Before the streaming warriors mined the world for content, British television made its way into the American living room almost exclusively by way of PBS and its affiliates. "Masterpiece Theater" was the network's home for literary adaptations and classy historical dramas, and "Mystery!" the place for the … mysteries.
Those venues now share prime time as "Masterpiece" and "Masterpiece Mystery!" whose latest presentation, which premiered Sunday, is "Magpie Murders," adapted by Anthony Horowitz ("Foyle's War," "Midsomer Murders"), from his own 2016 novel. It's a tightly plotted, handsomely presented, smartly acted, entirely enjoyable and structurally unusual piece — a mystery centered around a mystery novel, two stories enacted in parallel in alternating and rhyming scenes, that between them, over the course of six episodes, give you practically everything you come to British mysteries for.
An English village (times two). A baronial mansion (times two). A victim many people would be happy to see dead (times two). In the framing narrative, an amateur sleuth, drawn by circumstance into the mystery; in the story within the story, a professional detective, a foreign gentleman not exactly in the mold of Hercule Poirot but something of that type (without the tics). The local constabulary (antagonistic in the "real world," comical and cooperative in the "fictional"). A pleasant young sidekick. A new will. A puzzle unrecognized as a puzzle. A cold case heating up. And the old question: Did he/she fall or was he/she pushed?
