came to the end of scripting this first episode, how did you alight on this image as the end of the first episode?

Anthony Having made the decision that they would see each other or that she would, yeah, she would see him. I realize that what I would have to do is, is first of all, it was a big moment. So I realized straightaway that’s going to be the last moment in episode one. And again, you have to look how cleverly Peter Cattaneo actually does it, because then she looks in the mirror and he is there. She looked around and he’s still there, but when she looks back again, he’s gone. It’s something like that, anyway, and it’s sort of, ‘Is he real. Am I imagining this? What actually is going on here?’ So it’s asking a question even as it is, as it were, dealing my favorite card out of the pack of what we’re going to do. In the second episode, you see more of him, and in the third yet more. And it continues all the way to a really, I think, considerable surprise at the end of episode six where we take the relationship and really turn it on its head. I won’t describe what happens, because I don’t want to do a spoiler, but I will say that in my in my opinion, it is the most moving scene in the entire drama. And I can’t watch it without sort of, almost sort of, you know, shedding a tear. And again, that’s down to the performances and down to Peter’s work. But that was how it was conceived. That every episode we would develop the idea of, of, you know, the ghost writer almost coming to visit the editor.

Jace Anthony Horowitz, thank you so very much.

Anthony It’s been a pleasure.

Jace Alan Conway was a particularly difficult author. But even he couldn’t stop the quiet brilliance of his editor, Susan Ryeland — nor her inquisitive mind or critical eye.

CLIP

Susan Have you read Magpie Murders?

James He never let me read anything until he’d finished.

Susan Had he finished?

James Yeah. I saw a finished manuscript.

Susan It’s missing the last chapter.

James Really? The last chapter of a whodunit? I can see why that might be a problem.

Susan That’s why I’m here.

Jace The remarkable Lesley Manville joins us next on the podcast, October 23.

MASTERPIECE Studio is hosted by me, Jace Lacob, produced by Nick Andersen and edited by Robyn Bissette. Elisheba Ittoop is our sound designer. The executive producer of MASTERPIECE is Susanne Simpson.