CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Moonflower Murders on BBC1: This brainteasing mystery may be baffling, but it’s an awful lot of fun

Moonflower Murders (BBC1)

Rating:

Silly accents, vintagecars, stunning locations — Moonflower Murders is a lot of fun to watch and, by the look of it, even more fun to make.

Sipping cocktails by a pool in the Med, Lesley Manville returns as sleuth Susan Ryeland, now retired from the London publishing trade and running a hotel on Crete with her boyfriend, Andreas.

Just as the business threatens to fold, what with leaking roofs and kitchen fires, two visitors turn up and offer her £10,000 to help find their missing daughter. Nothing strenuous involved . . . just a bit of travel and a few tantalising puzzles to solve.

Amateur detective Susan thinks exactly what actress Lesley must have thought — this job offer is too good to miss.

Adapted from his own novel by the acknowledged master of traditional mystery stories, Anthony Horowitz, the plot is a riddle wrapped in an enigma sealed within a conundrum.

Susan is investigating a disappearance linked to a killing eight years earlier, which supplied the inspiration for a period thriller set in the 1950s . . . a book that she herself edited. Got that?

We timeslip between eras and backdrops: her idyllic life in the Greek islands, a wedding venue in Suffolk and an Olde Worlde village in post-war Devon. To add to the layers of complexity, many of the cast play double roles. Rosalie Craig, for instance, is a bad-tempered hotel manager in the 21st century and a spoilt Hollywood film star 60 years earlier.

Even the title is a teaser — a tongue-in-cheek reference to Midsomer Murders, the series Horowitz helped to create. In fact, Moonflower Murders is the second in a series that started with Magpie Murders and will continue with Marble Hall Murders . . . it’s clearly a case of ‘dial double-M for you-know what’.

Madeline Cain played by Pippa Bennett-Warner and Maureen Gardner played by Pooky Quesnel in Moonflower Murders

One of the characters, the marvellously brisk and efficient secretary Madeline Cain (Pippa Bennett-Warner), is never without her notebook. It’s the surest way of keeping track but, if that’s too much like hard work on a Saturday evening, you can simply let the cast entertain you.

Tim McMullan is the imaginary detective Atticus Pund, a cousin of Hercule Poirot but without the moustache, who haunts Susan’s imagination to hint at clues.

Daniel Mays plays a gruff inspector called Locke and his 1950s counterpart, a yokel policeman with a limp and a ravenous appetite for home-made Battenberg . . . whose name is Chubb.

That performance is almost understated, compared to Mark Gatiss’s turn as a prissy, demanding hotel guest called Frank Parris. He has only one scene before the Russian chambermaid discovers him with his head bashed in and a bloody hammer lying beside his corpse.

Naturally, the maid dips her hands in gore and rushes downstairs to smear crimson all over a bride’s white satin.

Gatiss soon returns as the alter ego of Mr Parris — Herr Oscar Berlin, an oleaginous film producer with a nervous twitch and a Gestapo intonation straight out of ’Allo ’Allo. I kept expecting him to announce: ‘I shall not be reporting zis incident.’