Almost too clever by half, but fun

Anthony Horowitz, in addition to writing The Word Is Murder, is the author of more than two dozen books for children, as well as a prolific screenwriter and the author of multiple crime novels, including two Sherlock Holmes novels authorized by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate, plus two James Bond novels authorized by the Ian Fleming estate. 

Recently he adapted his mystery novel Magpie Murders for a TV miniseries. He was the creator and writer of the Foyle’s War mysteries and has written a number of the Misomer Murder scripts. He is an exceptionally productive and creative writer.

The narrator of The Word Is Murder is named Anthony Horowitz who is a London-based mystery writer, creator and writer of a TV series called Foyle’s War, and whose last book was The House of Silk, a Sherlock Holmes novel. The narrator shares a number of other attributes with the author: they are both happily married; they both have a literary agent named Hilda Starke; they both have their books published by HarperCollins in the U.S.  In other words, Horowitz would like readers to think that the story he tells is not fiction but something else. A memoir or true crime story perhaps.

The first chapter reads like the beginning of a conventional mystery. A wealthy woman of a certain age (although apparently healthy) visits a London funeral home in the morning to arrange for her funeral. Nothing particularly mysterious about that; it can be a prudent preparation. But that afternoon she’s murdered. Which, following her morning’s visit, is unusual.

In chapter two, the narrator who I will call Anthony is contacted by a consulting detective named Daniel Hawthorne. Anthony had met Hawthorne a year earlier when the detective helped with the technical details of a TV crime drama Anthony had written. Hawthorne wants Anthony to write a book about him, which I would not be surprised has happened to Horowitz the author more than once. 

The deal is this: Anthony will tag along with Hawthorne as he works to solve the murder of the woman who had made arrangements for her own funeral the morning of her death. The Met has no clue and called Hawthorne in as a consultant. They will split the profits fifty-fifty. 

It sounds like writing true crime and Anthony turn him down. He explains to Hawthorne he’d rather write fiction: “I’m in control of my stories. I like to know what I’m writing about. Creating the crimes and the clues and all the rest of it is half the fun. If I were to follow you around, just writing down what you said, what would that make me? I’m sorry, I’m not interested.”

Still . . . he can see an opening chapter in that woman’s visit to the funeral home and her murder. And after a woman fan asks Anthony why he’s not interested in writing about the real world he decides to team up with Hawthorne.

He writes a first chapter, the one that actually begins The Word Is Murder. Hawthorne rips it apart, starting with the first sentence:

“Just after eleven o’clock on a bright spring morning, the sort of day when the sunshine is almost white and promises a warmth that it doesn’t quite deliver, Diana Cowper crossed the Fulham Road and went into a funeral parlour.” 

Hawthorne’s investigation has established that she didn’t cross the Fulham Road. The bus she must have taken (she’s caught on CCTV) stops on the same side of the street as the undertaker. “So what would you want me to write?” Anthony asks, not unreasonable. Hawthorne has already scribbled something:

“At exactly seventeen minutes past eleven, Diana Jane Cowper exited from the number 14 bus at the Old Church Street (HJ) stop and retraced her steps twenty-five metres along the pavement. She then entered Cornwallis and Sons funeral parlour.”

Anthony says it reads like a police report. “At least it’s accurate.,” says Hawthorne.

It seems to me that Horowitz is doing a number of things in The Word Is Murder. He is playing with reader expectations. What’s real? London is real. (I’ve been there). HarperCollins is real. (They published a couple of my books.) I will accept that Hilda Starke, named in the Acknowledgments is real. (Or did until I Google searched her name and found this in The Los Angeles Review of Books: “I looked up his literary agent and am sad to report that it is not the delightfully no-nonsense Hilda Starke, who steals every scene in which she appears.”)

He is critiquing the mystery genre while simultaneously writing a mystery in the genre. Diana Cowper’s murder is followed on the day of her self-plotted funeral by the exceptionally brutal murder of her son, a movie actor on the brink of stardom. I suspect that one of the differences between writing a murder mystery and researching and writing true crime is that in fiction all the parts have to fit together. There cannot be an effect without a cause. The moment a reader says “That could never happen” within the context of the story, you’ve lost her. So Hawthorne displays remarkable powers of observation and ratiocination but he cannot read minds or time travel.

True crime is often messy, illogical, incomplete. We want the world to make sense, a sense that feels consistent dependable. True crime is filled with ambiguity, accident, coincident, and loose ends. Who wants to read a book in which you don’t know the villain’s punishment—or reward for that matter?

Finally, Horowitz has written a wonderful book about the writing life. I may not believe that there is a London consulting detective named David Hawthorne (I don’t), but I believe absolutely that everything Horowitz writes about being a writer, from Anthony’s meeting with Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg to the discussions of what to call the book. (Hawthorne Investigates loses to The Word Is Murder.)

Nevertheless, for all the cleverness and inside winks, the members of the mystery reading group to which I belong and I almost unanimously enjoyed the book. Horowitz has created an interesting character in Hawthorne and has a three-book contract to fulfill. The second in the series The Sentence Is Death was published in May 2020, and the third, A Line to Kill is due out in the fall of 2021.

Two mysteries, one book, and too clever by half

I did not care for Anthony Horowitz's best selling Magpie Murders but I feel that anyone interested in writing and publishing should read it because, aside from the stories it tells, it includes a wealth of information about publishing, mysteries, and the writing life.

The book begins with Susan Ryeland, a British editor, introducing "Magpie Murders," a new mystery by Alan Conway, the house's most popular author. The next 213 pages (separately numbered, different type) is that manuscript minus the last chapter. The rest of the book is Susan's story of tracking down the missing last chapter and trying to understand why Conway has just committed suicide. Or has he?

Horowitz has (at this writing) written over 40 books including the teen spy series Alex Rider, which he adapted into a movie. The Conan Doyle estate commissioned him to write two new Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Moriarty and The House of Silk, both bestsellers. The Ian Fleming estate commissioned him to write the James Bond novel Trigger Mortis. As a television screenwriter he created and wrote Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War.

Alan Conway's "Magpie Murders," ostensibly the ninth in the August Pünd series, is in the style of Agatha Christie set in a 1955 English village complete with a brilliant, if opaque, private investigator; his faithful, much younger, sidekick; a helpful, if dim, police inspector; two murders, and a half dozen suspects with reasons to kill. That is, everyone but the actual killer which Pünd has to finally expose.

I did not care for either "Conway's" mystery nor the mystery in which it is embedded because they are both puzzle boxes with red herrings, lucky (or unlucky) coincidences, and—for me—unconvincing murderers. Interestingly, we learn that Conway himself did not care for the character and the series that had made him wealthy, and one of the book's many pleasures is learning the connections between Conway's life and his book.

I am in awe of Anthony Horowitz's ability to write in the style of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and others of the period. Here is "Conway's" third-person, omniscient POV introduction to Pünd:

"Dr. Benson examined his patient with a certain amount of puzzlement. The name Atticus Pünd was familiar to him, of course. He was often mentioned in the newspapers—a German refugee who had managed to survive the war after spending a year in one of Hitler's concentration camps. At the time of his arrest he had been a policeman working in Berlin—or perhaps it was Vienna—and after arriving in England he had set himself up as a private detective, helping the police on  numerous occasions. He did not look like a detective. He was a small man, very neat, his hands folded in front of him. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt and a narrow black tie. His shoes were polished. If he had not known otherwise, the doctor might have mistaken him for an accountant, the sort who would work for a family firm and who would be utterly reliable. And yet there was something else . . ."

By contrast, here is Susan Ryeland's first person POV description of Alan Conway:

"I didn't like him. I'm sorry to say it but he just struck me as a bit of a cold fish. You'll have seen photographs of him on the book jackets, the slim face, the closely cropped silver hair, the round wire-framed glasses. On television or on the radio he'd always had a sort of eloquence, an easy charm. He was nothing like that then. He was puffy and a little overweight, wearing a suit with chalk marks on the sleeves. His manner was at once aggressive and eager to please. He wasted no time telling me how much he wanted to be a published author but he showed almost no enthusiasm now that the moment had come. I couldn't work him out . . ."

And here is a sample from the thankfully brief excerpt of the kind of book Conway would like the be known for:

"Lord Quentin Crump comes slumping down the staircase, lording it as he always does over the cooks and maids, the under-butlers and the footmen that exist only in his anfractuous imagination, that have in truth slipped hugger-mugger into the adumbration of family history. They were there when he was a boy and in some ways he is still a boy, or perhaps it is more true to say that the boy he was lurks obstinately in the fleshy folds that fifty years of unhealthy living have deposited on the barren winter tree that is his skeleton . . ."

I believe any aspiring mystery writer could study Magpie Murders to understand how a consummate professional describes character and place, drops clues, and propels the story forward, in this case both stories. While puzzle box mysteries are not to my taste (I agree with Edmond Wilson; who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?), I learned a great deal from the book that I plan to use in my own writing.