Murder most foul is afoot again as Anthony Horowitz’s quirky characters return in “Moonflower Murders” on PBS Sunday. “Moonflower Murders” and the original series, “Magpie Murders,” are based on Horowitz’s books and, yes, there’s a third on the way.

“This one is called ‘The Marble Hall Murders,’” he says. “It is a variation on the theme, and the book has been extremely well-received by my American publishers, my Canadian publishers and my British publishers, and, most importantly of all, by my wife,” says Horowitz.

Most conveniently, Horowitz’s wife of 36 years is Jill Green, who serves as executive producer on the shows and, as he says, proves a trusted editor.

“We started collaborating on ‘Foyle’s War.’ It was the first show we did together,” Green says.

“I guess it gives us a fantastic shorthand. When we’re working on these very complex shows, where things change all the time and we have to think outside the box, sometimes very quickly, to have that tremendous work ethic is fantastic. I mean, we can still argue in a room, we can still not agree because we come from different sides of the coin sometimes. But I love it.”

The complexity she’s talking about is the fact that the narrative of the plot moves between two worlds: the real world of a book publisher and her alter-mentor, a peerless detective from a 1950s novel — a gumshoe that only she can see. This is easy enough in book form, but not as simple for television.

Even though these three novels are beleaguered by crime and his books — “The Word is Murder,” “The Sentence is Death,” “A Twist of a Knife” may sound profoundly deadly — Horowitz insists his work is not dark.

"I think what I write is entertainment and very life-observing, but I guess that the darkness in them, the murders and the violence and the sense of threat comes from my own childhood — those unhappy days between 8 and 13 that have never quite gone away.”

Those unhappy days marked the period when Horowitz was sent away to boarding school by his privileged parents. “I was extremely unhappy there because if you were in English boarding school back in the 1960s you had to be one of two things: very clever or very athletic. And I was neither,” he recalls.

“I was an oversized child. I wasn’t very bright. I wasn’t doing well in class and I didn’t have many friends, and two things changed everything for me. The first was my discovery of the library. The school had a library, and that was my place of refuge and books became an escape for me — just reading adventure stories and absorbing them and living them and at the same time, I discovered the ability to tell stories. So in the dormitory at night I would tell stories to the other kids and suddenly I was popular because they enjoyed my stories. That was a transformative moment in my life. I was 10 years old, and I knew I was going to be writer and there was no Plan B.

There was definitely no Plan B. A prolific writer, Horowitz has also scribed the Alex Rider series about a teenage James Bond, and he has dallied with Sherlock Holmes and written the addicting “Foyles War,” about an uncompromising small-town detective during World War II.

Though the 69-year-old writer was too young to remember the war, he says he had a nanny as a child who regaled him with wartime tales which piqued his interest.

I'm fascinated by writers,” he says. “I think about Conan Doyle. Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the greatest detective who ever lived, and dislikes him so much and feels he's so far beneath him, that he throws him off a waterfall at the Reichenbach Falls. Ian Fleming creates James Bond and talks about him as being ‘children's’ fiction, and sort of kiss‑kiss and bang‑bang, and somewhat has a slight contempt for him. I find that fascinating in writers who create great characters and then feel that they're somehow beneath them.

“That is not true for me. Every character I've created from Alex Rider to Hawthorne to all the characters in this show, I love. I love my work. And I don't have any sort of views of myself as being too good for this. I love murder mystery writing.”

Trapped again at MGM+

Maybe you feel trapped by your job or your marriage or your unpredictable finances, but how would you like to be trapped by your town? That’s the premise of the MGM+ spooky thriller, “FROM,” returning on Sept. 22.

No Mayberry here. Nope, folks are frantic to escape this menacing village and the horrific creatures that haunt them. Harold Perrineau stars as the mayor who’s trying to cope with the unknown threat.

The 61-year-old actor tried all kinds of jobs before he captured his first break in the independent movie “Smoke.” In fact, he spent two years dancing with the Alvin Ailey troupe before he wrangled some musicals in which he could act.

“I sold Time-Life books, was a soda jerk, when they called them soda jerks. I worked in an office filing and counting bonds in a basement on Wall Street,” he says, “and was a delivery boy. I did a show at a theme park, Kings Dominion in Virginia, where you did eight shows a day — a full musical revue. Every once in awhile, I look back at pictures of me in my ‘Oklahoma’ costume dancing; it just makes me laugh.”

Stallone see positives in vulnerability

He’s a battle-scarred veteran now, but when Sylvester Stallone had the audacity to push for “Rocky,” everything proved different. The titular tough guy will be back on Sunday when Season 2 of “Tulsa King” returns to Paramount+.

The role of the demoted don is a perfect landing for the dynamic Stallone. But he wasn’t always that way. When he was jockeying to get the film “Rocky” going, he says it was all smoke-and-mirrors with him.

“What was professed to be confidence was just paper-thin bravado, trying to give myself confidence," he admits. "When I look back and see the first rehearsals of ‘Rocky,’ they're atrocious. The first boxing films were painful and awkward and nothing like I envisioned it. When I saw it in rehearsal it was pretty bad.

“So all during the first few weeks of ‘Rocky’ I knew I was going to be fired. Within my contract it said I could be replaced in 10 days. So I think it's important for actors to shore up their insecurities. But for me, when I get too confident, then it's terrible. I don't work as hard. The idea of being a little afraid I think makes you dig deeper, a lot deeper.”

Olson explores her 'Potential'

People may know Kaitlin Olson from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” or “The Mick,” or “Flipped,” but she’s earned her very own starrer with “High Potential,” arriving on ABC Sept. 17. In the drama, based on a French series, she plays a struggling single mom who has an extraordinary ability to solve crime via her enviable IQ.

Recognizing her talent, the police hook her up with (of course) a very conventional cop, played by Daniel Sunjata (“Graceland,” “Rescue Me.”)

The part lives right in her wheelhouse, she says. “I love an underdog. I love a character who is so deeply insecure that they act out. Back when I was in first grade, I just was a very insecure kid, and I knew that I — I’ve known from consciousness that I wanted to act. I don’t know why.

“Then I discovered theater, but I was so shy that I never even attempted it. I mean, in summer camps and stuff like that, but I didn’t audition for a play at school until high school. And so there was this inner weird balance between ‘I know I have this thing that I can do, but I’m way too shy and insecure to be vulnerable enough to open that up for other people to shoot me down.’

“So that’s always kind of been in there. So maybe that’s a little bit why I’m drawn to characters like that. I just also find a more layered character so much more interesting, with those complete opposites smashed into one person. I just like that.”

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