[Review] Anthony Horowitz: 'Magpie Murders'

Anthony Horowitz likes to experiment, or maybe he's just bored. His 'Magpie Murders' is not one book but two books for the price of one. A book within a book.

[Buy the book here]

Crime writer Alan Conway is not a very likeable man but has been a bestselling author for a number of years. His detective Atticus Pünd is clearly a derivative of Hercule Poirot, although Conway makes him an Austrian survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. Pünd, like Poirot, solves crimes in the sleepy English countryside of the 1950s.

Problems arise when his latest mystery appears to be missing the final chapters when he delivers it to his publishers. Then Alan Conway managed to get himself killed and his editor Susan Ryeland goes in search of the missing chapters and the truth of Conway's demise.

So, did it work? Did Anthony Horowitz, like a true magician, manage to pull off his trick?

That is a question that is difficult to answer, because how should you look at such a book? Should you look at the whole or should you take it apart and look at the two books separately.

Let's do both.

As a whole 'Magpie Murders' is a rather satisfying mystery. This whodunnit is set in the über-English village of Saxby-on-Avon, where the widely disliked Mary Blakiston has been found dead at the bottom of the stairs in Pye Hall, the grand house where she worked as a housekeeper. The story is a true homage to Agatha Christie (and is obviously much, much better than Sophie Hannah’s Poirot continuations). It is fairly well clued with a number of red herrings, although I already managed to detect the identity of the killer when I was at page 68 of the second book.

The actual manuscript of the 'Magpie Murders', supposedly written by Alan Conway, wasn't a joy to read. Anthony Horowitz tried to adapt his own style to show that the manuscript was written by another writer. That didn't go too well. The sentences are short, almost staccato, and the writing is devoid of any sense of humour. I can't imagine that Alan Conway's books would ever have sold as many as is mentioned.

Still, if you regard the 'Magpie Murders' as a pastiche and read it with a glass of wine, it's not too bad. Maybe this will be the effect of the wine but who cares.

Buy 'Magpie Murders' here.