Interlaced themes

Reading a book or the original text is usually more enjoyable than a re-imagined piece. Holding Magpie Murders [the book] and travelling between 1955 and the present made me traverse the many layers of the plot and its characters. However, with the series, the multi-sensory nature of the medium distinctly attracted me. The book bore a multiplicity of themes and that might have allowed creators to tinker with the on-screen possibilities. When Susan Ryeland [played by Lesley Ann Manville] is readying her car to leave for Suffolk, she catches a glance of Atticus Pünd [played by Tim McMullan] in her rear-view mirror. The suddenness introduces scare, but then, this association between a real person and a literary character lives on through guidance and confrontation. In the story from the 1950s, Pünd leaves for Saxon-on-Avon with his young apprentice. A red convertible passes them by on the way; this is Ryeland’s car — such visual elements brought the structure of a whodunit within a whodunit to life.