“Magpie Murders” by Anthony Horowitz

 

496 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0062645227

When I assigned Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz for my Mysteries & Munchies book club via the Fraser Public Library, I had no idea that an adaptation would begin broadcasting on PBS just a few months later. Whoops. Anyway. Anthony Horowitz is an English novelist and screenwriter who has written several novels and been behind many TV series, contributing scripts to ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Midsomer Murders, as well as being the creator and writer of the ITV series Foyle’s War, Collision and Injustice, and the BBC series New Blood. So the guy has murder running through his veins and it shows in this book.

What we have with Magpie Murders is an embedded narrative in which Susan Ryeland, the editor of the mystery author Alan Conway – known for his well-received series of novels centering upon detective Atticus Pünd (and for being very difficult to work with) – reads his latest (and possibly, last) novel, but when she completes the manuscript she finds the last chapter is missing; shortly afterwards, she also hears that Alan Conway has died – possibly a suicide. In order to discover the whereabouts of the final chapter, Susan begins an investigation of her own and finds that the novel may have been based on true events, causing someone to murder Conway.

So then what we have here is a mystery within a mystery, in which the “real” Susan Ryeland shadows the “fictitious” Atticus Pünd as they each attempt to solve a corresponding mystery and bring the wicked to justice. The book is divided into two halves, the first following Atticus and the second Susan, as each goes about their detecting ways, allowing Horowitz to play with mystery conventions in ways that are often clever…but that sometimes come off as artifice, as if he were trying too hard. But those instances are few and more often than not the wink wink attitude of the book works, especially if you are a fan of the mystery genre.

Anyway, Book One is a more or less a traditional British mystery à la Agatha Christie, well executed with excellent depth of detail and interesting characters, supposedly written by a writer named Alan Conway. As a stand-alone mystery it functions admirably in the tradition of Hercule Poirot (indeed, Atticus Pünd could be called the German answer to the Belgian detective). Pünd is an estimable protagonist whose deductive reasoning is logical and easy to follow, and when he wraps his tale up at the end one is satisfied that the facts fit and that justice was done. If Horowitz hadn’t used this tale as the centerpiece of his send-up it would have been a fine story as is.

In Book Two Susan Ryeland seeks out the missing chapters of the manuscript she is supposed to be editing and ends up attempting to solve the possible murder of the author, Alan Conway. It turns out that there are many parallels between the author (Conway) and his protagonist (Pünd), to say nothing of the world he created and the world in which he lived. All of that is well handled and interesting, but Ryeland’s search for missing material layers red herring upon red herring, almost as if Horowitz was trying to stretch his tale out. But it is entertaining nonetheless, and the game the reader plays as he recognizes standard mystery tropes adds to the reading.

Magpie Murders, then, is a clever send-up of mysteries, their writers and even their readers, but it isn’t too clever. And as mysteries go, both tales are solid, logical and satisfying, making this book a mysterious two-fer for fans of whodunnits everywhere.