The curiously named Atticus Pünd is half-Greek, half-Jew, who made it alive out of Hitler’s concentration camps but lost his entire family during World War II and eventually migrated to the U.K., setting himself up as a private detective. He is a retro character who struts about in the mellow light of the 1950s, when vicars and nobility dominated the social life of English villages, and murders mostly happened offstage. Sounds a bit like an Agatha Christie novel?
Just like Christie’s And Then There Were None , the title of Magpie Murders harks back to a children’s poem, giving us a code to crack: why, for example, are all the suspects named after birds? This novel is full of puzzles, anagrams (including the detective’s name) and the like, surrounding the death of a local cleaning lady, who made it her point to dig out the dirty secrets of her village. Hers seems like an accidental fall down the manor steps, after stumbling on a vacuum cleaner, but at the same time too many people have reasons for wishing her dead — including her very own son who publicly proclaimed so, days prior to the mishap. A factor that suggests that there is more to it than meets the eye is the beheading of her employer, Sir Pye, owner of the manor, by an antique sword soon after. Meanwhile, Pünd has been diagnosed with intracranial neoplasm — a sort of terminal brain cancer — and given a very short time to live, so this latest case of his appears also to be the last.
The clock is ticking. Snooping around in Saxby-on-Avon, much in the manner of Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, Pünd with his ‘Dr. Watson’ in tow — the failed actor James Fraser — so far makes for a traditional old-fashioned whodunnit. But there’s an element of meta-fiction: we are told from the onset that Pünd is fictional — as in a character in a manuscript — being read by publishing house editor Sue Ryeland.
Initially, I thought it was a cheap way of passing off a not particularly great detective novel. It appears that part of the book was written back in 2005, but abandoned by Horowitz as a failed project, and finally reworked 10 years later into what we have here. However, it turns out to be deeper than just a salvaged flop. As we read the manuscript alongside the editor, we find — like she does — that the end is missing. Just after the great detective declares that he has solved the case. Infuriating? More than so — the author, Alan Conway, is not in a position to help her out. He jumped from the roof of his house after submitting the script.
Ryeland’s search for the missing pages, taking up about half the book, turns into a detective story of its own because all traces of the lost chapter, including the author’s notes, have been erased. Predictably, there are a number of people who might have reason to wish Conway dead. He was an unpopular English teacher to his former students, crappy plagiarist detested by fellow authors. His ex-wife, his young live-in lover boy, and the producer who is struggling to turn Pünd into a BBC series too will appreciate his death. Ryeland is no detective, but since the police dismissed the death as a suicide, she feels an urge to dig out the truth — a quest which, despite its seemingly realistic narration in which real people like Ian Rankin (blurbing Conway) and Agatha Christie’s grandson have cameos, becomes yet another whodunnit about whodunnit to the whodunnit writer.
Horowitz is well known in the book industry for ‘ghost-writing’ for dead authors like Arthur Conan Doyle (he’s penned two authorised Sherlock Holmes novels) and Ian Fleming (he wrote the latest James Bond, Trigger Mortis ). He has also worked on TV scripts for the Poirot serial based on Agatha Christie’s characters. So he is eminently suited to write a farcical novel like this one, where he puns on Christie and, indeed, caricatures the entire British crime fiction trade.
This is the fun part, because frankly speaking one doesn’t care much about who killed the gossip-monger or if she simply stumbled down those steps. But the Ryeland plot is like a jolly pastiche, and so for aspiring pulp writers this can be a rather instructive read, in the way it analyses, drolly, aspects of writing, publishing and marketing. It also becomes a discussion of the whodunnit as a genre until, in the end, it reverts to where it started — a whodunnit.
Despite this layered complexity, the book doesn’t get as post-modern as, say, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy which sent many readers’ IQs for a spin. This book has no literary pretensions, all the seemingly cool name-dropping is eyewash (important writers’ names are misspelled, like Graham “Green” instead of “Greene”, which gives the book a somewhat sloppy feel), and the plot has holes big enough to send a riot squad through.
So you can safely stash this one alongside your favourite pulp paperbacks without worrying that it might make you look like an intellectual.
Magpie Murders ; Anthony Horowitz,Orion Books 2016, 452 pages, Rs. 499.
Zac O’Yeah’s latest comic detective novel set in Bengaluru is the bestselling Hari, a Hero for Hire.
