The Word Is Murder (Hawthorne #1)

After reading Horowitzs MAGPIE MURDERS, I was compelled to read this one straightaway. I am a big fan of his small screen series, such as Foyles War, a nuanced, intelligent series about a British detective during WW II and beyond to the Cold War, the short series Injustice, a tense drama about a tormented attorney, and the eccentric but suspenseful Midsomer Murders about a quaint English village and its people, coupled with murder. Magpie Murders had a combination of a vintage English murder, mixed with a contemporary meta-fiction that renders it more complex and twisty.

In this, another murder case, Horowitz is even more brazen by casting himself as himself, layering fictional characters and a storyline with the authentic Horowitz, in a sometimes gleefully tingling meta- scene. For example, the writer is in an actual meeting with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, andwell, I wont reveal what happens, but it really blurs the lines between fact and fiction, that scene being the most arch of all the meta-scenes due to the billion-watt celebrities going eerily from foreground to background with a few strokes of a keyboard.

The story: It starts with a short narrative: a 60s-aged woman, Diana Cowper, walks into a funeral parlor to arrange her own funeral, and is murdered six hours later. This was more of a prologue, demonstrating the authors draft of a story, and then the next chapter we get to the meat of the set-up, and how that funeral parlor scene came to be.

In London, Anthony Horowitz, busy with different writing projects and a screenplay, is contacted by a peculiar ex police force detective named Daniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne was once hired by Horowitzs production team to be used as a consultant in his five-part miniseries, INJUSTICE, to help keep the scripts police procedures credible and methodical. He was brilliant with his advice, and apparently a crack investigator, but was fired by the Metropolitan police force prior to working with Horowitz on the series. Anthony never liked himhe found him morose, socially miscued, prickly, annoying, and intrusive, but he put up with him for his use on the series.

Horowitz is inwardly outraged and outwardly dismissive when Hawthorne calls him to offer him a 50-50 book deal to write about himself. Why would anyone want to read about Hawthorne? And how brazen for him to call Horowitz to write this? And 50-50??? Yet, when he finally does meet up with him and Hawthorne tells him about the Cowper case, Anthony is legitimately intrigued. The fact that she has a famous son, a stage and screen actor hes familiar with, amps up the buzz.

Horowitz agrees to do it, i.e. to follow Hawthorne around (who has been curiously hired by the Met to consult, and seems to have primary privileges). The problem to Anthonys chagrin, Hawthorne is a cipher and refuses to answer any questions about himself. Anthony expresses to him that if he is going to write about him,
Id have to know where you live, whether youre married or not, what you have for breakfast, what you do on your day off. Thats why people read murder stories. Hawthornes response?
I dont agree. The word is murder. Thats what matters.

As the case and story unfold, and the suspects pile up, it becomes just as thrilling to witness the testy relationship of Hawthorne and Horowitz as it is to watch how the investigation progresses. Moreover, the writer shares the writing process. Although the case is fiction (but treated as fact), you totally believe in it! Horowitz is a genius at including himself BUT getting out of his own way. Only an accomplished, meticulous writer is able to pull that off. You wont be disappointed.

Wow. I can’t believe this is the same guy that wrote Magpie Murders. Maybe he fired his ghostwriter because this book isn’t just stale from page 1 it has huge, amateurish problems. Cackling-villian-spilling-his-evil-plan-thus-giving-the-hero-time-to-arrive kind of problems. The only novelty here is that Horowitz casts himself as a Watson-type sidekick, but it does nothing for the story. He comes across as a boring, whiny doormat who will not stop name-dropping his other books & projects. Better mention Foyle’s War one more time in case somebody forgot the 15 previous mentions. And then he damsels himself. The other main character is Hawthorne, a rude, homophobic, manipulative ex-detective. Wow #2. How is anybody still using this trope of excusing a character’s horrible behavior because he’s good at something? Un-ironically? Hawthorne is made of cardboard: a straight, white, egotistical male bigot with no respect for anyone or anything. He learns nothing along the way and has zero redeeming features. I’m not questioning the veracity of the character sketch—I’m questioning the focus. Is this a personality deserving of *another* work of fiction? The shallow, self-absorbed man in a position of power who glides through life encountering as much resistance as a greased pig running through sunshie, but still he’s misanthropic & pissy. So tortured. Gay people still exist and all the other characters haven’t crowned him king, must be time to say something crass & storm off the stage. Seriously, give this one a miss.

This book dragged on and on. I only finished it because I started it, but i didnt care for the way it was written. It was hard to get into the characters; no one was very likeable. The author, writing in the first person, kept expressing how ambivalent he was about writing this book. I was just as ambivalent about the value of reading it. Definitely not a fun read, nor a particularly rewarding one. This was a major disappointment for me, especially after reading the Magpie Murders, one of the best mysteries Ive read in a long time.

First off I will have to say that if there is an award for name-dropping, surely this author deserves it. “Deserves” is the right word, for he has earned the right I suppose with his many writing successes. Nonetheless it was a bit off-putting to hear about Steven Spielberg, Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders etc. throughout the book. They added nothing to the plot or to the reader’s enjoyment.

That said this was a good story, well-written, and attention-holding. It is difficult to like the main character who is a blend of Sherlock Holmes and Mike Hammer, but again I ‘spose that isn’t the point. I never did figure out why Mrs. Cowper planned her own funeral, but I realized that the funeral director would play a major role because he was mentioned so frequently rather than being a sidelines character. You will enjoy the book and appreciate the twists.

This is another cracker from Anthony Horowitz, hot on the heels of The Magpie Murders. If that book had begun deconstructing, playing around and having a lot of fun with the form of the whodunnit, this brand new adventure carries on that theme: this time Horowitz puts himself into the story – and in the reluctant role of the Watson/Hastings sidekick to boot. His detective this time is a million miles from a Poirot, a Holmes or a Father Brown. Hawthorne swears like a squaddie, chain smokes his way through the case, is as politically correct as Bernard Manning and is not at all easy to get to know. It’s clear that he’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum, but is far from being endearing in the way that, say, Christopher was in The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time.

Horowitz seemlessly mixes reality with fantasy (of course it’s fiction and none of it happened, but your disbelief is very readily suspended) until you don’t know where one ends and the other begins. Is he using the real name of his agent? Did that building really exist? Has he ever met someone like Hawthorne in real life? There is a wonderful scene where the gruff detective bursts into a meeting about a Tintin film script Horowitz is having with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. How much of this happened? You don’t know and, naturally, you don’t care but it creates a deliciously ambiguous halfway house between the world we know and the parallel universe of detective fiction. In fact, Hawthorne is perhaps the most realistic new detective to appear for a very long time.

I thought I’d worked it out quite early on and was delighted when the fictional version of Anthony Horowitz (or ‘Tony’ as Hawthorne calls him) began thinking along the same lines. We were, of course, both completely wrong. The real Horowitz had flummoxed us as usual.

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