Book Review - Anthony Horowitz's Magpie Murders
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz
Published by: Harper
Publication Date: October 6th, 2016
Format: Paperback, 498 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy
Editor Susan Ryeland has a bit of a problem. Alan Conway is a very successful author for her publishing house. Without him they'd be in serious trouble. As it is they've had a very rough year and his next book needs to be a success to stabilize everything. She's never much liked Alan, but there's no doubt that the reading public adores his Atticus Pünd series. It's classic golden age detection written today, with a deeply affecting and dark backstory for it's lead. The problem is his newest book, Magpie Murders, is missing the final chapters and Alan has committed suicide. Her boss Charles even receives Alan's suicide note in the mail. Susan knows how important this book is, not just to Alan's readers, but to her continued employment. Therefore she sets out to find the missing pages. But that's when things get weird. Alan's home turns out to be the fictional Pye Hall where both deaths happened in his newest manuscript. What's more, everyone in Alan's life has a counterpart on the page. Alan's sister, his lover, his neighbor, even the vicar, everyone is somehow represented within the pages of his story. Which makes Susan wonder, what is really happening on these pages? Could they be hiding a secret? Did Alan even kill himself? Perhaps it was murder! Alan seemed to really rub everyone the wrong way. When events start to happen just like they did in the book, Susan wonders what is really going on. There are some deep and disturbing secrets held within the pages of Alan's work. He was a vindictive man who wanted not just fame but prestige. He was wasted on golden age procedurals, at least in his mind, and he amused himself in very spiteful ways. If she can solve the crimes in the manuscript perhaps it will lead to solving the mystery of Alan. That or she's out of a job. At least her boyfriend would be happy. He wants to whisk her off to a Greek isle to help his cousin run a hotel. But Susan, the woman who could never guess whodunit, wants to solve the case, even if it costs her her life.
If there's one thing that Anthony Horowitz knows it's murder. Which might actually be my issue with this book. It's not that it's not deftly plotted and keeps you on your toes, it's that with Susan, an editor who can never guess whodunit, we have a character who has to give us "teaching moments" about writers and television shows, most of which Horowitz has written for, and I just felt like it was condescending while at the same time insulting Susan's, and the readers, intelligence. But Susan is a whole other problem I don't know if I feel like getting into. If you picked up this book because of Horowitz, you know what he's written, you know that Atticus Pünd is going to be a pitch perfect Germanic cousin to Poirot because Horowitz adapted eleven episodes for David Suchet. And so he is. There is no doubt of the bona fides here. And yes, you could say that it's done tongue firmly in cheek, like with his Hawthorne and Horowitz series where he has gone so far as to make himself an actual character in his books, but it just didn't feel that way to me. Perhaps it was just that Alan Conway is so full of himself and such a pompous ass that that superiority of being seeps into the whole book and it just gives off a smugness that I just don't care for. I don't know if it's that Horowitz is actually that smug about his career, or that I'm misreading it. I just felt like this book was in may face. It was at me trying to get it's point across. What was that point? Well, it's interesting in that it seems that Horowitz thinks authors have a duty of care towards their readers and that they shouldn't betray their trust. I totally agree with him here, it just could have been presented in a different manner. In fact, the number one thing I kept thinking about, as he'd name dropped her a few times, is what does he think about J.K. Rowling's decent into TERFdom? Because she has totally betrayed her readers. And looking online I saw him tweet in defense of her and then try to reframe the narrative. So. Yeah.
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