Cooking up crime
A Taste for Murder star Warren Brown and writer Matt Baker tell DQ about dishing up this crime show in which a grieving British detective relocates to Capri and is confronted by a series of murder mysteries that can only be solved with the help of culinary clues.
On screen and behind the camera, Warren Brown and Matt Baker both know a thing or two about crime dramas.
Brown is the star of such shows as Good Cop, The Responder and Luther, while Baker has written dramas including Professor T and Patience – both adapted from European cities. Baker also penned Hotel Portofino, a 1920s-set period drama about a British family setting up a hotel in the Italian Riviera.
Now, the two men have partnered for A Taste for Murder, an original series that blends the crime genre with a picturesque Italian setting – and multiple helpings of local cuisine.
Created by Baker, the series stars Brown as DCI Joe Mottram, a star detective with London’s Metropolitan Police. After a personal tragedy, he retreats to Capri with his daughter to stay with his Italian in-laws for the summer. Unsure how to face his own grief, let alone help heal his daughter’s broken heart, he quickly becomes immersed in a series of murder cases on the island.
The show also stars Phyllis Logan as Elena Da Vinale, the witty, fiercely loyal, loving matriarch, front-of-house manager at the family restaurant and mother to DCI Joe’s late wife, while Cristiana Dell’Anna plays Inspector Lara Sarrancino, an ambitious and no-nonsense detective with the state police in Naples.
Beau Gadsdon is Angelica, Joe’s bright and knife-sharp teenage daughter from South London. Still traumatised by her mother’s sudden death, she distances from her father and seeks escape in Capri.
The cast also includes Urbano Barberini as Gennaro Da Vinale, the family’s gregarious patriarch and legendary local chef; Alessandro Fella as Luca Da Vinale, Gennaro’s charming but ne’er-do-well nephew; Gaia Scodellaro as Daria, a local divorcée who works in the restaurant kitchen; and Alessandro Bedetti as Daniele, a young lothario who falls in with Angelica and offers to show her the island.
Commissioned by Eagle Eye Drama and produced by Eagle Eye Drama, the six-part series is described as “more than the standard crime procedural.”
“Having been involved in shows akin to that, it felt really different,” Brown tells DQ. “It felt like it was something different to explore. At the heart is a family of different cultures from different places, trying to come together and trying to grieve the loss of a wife, of a mother, of a daughter. You just learn so much more about the characters than what is on the surface of your typical crime procedural.”
“I’ve written these shows before, but it’s the first one I’ve done originally,” says Baker. “I’ve adapted crime shows like this. They’re great shows to write; I love them. The difference here is that those types of shows can often be quite intellectual. It’s often about the process of the crime, and you get emotional backstories.
“But with this, the emotion is more to the fore than it has been in some of the other shows I’ve worked on. Actually across the series, the balance between the crime and the intellectual elements of it actually changes, and it’s the family story towards the second half of the series that comes forward. Sometimes these shows lack a little bit of emotional heart, but this is the big difference with this show. It’s got this beating family drama at the heart of it, hopefully with some clever, knotty crimes all shot in incredible locations.”
In the series, Joe is a detective who’s “trying to not be at work,” Brown says. Grieving his late wife and trying to reconnect with his daughter, he finds himself in the middle of a culture clash with his Italian relatives – especially when it comes to their different attitudes towards food. They are particularly horrified to discover Joe left all the cooking to his wife, leaving him at a loss in the kitchen.
“It is interesting and brings a different kind of nuance to it,” the actor continues. “But I really enjoyed that food element. You never really know how that’s going to work when it’s all finished. But I think it fits really well.”
But as the title suggests, food is more than just a side dish in A Taste for Murder, with classic Italian cuisine being key to each episode’s central murder mystery.
Baker jokes that Brown will soon be a contestant on Celebrity MasterChef, such was the amount of cooking he had to do on camera. “It’s a format point within the show, so Joe’s learning to cook,” the writer says. “The story at the heart of it is about a father and daughter learning to try to reconnect emotionally after the loss of a loved person, and food is the medium through which they try to do this.”
The “fun dimension” to the show allowed him to play with the parallels between the ingredients of a perfect recipe and the ingredients of committing – and solving – the perfect murder.
“There’s always a moment in every show where something he’s learning about cooking plays into the crime story,” he says. “But hopefully it’s done in quite a subtle way. It’s more about the emotional insights that come from cooking and how that helps him, as a person, become more emotionally intelligent in a way that actually feeds into the work he’s doing. It was fun to play around with that.”
As might be expected in a show about food, there’s a lot of eating during scenes. “As ever on a set, sometimes you fall into, ‘Oh, it’d be interesting if my character’s eating,’” Brown says. “If you’re eating cannoli, you’re doing different takes and going over it, and you’re like, ‘These are amazing.’ But then when you’ve got to eat 15…”
“…you never want to see another cannoli in your life,” Baker says.
Including food in so many scenes certainly added another dimension to the scripts for the writer, who sought to create mysteries that could be solved in a relatively short amount of time while also being “knotty” enough to engage the audience.
The origins of the show emerged from a trip Baker and his wife, Eagle Eye Drama executive producer Jo McGrath, took to Italy, where they went for dinner at a family-run restaurant “off the beaten track” with a “very big, ebullient chef character” who would meet all his customers and treat them like his own family.
A similar dynamic sits at the heart of A Taste for Murder, and a restaurant felt like the perfect precinct for a crime show. Directed by Jon Jones and filmed on location in Italy and Croatia, the series is now set to launch on April 7 on BritBox in the US and Canada. It is distributed internationally by ITV Studios.
“With police shows, often the precinct is the police station, isn’t it? And it can become a little bit repetitious,” Baker says. “With drama, you’re always looking for ways to bring different textures to it. So to have this at the heart of the show is a gift, really, because it allows you to play between different vibes and different tones throughout the show. It’s just adding layers, and adding complexity and interest. It’s been a lot of fun to write, and hopefully the different things the actors have to play with within the story come out on the screen.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
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Whitstable Pearl: A single mum who runs a seafood restaurant on the Kent coast launches a private detective business on the side, finding that every picturesque harbour view hides a secret.
The Gourmet Detective: A cynical chef turned culinary consultant teams up with a homicide detective, using insider knowledge of kitchens, menus and foodie culture to crack restaurant-adjacent murders.
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tagged in: A Taste for Murder, Eagle Eye Drama, ITV Studios, Matt Baker, Warren Brown