This fiendishly convoluted mystery is as much whenwozzit as whodunnit! CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews BBC2's Marble Hall Murders

Published: 18:02 EDT, 27 September 2026 | Updated: 18:09 EDT, 27 September 2026 Marble Hall Murders (BBC2)Rating:Beside the grand staircase on a cruise liner, in Steph McGovern’s BBC2 art show The Big Deal, a floor-to-ceiling painting created a bizarre optical illusion.The three-dimensional picture was constructed from triangular wedges, laid vertically, like a picket fence made from Toblerones. Viewed from the front, it presented a panoramic image... but move to the left and an entirely different likeness appeared.Step right, and everything changed again. It was ingenious, and fascinating, but liable to induce seasickness even before the ship left dock.Anthony Horowitz’s fiendishly convoluted mystery Marble Hall Murders does something similar. The actors play two sets of characters, across three different post-war eras, committing a pair of almost identical murders – to dizzying effect.Never mind trying to work out whodunnit. I spent the first hour asking whenwozzit and who’zatden?The one constant is Lesley Manville as brisk, unsentimental book doctor Susan, whose job is to take messy manuscripts and rewrite them so that the plots make sense. This fiendishly convoluted mystery is as much whenwozzit as whodunnit! Christopher Stevens reviews BBC2's Marble Hall Murders (Tim McMullan and Lesley Manville pictured) But as we’ve seen in the previous two series, Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, Susan isn’t quite as sane as she seems. A fictional detective, Atticus Pund (a name about as evocative of Hercule Poirot as you could get without incurring legal action), keeps popping into her imagination to offer opinions, advice and general criminology wisdom.Pund (Tim McMullan) is a German of Greek descent, with a Homburg hat and a face so sorrowful that even a bloodhound would want to tell him, ‘Cheer up, it might never happen.’Pund’s creator was murdered by his publisher, a twist so Freudian that I can only assume Horowitz felt writing a novel would be cheaper than therapy.Now, the detective is about to be killed off too, by a writer hired to produce a spin-off. But, as a child, the novelist apparently murdered his grandmother, with the aid of his brother and sister – and it’s this killing that inspires the plot of his book. Got that?The result is: firstly, a fictional mystery set on Corfu in the late 1950s, with Patricia Hodge drinking poison, as the autocratic Lady Margaret.Secondly, at a country house called Marble Hall in the mid-1970s, Patricia Hodge is again knocking back the hemlock but this time as an acid-tongued children’s novelist.Thirdly, in London, at a date hard to ascertain, it’s supposedly 20 years later but much of the tech belongs in the present day. Still with me?Mark Bonnar appears in all three eras – playing a loud-mouthed American millionaire in the 1950s, an unhappy husband in the middle period and a meek divorcee in the present.He’s your best bet for keeping track of it all. Bonnar sounds like a Texan oilman? We’re back before Beatlemania. Bonnar with improbably jet-black hair and a manicured beard? That’s the 1970s. Bonnar looks like himself?That’s today’s timeline. Simple really.