Interview: Anthony Horowitz on Moonflower Murders, Mysteries & More
How does one of the most devilishly clever authors of British mystery and suspense keep readers and TV viewers coming back for more? According to Anthony Horowitz, writer and producer of countless mysteries on the page and on screen, including Moonflower Murders on MASTERPIECE, it’s by exploring new ways to surprise himself. Get insights from the award-winning author on mystery influences, tropes, and coincidences, plus behind-the-scenes details on making Moonflower Murders…with some cunning Easter eggs revealed!
Moonflower Murders, and Magpie Murders before it, is very funny, and also serious, frightening, and vulnerable. How did you go about crafting a work with such an utterly unique tone?
Humor is very important to me, and a little bit of commentary on the world we live in, and puzzles, and fun, and all the rest of it—these are labors of love. But the answer to your question is that for me, a murder mystery is not enough. A whodunit is not enough. To spend 46 minutes watching a story simply to discover that the butler or the doctor or the man next door, or whoever, did it…To me the experience needs to be something more than that.
What I was trying to do in Moonflower Murders was to play with the murder mystery genre, which I love, and to give an audience extra pleasures along the way. For example, the whole setup of the book-within-the-book allows me to have this meta-fictional inter-dimensional travel between two completely separate worlds, with people crossing from one to the other. And I think that is something completely new, that hasn’t been seen on television before. But then, I have been writing for a very, very long time, and right now, the thing that is uppermost in my mind is to keep finding new things to do, new pleasures, new adventures to surprise myself. Because if I don’t surprise myself, how can I surprise an audience?
When we first find Susan in Episode 1, her life in Crete is not playing to her strengths or her passions, which becomes a part of her Moonflower Murders journey…
That was a big joy of it. For Susan, who at the end of Magpie Murders her business has burned down, she’s got nowhere to go, she’s got no job, that she takes up this idea of running a hotel, has a Shirley Valentine experience in Crete. And of course she’s not just a fish out of water; she is lost in this world. I think that Rebecca Gatward, our director, did a very good job of making the hotel real. I think you believe in all of the catastrophes that are happening, and poor Susan in the middle of it, just realizing she’s made a terrible mistake.
Shooting the hotel, I was always nervous that we’d turn into too much of a comedy. There’s a wonderful actor, Kostis Daskalakis—he just plays a waiter, but he is a comic genius. Every time he walked through shot, I found myself smiling. He is like [the character] Manuel out of Fawlty Towers. We pulled back in the editing because the humor is important, but I don’t want it taking over—this is a serious story about a woman who has gone missing, who may have been murdered, and I didn’t want comedy and easy laughs to overcome that.
What was your experience filming in Crete?
There is a sort of a sort of a secret meta level in these dramas and in the books that they’re based on, which is that I fold my own life in secretly, because these are stories about a writer, Alan Conway, but Alan Conway—the author of Magpie Murders and of Moonflower Murders—was actually created by me. So I’m sort of the outside Russian doll in all this. And therefore, for example, Susan Ryland lives, as it happens, in Crouch End, in North London in the first season. That’s where I used to live, and that’s why I took her to Crete—because I know that island very well. I love the island really very much. I’ve spent a lot of time there, and I can speak a little bit of Greek, too, so I decided I would send her there to this hotel, which was filmed in a town called Agios Nikolos, which is on the northeastern side of Crete, not far from Heraklion.
I think that Crete very quickly established itself as the hero of this film, the invisible hero, or the very visible hero but, as it were, the uncredited hero, because the first episode and all the flashbacks to Crete, and the role of Crete in the story, is very significant. It adds a whole new dimension that we didn’t have in Magpie Murders. It’s a whole new sort of feel—it adds sunshine, and it adds the Aegean Sea, which is so beautiful, and the hotel itself that we found, and which is a real hotel. I never even knew it was there—it’s hidden just off the main road in its own little cove, and it is the most extraordinary place. I do hope that our show will help it, because actually it needs a little help. It is a little bit tired, perhaps not quite as beautiful as our wonderful cinematographer makes it. But it was a joy to be there, and the eagle-eyed viewers might just notice the author of this series—that is to say, me—I won’t say walking, or even tiptoeing, through a scene, because I do neither…but I am there.
What makes a hotel the perfect location for a mystery?
When I’m writing these things—Magpie and Moonflower, and there’s a third one, which I’m writing as a novel at the moment—the first thing is, “What is the milieu? Where is this murder going to happen?” It could be a big country house, it could be a village, it can be all sorts of things, but a hotel, I think, is very good because it’s where strangers come together from different walks of life. When you meet somebody in a hotel and you say, “Hello, what you do?” and they say, ” I’m a dentist,” they may be telling the truth or they may be lying, or they may be a mass murderer. You don’t know, and yet you are sleeping next door to them. I like that confluence of these different people coming together and the sense of nobody really knowing each other, but still having breakfast together and passing in the corridors and sleeping in separate rooms, just this little microcosm of life.
Stephen King in The Shining has always been a huge inspiration for me, where he realized that hotels are just repositories. They contain so many dark and awful stories. Couples who’ve come there, who’ve argued or who’ve divorced or who’ve murdered each other, all the horrors of The Shining. Now, we don’t go that far, but there are one or two moments in it when Susan is tiptoeing down those very dark corridors and I do get a little sense of which door is going to open. In fact, in the very first draft of the series, I had her actually going into Room 12, where the murder took place, and she was going to open the door and look in and there would be blood everywhere—it would be absolute carnage and nightmare horror sequence. And then you’d snap and it’s just her imagination; it’s not real. But in the end, I didn’t do that because it was a little bit too much like a hoax, and this is a show for the family, as well. We’re not interested in that extremes of violence or unpleasantness. That was just one idea I toyed with, but it went.
Part of the fun for viewers is that you are playing lots of games with us, many of which we just don’t even know are working beneath the surface. Can you share any Easter eggs that we might see in Moonflower Murders?
Oh, there are so many, I can’t really remember all of them. There are names and there are references. Here’s a little Easter egg from Episode 2: Pünd takes the Melissa James case in the first place because a client called Mrs. Allingham has canceled on him. And Margery Allingham, of course, was one of the great crime writers. So one of the golden age crime writers is just mentioned by name in that. And the magpie is another one—in one shot, there’s one magpie that’s drifted in from Season 1 and it’s just watching to see what’s going to happen next. But in fact, every single episode has its little secrets hidden there. Often, they’re just done for my own entertainment. But again, I think if you do spot them, this is a mystery, and there are lots of tiny mysteries along the way.
Do you have any favorite mystery tropes or conventions that you most enjoy playing with and manipulating?
As people who have seen Magpie Murders and now Moonflower Murders will know, I have a fondness for anagrams and acrostics and gameplay with words, which is unusual to find in a murder mystery book, certainly as part of the plot. But I quite like the fact that the book actually deconstructs itself while you are reading and that some things appear to be one thing but actually turn out to be something else. I’m very fond of illusion. In my real life I love magic and illusion shows—I don’t perform magic, but I love to watch it and see it done. And I love the sleight of hand. And I actually wrote a whole novel based on a card trick, believe it or not, some years ago. It’s called Moriarty.
But I’m always trying to actually avoid tropes. If it’s been done so often that everybody recognizes it, that doesn’t recommend it to me. In the last novel I wrote, Close to Death, which is from my Hawthorne series, there is what is called a “locked room murder” in it. In this case, it’s somebody in a car with the doors locked, the key to the car in their pocket, inside a garage with no windows, with the roller door and the only other door both bolted shut from the inside. And that’s a perfect locked room mystery. How on earth did the killer get the body into the car, and for that matter kill them? But before you get to that, you have to have two pages of the character—who is me, because I’m in the books—complaining that I don’t like locked room mysteries and why I don’t like locked room mysteries: because they are a trope.
That said, I do know how indebted I am to the masters, to Agatha Christie, to Conan Doyle, to Dorothy L. Sayers, to many, many others of the golden age crime fiction. I’m not saying that I’m doing things that are entirely new and different. I am borrowing, like a magpie, from everybody. But I try if I can, to avoid the obvious.
Your Moonflower Murders and Magpie Murders detective Atticus Pünd is writing his master work, The Landscape of Criminal Investigation. Do you know what he covers in that book?
Well, I do indeed. I know very well what’s in that book…He covers things like interrogation techniques, and obviously he has a fascination with coincidences. Pünd is always saying that there’s no such thing as a coincidence. Indeed, I think in Moonflower Murders he says, “A coincidence is only the truth making itself apparent.” There are no coincidences. Everything has a pattern and when the pattern appears, that can sometimes seem like a coincidence. I think The Landscape of Criminal Investigation would be a formidable work, and I think it’s only sad that we won’t ever read more than about two or three pages of it, because I don’t think I have the time or the energy to actually write the whole thing myself. Or, for that matter, the expertise. I’ll have to ask Pünd.
