Behind the Story: The Marlow Murder Club
- The Bookery
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Learn more about the books behind PBS’ “Marlow Murder Club.”
Nothing says fall like a good mystery, and one of our current favorites is PBS’ “The Marlow Murder Club.” The television series, based on a book series by Robert Thorogood (also the creator of Masterpiece’s “Death in Paradise”), features a group of women who become amateur detectives after a series of neighbors are killed in the English village of Marlow.
It’s as charming as you’d imagine for a Masterpiece mystery set in a little English village where murder victims keep popping up, and the lead sleuth is 77-year-old Judith Potts who creates crossword puzzles for the newspaper. We wanted to know more about the book series that shaped the show, including where Thorogood got the idea, what his writing process looks like and more.
Read on to go “Behind the Story” with us.
Where did Robert Thorogood get the idea for the book series?
An admitted Agatha Christie fan, Thorogood says all he tries to do is write “Agatha Christie style stories. “Death in Paradise” was his tribute to Hercule Poirot, and he found himself ready to create his Miss Marple. Raised by his mother and great aunts Jean and Jess, Thorogood also wanted to honor the women who had shaped and nurtured him. "I really wanted to write a love letter to these amazing women who are now, apart from my mother, all dead,” Thorogood said in an interview for RadioTimes.
He first tried to sell the idea as a TV series in 2015, but no one was interested. So, Thorogood set out to write the idea as a novel, which eventually became a series of novels.
Thorogood was a screenwriter long before he became a novelist. How does the process of writing for TV differ from writing a book?
“There are huge differences between writing a book and writing a TV episode,” Thorogood said in an interview for Cleopatra Loves Books. “The main one is that when you’re working in TV, it’s very much a team effort, whereas when you’re writing a book you are on your own for months at a time, which is both liberating and terrifying.” Thorogood also discussed the creative freedom novels allow the writer, since there are no restrictions or boundaries to the situations and experience you can imagine.
“When you’re coming up with a TV script, you’re very much tied to what we can afford to film, who we can manage to cast — all the ‘real world’ problems that coming with shooting a script in the real world,” Thorogood said. “Whereas the joy of a novel is that you only have to write a sentence and you can conjure anything into existence.”
What does Thorogood’s writing process look like?
In The Green Room Interviews for the International Agatha Christie Festival, Thorogood said that his writing process often begins with the end of the story or “the reveal.” After determining where he wants to take readers, he then has to work backward from that moment to create the storyline.
“Having worked out what the trick or the world is, and then you populate it with people,” he said. “You sort of have the shape of [the story], and then you populate it with people and then people watch or read it from the beginning to the end, even though you created it the other way around.”
There are currently two seasons of “The Marlow Murder Club” available to stream on PBS and elsewhere. A third season, based on Thorogood’s novel, The Queen of Poisons, is set to premiere in 2026. If you’d like to read the novels that shaped the series, check them out on Amazon.
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