So simplicity was the key in a very, very complicated setup. When you're watching television, you don't have the facility to go back and flip through the pages and work out who somebody is. I think the most difficult thing of all for me was to make this show enjoyable and puzzling for an audience, with three murders to solve-and yet not to make it confusing, so everybody would know where they were at exactly the moment something is being shared. Lesley Manville as Susan Ryeland and Tim McMullan as Atticus Pünd in Magpie Murders. The result is that you have this peculiar, enjoyable mix up of modern crime and golden age crime with two wonderful characters: Atticus Pünd played by Tim McMullan and, Susan Ryeland, an editor played by Lesley Manville, who begin an inter-dimensional affair. And that meant you could slide from one to the other in a way that would be completely unique and never been done before, as far as I can tell, on television. So having said that Susan Ryeland would appear from episode one of the show, I realized what I had to do was to mash the two periods together-the past and the present, the fictitious and the real. Because if we had adapted the TV series the way the book is written, Lesley Manville would not have turned up until episode three or even four, and you cannot have a star of that stature and that value appearing halfway through your show.
And when we cast Lesley Manville on the show, that cemented it. Her first note was the show had to rest on the shoulders of Susan Ryland Susan Ryland would be our guide through the maze.
I didn't know be able to adapt it, but my wife, Jill Green, who is a producer on the show, gave me some absolutely brilliant notes on how to do it. And as you correctly say, the book is in two halves-the first half takes place in 1955, the second half in the modern world. It has many, many subplots, many characters. It has a fictional world of Atticus Pünd versus the real world of Susan Rowland.
It was an extremely difficult adaptation. Lesley Manville as Susan Ryeland in Magpie Murders.
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