TV Review: 'Marble Hall Murders' Offers a Convoluted Mystery Across Time

BBC2's "Marble Hall Murders," the latest offering from writer Anthony Horowitz, presents a mystery that is as much about navigating its complex structure as it is about solving the crime itself. The series employs a narrative device similar to a three-dimensional painting, where shifting perspectives reveal entirely different images, mirroring the show's intricate plot.

Viewers are tasked with untangling a story that spans three distinct post-war eras, with actors portraying two sets of characters involved in two nearly identical murders. This multi-layered approach, while potentially disorienting, is central to the show's design.

Lesley Manville stars as Susan, a book doctor whose role is to refine messy manuscripts. However, as seen in previous series like "Magpie Murders" and "Moonflower Murders," Susan's grip on reality is not always firm. Her imagination conjures a fictional detective, Atticus Pund, a German of Greek descent with a melancholic demeanor, who offers her advice on criminology. Pund, created by a murdered publisher, is himself facing a narrative death at the hands of a writer commissioned to pen a spin-off. This spin-off's plot, inspired by the writer's own childhood murder of his grandmother, further complicates the narrative layers.

The series unfolds across three settings: a 1950s Corfu, featuring Lady Margaret (Patricia Hodge) drinking poison; a mid-1970s country house, Marble Hall, where Patricia Hodge plays an acid-tongued children's novelist also meeting a fatal end; and a contemporary London setting, though with technology that sometimes seems anachronistic. Mark Bonnar appears in all three timelines, portraying a Texan millionaire in the 1950s, an unhappy husband in the 1970s, and a meek divorcee in the present day, serving as a potential anchor for viewers trying to keep track of the shifting identities and eras.