Hooray! Foyled Again!

When we last saw our hero DCS Christopher Foyle, World War II had come to an end and so had Foyle’s War, the slow-but-steady mystery series that has been a Masterpiece Mystery and PBS mainstay for seven seasons.

That was 2010 and the end of Foyle’s War was to be expected. The show’s premise, a senior police officer left to enforce the law on the home front while the rest of the able-bodied men in Britain have gone to war, couldn’t be sustained if the war was over.

Or could it?

Leave it to series creator and master plotter Anthony Horowitz to find a way to Foyle us again by expanding the definition of “war” to include the Cold War, jumping the action ahead a few years to 1946, and placing Foyle in a position to gather intelligence, protect national secrets, and investigate acts of espionage in the golden age of nuclear weapons.

Once again, story lines will be adapted from and inspired by true events, and Horowitz will write two of the three planned two-hour episodes. “I have returned to Foyle’s War because there are still some amazing stories I want to tell,” he said in a press statement. “The war may be over but Foyle’s career goes on.” (Horowitz also writes the Alex Rider series of YA spy novels, and his fantastic 2011 novel The House of Silk is the only “new” Sherlock Holmes novel authorized by the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate.)

Michael Kitchen will return as Foyle, now a senior intelligence officer, and Honeysuckle Weeks is expected to rejoin the cast as Samantha Stewart, Foyle’s wartime driver now “married and relishing domesticity” according to the press brief. Filming starts in September and we should see Foyle’s War stateside in 2013.

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Leslie Gilbert Elman, author of Weird But True: 200 Astounding, Outrageous, and Totally Off the Wall Facts, believes books make excellent gifts. Follow her on Twitter @leslieelman.