After the intensity of my last #20booksofsummer book — Quartet by Jean Rhys — I badly needed something that was less demanding.
Magpie Murders fitted the bill nicely. It’s a murder mystery with echoes of those classic Poirot tales set in a small English village. Actually it’s two murder mysteries created using the nested narrative device.
The premise is that author Alan Conway is found dead just days after handing in the latest title in his best selling crime series. But the manuscript of Magpie Murders is missing the vital last chapter in which the ace detective Atticus Pünd reveals the identity of a murderer.
Conway’s editor Susan Ryeland embarks on a hunt to find the missing chapter of Magpie Murders. In the process she begins to question the official account of how Conway died. Did he really commit suicide or was he murdered? Is there something in his final book that might provide clues?
Susan’s investigation into the writer’s death, which takes up a fair chunk of Horowitz’s novel, is rather a run-of-the- mill (and unlikely) mystery tale. In the midst of this we’re taken down the path of an entirely different murder mystery via the full text of Conway’s novel
Conway’s Magpie Murders novel uses tropes that will be familiar to Agatha Christie readers. Large rambling manor house. A village where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Plenty of likely suspects and dozens of red herrings. His detective is European just like Poirot and uses the same investigative methods — close observation, common sense and leaps of deductive reasoning.
Horowitz makes this story-within-a-story a homage to the Golden Age of crime while using the editor’s framing narrative for an insider’s commentary on the art and popularity of crime fiction.
On popularity for example we get:
Whodunnits are all about truth: nothing more, nothing less. In a world full of uncertainties, is it not inherently satisfying to come to the last page with every i dotted and every t crossed? The stories mimic our experience in the world. We are surrounded by tensions and ambiguities, which we spend half our life trying to resolve, and we’ll probably be on our own deathbed when we reach that moment when everything makes sense. Just about every whodunnit provides that pleasure. It is the reason for their existence.”
While on fictional detectives we find:
Of course the detectives are cleverer than us. We expect them to be. But that doesn’t mean they’re paragons of virtue. Holmes is depressed. Poirot is vain. Miss Marple is brusque and eccentric. They don’t have to be attractive. Look at Nero Wolfe who was so fat that he couldn’t even leave his New York home and had to have a custom-made chair to support his weight! Or Father Brown who had ‘a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling . . . eyes as empty as the North Sea’. … We don’t need to like or admire our detectives. We stick with them because we have confidence in them.”
These asides help enliven the otherwise nondescript mystery narrative from Susan Ryeland — an earnest but dull character by the way. I much preferred the unfinished novel from Alan Conway.
Overall the book won’t set the world on fire but it’s reasonably entertaining and delivered what I needed at the time. Now it’s back to something more demanding with Emile Zola.