The Marlow Murder Club creator first pitched it as TV series before book
The two-part murder mystery series is based on the best-selling book of the same name by Death in Paradise creator Robert Thorogood.
New murder mystery series The Marlow Murder Club comes from Death in Paradise creator Robert Thorogood, who has adapted it from his own best-selling novel from 2021.
The two-part drama follows Judith, Becks and Suzie, three women living in Marlow who, along with police detective Tanika Malik, investigate a series of murders in their home town.
Speaking with RadioTimes.com and other press on the set of the series in 2023, Thorogood explained that television was actually the initial home for this series, and that he only wrote the book in order to get it made as a TV programme.
He explained: "After I came up with Death in Paradise, which was always sort of a Hercule Poirot, Richard Pool, I love Agatha Christie, I wanted to do what would be my Miss Marple. Because all I do is try and write Agatha Christie style stories.
"And I was raised mostly by my mum, and my great aunt Jean, and my great aunt Jess, and my grandmother, Betty, all of whom were these really strong, eccentric, intelligent women who smoked and drank. They were just these really inspirational women who were married to these quite boring men, who all felt they had the power.
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"I really wanted to write a love letter to these amazing women who are now, apart from my mother, all dead. And so I tried to sell it as a TV show back in 2015. I thought, ‘I’ve got Death in Paradise, this will be the next thing I'll do, called The Murder Club’. And no one was interested."
He continued: "So I thought, 'I’m gonna have to do this the hard way. To get this onto television, I'm gonna have to go and write a novel', because I had a book deal so I had the chance to write it as a book.
"And there was also a part of me that thought, 'I wonder who these people are, will it work? Maybe I can discover in book form'.
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"This is before Richard Osman so it's sort of ironic saying this now, because Richard Osman has subsequently happened, and redefined the genre.
But you've got Judith, who's based on my grandmother but is named after my mother's good friend, Judith. And then you've got Becks. You've got Beck's who's a housewife. I was thinking ‘what the most housewifey housewife you can get, well, it’s the Vicar's wife'.
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"And then also the few single parents that I know, all of whom are women, I so admire, and they also don’t get to be heroes. So I thought 'I’ll have these three women, each of them not normally allowed to be the hero of a murder mystery, I'll put them in a book and if the book does well, I'll try and sell it as a telly'.
"And the book was a best-seller and I was able to sell the rights to Monumental, who are an amazing company, all of them women, because I thought ;I need to be the only man in the room at any given time, because I'm already overstepping the mark'. And now we're turning [it] into a TV show in my hometown where I live."
The Marlow Murder Club airs on Wednesday 6th and Thursday 7th March at 8pm on Drama. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on.
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