Reel Life: When dead bodies add some zing to banal TV content

This weekend I keyed in “murder” in the search tab of all the streaming platforms that I subscribe to. I have been doing this quite often. Mostly when the Indian content of the week deadens my senses with its dullness. It’s then that I need a corpse to bring me alive.

Ordinarily dead bodies haven’t disappointed me. Neither did Alan Conway’s in Magpie Murders currently streaming on SonyLIV. An adaptation by Anthony Horowitz of his own 2016 novel, Magpie Murders stands out in how it turns homicides into these parallel crime narratives happening across two different periods. Add to it the setting of crime books publishing and I couldn’t be happy with tasting just one episode. I had to gobble all the six at a go, over one night. Which, in other words, is referred to as bingeing.

Susan Ryeland, the editor of the vile and despicable yet immensely successful mystery author Alan Conway, receives the manuscript of the latest novel, only to find the last chapter missing. “Nothing can be more useless than a whodunit without an ending”, especially so at a time when her publishing house is looking for a buyout for survival and the new Conway novel is the key to striking the deal.

It’s set in 1955. Conway’s ace detective Atticus Pund is having to face the biggest mystery of his life—that of his own imminent mortality. A tumour is making the end seem nearer than he’d have imagined, even as he goes about investigating the deaths of Sir Magnus Pye and his house help Mary Blakistone in the village of Saxby on Avon. Meanwhile, Conway himself has been told that his cancer is at Stage Four. So, will he kill his dear detective in his final work so as to take his favourite creation along with him all the way to the other world?

Far from being able to plan a good send off for himself and his character, Conway is found dead suspected to be due to a fall from atop the tower in his home Abbey Grange in Suffolk. Was it a suicide, an accident or did someone deliberately push him down to his death?

Magpie Murders moves nimbly and effortlessly between its two worlds. The past and the present cross and coincide, characters, and the actors playing those roles, glide in and out of the twin realities; the events in one could be reflections of and inspired from those in the other. The narrative is so ingenuously handled that you often forget to dwell on the bits that feel like gaping plot-holes. One minute you pause to question, next you get drawn to the new turn in the plot and move ahead with the flow of the story.

There are references to Agatha Christie and the English countryside—there’s no place as dangerous, how its beauty can’t make one deny the evil that it allows to spread and blossom within. You can hear snatches of the Psycho tune. And Conway is a bit like Arthur Conan Doyle, an author who wanted to be taken seriously and isn’t quite happy for the immense success and wealth his “entertaining” novels have got him. And then the larger question: “Why should a book matter? Why can’t it be just enjoyed?”

Which is something that I would apply to Magpie Murders and other such crime series. Why do they need to cut deep? Why can’t they be good enough for the fun they offer. They might be dismissed by some as very lightweight. I for one am a succour for the tried and the traditional and indeed thankful that these aren’t one those “edgy”, “cutting edge” shows that take the joy away from the well-done carcasses and turn them into sites for existential ruminations.

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Give me my untainted classics: Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes who make you exercise your grey cells as viewers even while offering you an odd sense of comfort and calming your frayed nerves. There is a wholesomeness to these crime series, an odd sense of reassurance that keeps making you return to their folds. They give you a sense of belonging specially at times like these when everything appears to be falling apart and the centre hasn’t been able to hold.

I haven’t been able to find enough of them across the many OTT platforms. In the lack I have often turned back to Marple, Poirot, Murder on the Orient Express, Crooked House and Knives Out.

What I find in abundance is real crime or the shows that border on horror. Ones that either disgust you or scare you rather than take you along on a journey into detection with investigators who are as ordinary as you. An editor like Susan Ryeland (excellent Leslie Manville) in Magpie Murders or the three neighbours in my other favourite from the recent past, Only Murders In The Building on Disney+Hotstar.

An almost retired actor, Steve Martin and a Broadway director Martin Short team up with their young neighbour Selena Gomez to investigate a suspicious death in their apartment building and decide to turn it into a true crime podcast. The actors are wonderfully in tune with each other, crime comes laced with dollops of humour and the telling breezy enough for you to romp through all the episodes in one go. This even though the series also does some fabulous stylistic experimentation. Like having an entire episode seven without dialogue since it is told from the perspective of a character who is unable to hear.

I have recently embarked on The Afterparty on AppleTV+. Even though its world is that of the millennials the series’ central narrative device owes a lot to Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic Rashomon. Friends and batchmates from a high school reunion gather together for an afterparty. All hell breaks lose when one of them is killed. As detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) goes about investigating, each episode reconstructs the murder from one character’s perspective. The various versions could be wildly at variance with each other. With six episodes having been dropped, there are two more to go to arrive at the truth.

I am being recommended Nordic crime series—Taking Lives, The Chestnut Man. There’s an Irish one Sophie A Murder in West Cork which is also on my watch list, while Inspector Koo is proving to be a wildly entertaining ride about serial murders being passed off as accidents. All available on Netflix.

An odd discovery on Netflix has been the Polish film In For A Murder. Set in the quiet town of Podkowa Lesna it is centred on the bored housewife and crime fiction fan Magda, who had to let go of her career to take care of the family. One day she accidentally discovers the body of a young girl who is wearing a necklace identical to her long-lost friend Weronika.

Things get murky with business and politics of the region having their own stake in the killing game. But the gentle pace, mild twists and turns made the viewing experience feel like the one I often had as a child, while watching the German crime show, Der Alte (The Old Fox) on Doordarshan. Moving with the mild twists and turns, keeping the thinking caps on and guessing along. It held time still even as it made you spend time most engagingly. The lead up to the resolution and closures were satisfying than shocking or edge of the seat. Crime is best served this kind of riveting.