The Word is Murder

Anthony Horowitz is a clever and often humorous writer about murder.  And who doesn’t love a clever murder…mystery.  Horowitz worked with David Suchet and wrote many of the scripts for my favorite mystery series, Agatha Christie’s Poirot.  He discusses some of his television work in the mystery novel The Word is Murder because Horowitz becomes not only the first-person narrator of the novel but a character in it.  Horowitz portrays himself as a less than competent sleuth who works with a less than likeable detective, Hawthorne.  Apparently, the dyspeptic Hawthorne is to become a figure in a new series of who-dun-its.  Hawthorne hires Horowitz to write about Hawthorne himself and it turns out that he writes about Horowitz himself as well.  An interesting scene is an incident when Horowitz is meeting with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, an actual meeting—interrupted by the fictional Hawthorne. When the Horowitz character tries to out-detective the detective he almost gets himself killed.  After the incident, he writes that it is a pity deciding to write in first person because the reader can’t possibly think the writer will die at least until he finishes the book.  It a strange twist to the unreliable narrator technique, in this case possibly reliable, where the reader can’t quite tell what is fiction and what is not.  Like the long-running series Midsomer Murders for which Horowitz was also a writer, the story involves multiple murders, revenge, suicide, and various deceptive clues that the Horowitz character doesn’t catch but his character Hawthorne does.  Ingenious, witty, and entertaining.