Who Atticus Pünd is
Atticus Pünd is the private detective at the centre of Alan Conway’s celebrated mystery novels. His cases belong to the 1950s, but his importance extends into Susan Ryeland’s contemporary life: as she reads, he becomes an imagined partner with whom she can argue through a problem. He is a fictional investigator inside the story, rather than a policeman Susan meets in the ordinary world.
Pünd is a German refugee of Greek-Jewish heritage and a survivor of the concentration camps. His courtesy is not the innocence of someone sheltered from cruelty. It sits beside a profound awareness of what people can do to one another. That combination distinguishes him from the abrasive author who created him.
Role in the three mysteries
In Magpie Murders, Pünd investigates deaths in Saxby-on-Avon, where the wealth and influence of Pye Hall reach into village life. His assistant James Fraser accompanies him, and Inspector Chubb provides the official police connection. Pünd’s instinct is to attend to small discrepancies rather than accept the loudest accusation.
Moonflower Murders places him inside the earlier Conway novel Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. He travels with Madeline Cain to investigate the death of former film star Melissa James. The change of assistant is an important chronology clue: this is an earlier Pünd adventure, even though Susan’s investigation continues after Magpie.
In Marble Hall Murders, Eliot Crace takes over writing Pünd. Pünd’s Last Case sends the detective to Corfu, where he hopes to reconnect with his family’s roots. Lady Margaret Chalfont approaches him for help. The setting changes, and so does the author whose private experiences are being transformed into suspects and motives.
Key relationships
Susan Ryeland is his most unusual partner. She knows he exists in a manuscript, yet he helps her recognise that real people also edit their stories. Their conversations allow each investigation to comment on the other without making the two detectives inhabitants of the same literal world.
James Fraser supplies questions and companionship in Magpie; Madeline Cain brings her own alertness to Moonflower. DI Chubb needs Pünd’s insight but retains the authority to act on it. In Corfu, Achilles Vassilikos occupies the police side of that relationship. Each partnership tests how well patient reasoning can work alongside official procedure.
Played by Tim McMullan
Tim McMullan plays Atticus Pünd. The soft voice and measured pauses give the detective an authority based on attention rather than intimidation.
Their story and fate — spoilers
Magpie opens with Pünd facing an advanced brain tumour. His knowledge that time is limited gives his persistence a personal urgency. At the conclusion, he distinguishes Mary Blakiston’s accidental death from the murders committed by her son Robert: a solution depends on separating events that the village has drawn together too quickly.
In Moonflower’s embedded mystery, he exposes Dr Leonard Collins. He also admits his own responsibility for the chain of events leading to John Spencer’s death, complicating the familiar image of the detective as someone who only repairs other people’s mistakes. Pünd’s compassion matters because the solution is not simply a display of superior intelligence.
At the end of Marble Hall, Blakeney’s completed manuscript allows Pünd to solve the Corfu case. Susan then offers to publish his own unfinished study, The Landscape of Criminal Investigation. Their farewell becomes another collaboration: the detective who has helped her read other people’s stories can finally become an author in his own right.
Books and television — book spoilers
The books contain Pünd’s cases as substantial works of detective fiction within Susan’s story. Television can turn that literary arrangement into a meeting: Susan walks and talks with the detective while thinking through what she has read. These encounters are an adaptation device, not evidence that Pünd has travelled through time.
Casting also makes the books’ distorted reflections of real people visible. Pünd often faces a performer whom the audience has already seen in Susan’s investigation, but the detective must solve the fictional case on its own terms. Recognising the actor is a prompt to compare; it is not a substitute for following the evidence.
Read or listen to the book
Magpie Murders (2016)
Anthony Horowitz’s novel behind the first television mystery.
Waterstones · print Audible · audiobookMoonflower Murders (2020)
Anthony Horowitz’s novel behind the second television mystery.
Waterstones · print Audible · audiobookMarble Hall Murders (2025)
Anthony Horowitz’s novel behind the third television mystery.
Waterstones · print Audible · audiobookPaid links may earn commission, at no extra cost.