A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’: Not a Bad Nancy Drew-Redux Mystery

When we first meet Pip, the teenage heroine of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, her nose is buried in a copy of Jane Eyre while her friends try to buy booze at the local corner store using a fake ID. These are the activities that seem suitable for someone her age as she prepares for the end of high school in a small English village, followed by a hoped-for admission to Cambridge. But Pip (played by Emma Myers from Wednesday) has some age-inappropriate plans instead. For a school research project, she has decided she will solve the mystery of Andie (India Lillie Davies), an older girl who disappeared five years earlier. The police assumed Andie’s boyfriend Sal (Rahul Pattni) killed her and disposed of the body, and when Sal committed suicide, the case was closed. But Pip doesn’t believe Sal did it — in part because she helped lead Sal to Andie shortly before the disappearance, and thus needs to find an explanation where she’s not at fault for someone’s murder.

Adapted by Poppy Cogan from the YA novel by Holly Jackson, with direction by Dolly Wells and Tom Vaughan, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder fits a long tradition of TV teenage girl sleuths, from Nancy Drew to Daphne and Velma from Scooby-Doo to Veronica Mars. Once again, the idea is to contrast the seemingly sweet, wide-eyed, innocent exterior of these girls with the dark secrets they’re trying to uncover. Everyone Pip knows doesn’t understand why she’s doing this. She’s constantly at risk of alienating both good friends like Cara (Asha Banks), whose sister Naomi (Yasmin Al-Khudhairi) was friends with Andie; or Sal’s brother Ravi (Zain Iqbal), who just wants to be left alone. But she can’t stop updating the murder board in her room, both because of her own feelings of guilt and because it’s just how she’s wired.

“I think sometimes I get fixated on something,” she explains to Cara at one point, “and I can’t think of anything else — even things I care about the most.”

Good Girl’s Guide is a reasonably well made version of that old formula. The mystery is just complicated enough to fill six episodes. Cogan, Wells, and Vaughan do an effective job of capturing how cozy and provincial Pip’s hometown of Little Kilton is — a place where a murder seems as incongruous as the idea of Pip herself investigating it. And Myers makes for an appealing heroine, particularly when Pip and Ravi begin working together and arguing about which of them is Holmes and which has the “Martin Freeman energy” to be better suited as Watson.  It’s not reinventing the wheel, nor is it the best possible version of the genre. (If you’re curious, Veronica Mars Season One is over on Hulu.) But as Pip keeps getting in way over her head, it’s not hard to understand why books, TV, and film keep returning to the archetype.

All six episodes of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder are now streaming on Netflix. I’ve seen the whole thing.