Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz Review

Editor Susan Ryeland receives the latest manuscript from her publishing house’s biggest author: Magpie Murders by Alan Conway, featuring his popular Poirot-esque detective Atticus Pund. Set in a small Westcountry village in 1955, aristocrat Magnus Pye is murdered in his house, mere days after his cleaner died and the place was burgled - are these events connected in some way, pointing to whodunit? But Susan is about to discover the manuscript is just the beginning for an even stranger story that bleeds over from the printed page and into her life…

I think Anthony Horowitz is the bee’s knees but Magpie Murders is the first novel of his I’ve come across that I didn’t love. The meta-aspect of it is very cool - you get an entire Agatha Christie-esque novel and another modern detective story wrapped around it, the two playing into each other to form something unique. I can’t fault the ambition or the immense skill to put it all together and make it work like it does.

What was less impressive to me was the actual content of both novels. The Atticus Pund novel is very generic, because it’s a pastiche of a classic detective novel, which immediately makes it a bit boring to me, and it takes a while to get going too. You have to wade through the myriad character introductions and the cleaner’s death and its aftermath before getting to the real story, which was tedious.

Then after reading an entire novel, you’ve then got to read another novel immediately afterwards with a similar (deliberately so) structure, meaning you’ve got to go through more character introductions, etc. before getting into the real story of that one, and only then getting the resolution of how these two are connected. I found it quite wearisome, particularly as the second novel wasn’t as compelling as the first.

This isn’t a major criticism either but the novel-within-the-novel uses a typewriter-esque font (I don’t know what it’s called) and it’s really ugly and off-putting to have to see for 200+ pages. I get why it’s done that way - to play into the conceit that we’re reading a manuscript - but I didn’t like looking at it for that long. I guess I wouldn’t hack it as an editor!

I thought Susan Ryeland wasn’t that interesting a main character but generally the cast in both stories are memorable. You get a strong sense of place, especially with the ‘50s set village, and the mysteries are constructed very cleverly. Horowitz’s writing is as smooth and accessible as ever.

Without going into spoiler-y details, I didn’t dislike either of the novels, I just found them a bit plodding, overlong and uneven, compared to what I was expecting from Horowitz’s usually fast-paced storytelling. Magpie Murders is a decent read, and conceptually quite brilliant, but patience is certainly a must for this one as the execution is more leisurely than you normally get from this author.