Dublin Murders review: Sometimes teeters on the edge of cliche, but still succeeds in keeping you guessing

Sarah Phelps’s adaptation of crime writer Tana French’s novels finds two detectives trying to solve the murder of a young girl, with plenty of twists and turns

So familiar are we now with television psychological crime dramas, that we adopt a special sort of viewing technique for them. Thus it is with Dublin Murders (BBC1), adapted by Sarah Phelps from Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels, where you find yourself both second-guessing the people on screen (apart from the cadavers, obvs), but also the brilliant-but-warped psyche of the writers.

The setup, I have to say, sometimes teeters on the edge of cliche but it still succeeds in keeping you guessing. As usual, there is the murder of a 13-year-old girl in a creepy woods. There are the “period” flashbacks to a previous case of child abduction in the 1980s, in the same woods. There is the very odd family the dead girl springs from – again, par for the course. There is the sentimentalism of her ambition; to be a premier ballerina who is about to take up a place at a prestigious dance school in London.

The two detectives have a sort of friendly, sort of edgy working relationship. It’s apparent that there is a good deal of history behind their involvement with this case. Killian Scott and Sarah Greene are the coppers concerned, playing Detective Sergeant Rob Reilly and Detective Garda Cassie Maddox, and both have their hang-ups about their latest assignment. There is the obligatory breezy pathologist, a constant in these sorts of productions, complete with a rookie detective, who vomits in the presence of an autopsy, like in Quincy M.E. 40 years ago. The morgue and flashback scenes have a hefty dose of grumbly melodramatic music underlaid; the dimly lit archives with their trove of heart-tugging props include blood-stained clothes; a hard-bitten overweight, sweary, sexist middle-aged senior detective who looks like his principal source of sustenance is provided by the heirs of Arthur Guinness; a trampy bloke who looks like he might be either a paedo or a victim, or both; and a fair few Dublin gangsters.

The flashbacks are filmed in the routine fuzzy style with the right mix of cars of the time (Ford Cortina, Datsun Violet – impressive); the woods have crows and rooks croaking round the place, and of course, DS Reilly suffers weird nightmares. It’s funny how these woods never have those jolly bright green parakeets we get nowadays, the basement archives never have bright neon lighting, and coppers are never allowed to have happy marriages. Just saying.

So there we have it, and the producers have made the very best of the dismal, grey, permanently overcast film set that is Dublin and its environs; a sort of architectural corpse itself, despite its stock of handsome Georgian architecture. It’s Celtic-noir – basically Scandi-noir, but without the subtitles.

But then there are the other mysteries, meta-mysteries, the questions that gnaw away at you, not about the troubled Gardaí or deranged killer(s), but around the screenwriters. What are they up to, I always wonder?

Thus, in Dublin Murders, it seems obvious that there is some kind of a link between the 1980s abductions and the fresh murders in the woods. But what is the connection between the detectives and the previously unsolved abductions, which is equally strongly suggested? It would be too obvious, wouldn’t it, to make one of the investigators actually one of the kids (the one who escaped in fact) and when we learn their names, they don’t match the police anyway. Could they be related (maybe)? Could they have worked on the historic case (no, too young)? Then we discover, in a “Why didn’t I think of that?” sort of way, that Detective Ron Reilly was indeed one of the kids in the woods in 1985, but in a skilful twist we find out that he has, in fact, changed his name. I didn’t see that surprise coming. Then there’s Rob’s English accent, the only one we hear. My guess is that some childhood trauma has had him sent over to England for adoption or something – and I get that one right, as he was indeed packed off to boarding school in Sussex after the attack in the woods.

If this all sounds a bit formulaic, then, frankly, you’d be right. Yet it is none the worse for that, and it is far better put together than most of the type – because both the murderer(s) and the writers have an unusually inventive way of toying with the audience’s expectations by blindsiding you. Scott, Greene and the whole cast just manage to avoid parody and keep it real. Even the nosey old lady on the mobility scooter is, just about, believable. Dublin Murders reminds me a good deal of Channel 4’s The Virtues, earlier this year, which was excellent and similarly structured, but a much more visceral affair, one that took a lot more, emotionally, out of the audience. At times, The Virtues, with its themes of child abuse, was virtually impossible to watch; on what we have seen so far, Dublin Murders won’t leave you traumatised, whatever it might have done to DS Reilly.