Everything is better in Dublin isn’t it? Nicer accents. Everyone is friendly. Excellent calibre of novelists. Only thing probably not better is the murders.
Murders are bad everywhere. Dublin Murders, though, the new BBC crime drama by Sarah Phelps? Very good. In fact, better than many crime dramas.
The first episode begins with something of a prologue; Detective Rob Reilly (Killian Scott) asks his colleague Detective Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene): “What if the killed are the lucky ones?” A bit deep for a Monday but also a hint of the complicated, personal layers that lie beneath the surface of the mysteries at hand.
Flash to four months earlier, Dublin in 2006, and Rob and Cassie — possibly the most attractive detective duo since Coleen and her Instagram settings — are dispatched to a crime scene where the body of a 13-year-old girl has been found in the woods.
It’s the same woods, near the deprived Knocknaree estate, where three children went missing 21 years earlier and only one returned alive. Could there be a connection? Neither Cassie nor Rob want to be on the case, for reasons that are hinted at but not yet fully clear, but both find themselves pulled towards it anyway.
As the action sways dreamily between ominous shots of never-ending trees and carefree children running through the forest, there’s an eerie, gothic atmosphere.
This is a place where people expect bad things to happen. They look at each other with deep foreboding. They remind themselves to talk about dead people in the past tense. An elderly lady on an electric scooter rocks up to the house of the bereaved family with flowers in her front basket. “I had them ready,” she smiles.
The show is based on a series of novels by Tana French and if the first episode is anything to go by, this is also a series that intends to grapple with themes that feel inherently Irish: forgiveness, memory, the battle between the old and the new.
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There’s good chemistry between Scott and Greene, who both look sufficiently knackered and haunted. I honestly don’t know why people think it’s predestined that detective duos will end up banging because actually all they do — even at 3am drinking whiskey — is talk about work. Which, in this case, involves dead 13-year-old girls.
It’s not all doom and gloom. Conleth Hill is getting payback from his “meh” death in Game Of Thrones as Superintendent O’Kelly, as a sexist who gets all the best lines. “You gonna ride into town and make a giant tit sandwich out of everything?” “Are you trying to give me an aneurysm?” He could be a new crime-drama icon.
It didn’t make me want to go to Dublin but it did make me want to watch the next episode straight away. It also made me hopeful that Phelps — the writer whose stylish adaptations have made Agatha Christie cool — is now being considered a great TV brain to compare with the likes of Sally Wainwright and Jed Mercurio.
Dublin Murders airs on BBC One at 9pm tonight
