Anyone reading this who’s sold on Foyle’s War and/or Midsomer Murders or, for that matter, the Sherlock Holmes follow-up Moriarty, already knows how blasted ingenious their creator Anthony Horowitz is.
But no one fitting that description, as they say in procedurals, may be prepared for how the sly Horowitz outdoes himself in the ingenuity realm with Magpie Murders (HarperCollins, pp. 464, $27.99). Who would be, given that, near as I can reckon, there’s never been a mystery like this one? Or should I say, there’s never been a mystery like these two.
That’s right, whodunit fans, Horowitz tells a pair of mysteries in this volume. I know, I know. Something sounding like that comes across as ancient news. Scores of mysteries (hundreds? thousands?) include multiple mysterious murders? But that’s not how Magpie Murders goes.
Magpie Murders is a mystery bookending a separate but related mystery, and rest assured, it is (they are?) a honey. Here’s the set-up. Alan Conway has written eight novels featuring a detective he calls Atticus Pund. Each entry in the series has been edited by Susan Ryeland, working under Cloverleaf pubbery’s founder, Charles Clover. She’s introduced as, cozy at home, she’s cozily about to scan the latest Conway, which isn’t by any means one of the genre’s sub-genre cozies.
So that’s the get-go for the first of Horowitz’s mysteries. When warm and comfortable Susan thumbs through what Conway has called Magpie Murders, she can only thumb as far as the next to last chapter. Of all exasperating things, it’s missing. Its absence worries Susan so much that she decides to find out why Conway—a man for whom she has little regard as a person—has withheld it.
As this introductory mystery unfolds, Susan learns exactly why—but learns it after Conway has died, an apparent suicide, who in perhaps taking his life also lays to rest Cloverleaf’s biggest revenue retriever. But dear mystery reader, it’s common knowledge that apparent suicides in mysteries never are.
Which leads Susan to close this section of her mystery-memoir with one of the most gripping hooks a devoted aficionado will have encountered. In part, she writes, “But Magpie Murders really did change everything for me. I no longer live in Crouch End. I no longer have my job. I’ve managed to lose a great many friends…I hope I don’t have to spell it out any more. Unlike me, you have been warned.”
With that silently clanging alarm, she stops in order for Alan Conway’s Magpie Murders to begin. Instantly, a small village called Saxby-on-Avon and its graveyard at St. Botolph’s pops grimly up from the page and, don’t you know?, a mystery that summons the ghost of Agatha Christie rolls into place.
Housekeeper Mary Elizabeth Blakiston of sad Pye Hall has been bludgeoned to death, and her son Robert is the local constabulary’s prime suspect. His girlfriend Joy Sanderllng believes him innocent, however, and travels to London and Pund to enlist his aid—with eager assistant James Fraser—in clearing the young man.
Reluctant at first to help Joy—to some extent because he’s just been given a grim Harley Street cancer diagnosis—Pund relents and goes on a hunt for the real killer. Needless to say, he gets to confront as suspicious a handful of possible perpetrators as the divine Christie might have conjured.
They range from the vicar on down—or up, depending on a reader’s feeling about vicars who so often are mystery staples. And this vicar or anyone of the sorta usual sleepy village suspects could have snuffed Sir Magnus Pye, too. The old duffer drops from the suspect list when his severed head is found littering the chilly Pye Hall entrance space.
Needless to say, the terminally ill Pund does prevail, as does Susan in her peregrinations—but not before circumstances turn uglier and uglier and don’t necessarily end in any way much prettier.
Okay, things don’t improve much for them or for the Cloverleaf house on losing its major bread earner. But Horowitz gets his jollies devising this deviously unique mysteries container. He has good great fun proving his ability to mimic Christie and the English manor-house mystery writers of her ilk. By lodging the pastiche as he does, he lifts himself from criticism for simply pastiche-ing.
And best of all, he adds to his growing list of extra-special entertainments.