"Magpie Murders" by Anthony Horowitz

Susan Ryeland is a 40-something book editor for a small but successful London publisher. She edits their top-selling author, Alan Conway, who writes the Atticus Pund mystery series. She begins reading his latest manuscript, Magpie Murders, and we get to read it as well.

That is, we get to read all but the last few chapters. They’re missing. Ryeland talks with her publisher, Charles Clover, about where they might be. Clover gives her a letter from Conway. It’s a suicide note. Conway has jumped from a tower at his home in Somerset.

Or did he?

Ryeland decides to search for the missing chapters. The publishing house may not survive the death of its most celebrated author. She goes to Conway’s home. Not only are the missing chapters not there, there is not a hint of the manuscript on the author’s computer. His diaries are gone, too. Ryeland begins to suspect it wasn’t suicide.  

Anthony Horowitz

She turns herself into an amateur detective and learns that any one of a number of people had a motive in killing the author – the boyfriend, the former wife, the sister, the investment broker next door, and a few others. It turns out Conway wasn’t a very likeable man. And then she realizes that the final manuscript is more than what it seems; it may hold clues to the identity of the murderer.

Magpie Murders by British author Anthony Horowitz, first published in 2016, is a rather dazzling mystery story that exists in three levels. First is the mystery of the last Conway manuscript – and the book includes the full text (and eventually the missing chapters). Second, it is a mystery story in which Ryeland investigates the purported suicide of her author. And third, it is the story of how the author used all of his mystery novels to do something other than tell a story.

Horowitz has written numerous novels, including two Sherlock Holmes stories, Moriarity and The House of Silk. He is perhaps best known as the creator of two television programs popular in both Great Britain and the United States, Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War.

Magpie Murders wraps its fingers around your throat and doesn’t let go until the last page.

Related:

Anthony’s Horowitz’s Moriarity.

Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk.

Anthony Horowitz’s “The House of Silk”

A London art dealer comes to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, reporting that he’s being followed by the leader of an American criminal gang bent on revenge. Because of art (paintings by John Constable) caught up and destroyed during a train robbery, and the busting up of the gang involved (and the death of its co-leader), the art dealer fears for his life.

Holmes and Watson are on the case, except the case is not quite as straightforward as it seems. The criminal is found murdered in his hotel room, tracked down by a boy involved in Holmes’ “Baker Street Irregulars.” The boy disappears and is later founded brutally murdered.

More is afoot that a revenge killing over a train robbery gone bad. Much more.

And so we’re drawn, almost catapulted, into Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel.

This is the first of Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes novels, the second being Moriarity (which I reviewed here in April). Such is Horowitz’s reputation that these two books and are the only Holmes novels authorized by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate. (Horowitz, among numerous other works, was the writer for both the popular BBC and PBS series Foyle’s War and the long running detective series Midsummer Murders.)

Anthony Horowitz

The House of Silk takes us across London and its suburbs (Wimbledon was a suburb in the early 1890s), from the houses of the middle class to the smells and squalor of the East End. In the process we learn about the plight of orphaned children in Victorian England in institutional settings as well as on their own in a society that could crush them without thinking.

The author is true to both the Sherlock Holmes style and story signature – we think we see what’s coming, and it indeed comes, but it includes what we did and didn’t expect. Like Dr. Watson, we are left amazed by Holmes’ knowledge and deductions. Horowitz plays that extremely well in his Holmes novels, and keeps a surprise or two up his sleeve – just like Conan Doyle did in the original stories. And there's even a cameo appearance by Professor Moriarity.

Here’s to more Sherlock Holmes novels by Anthony Horowitz.

Short Takes: “Jack’s Wager" and “The Three Monarchs”

Short Takes is a new feature here that reviews generally short works (“short” defined as able to be read in under an hour).

Jack’s Wager

Both Halloween and Samhain in Ireland happen at roughly the end of the harvest season. Both have pre-Christian roots. And both share an emblem – the jack o’lantern, a hollowed pumpkin with a light inside. Such decorations sit on American front porches on Oct. 31 each year (including my own). The decoration spread in the United States with the large Irish immigrations in the 19^th century.

But where did the jack o’lantern come from? Writer Wirton Arvil has a creative suggestion, and describes it in detail in Jack’s Wagers. Using some of the legends and stories that have grown up around the jack o’lantern over the centuries, Arvil tells the story of Jack, a poor man for whom nothing ever seems to go right, but who manages to trick the devil not once but twice.

It’s a folk tale, written for contemporary readers, and it is great fun. One can image the story being told around a campfire on a moonlit Halloween night, the harvest finished, and the farmers and field hands fascinated with the a story of the devil being tricked.

The story is told in both English and Italian.

The Three Monarchs

Anthony Horowitz, writer for the popular British (and PBS) series Foyle’s War and the long running mystery series Midsomer Murders. In 2011, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, that was authorized by the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate. And last year, he published a second Holmes novel, Moriarty (reviewed here last month).

He’s also written a Holmes short story, The Three Monarchs, available as a single story. It is remarkably like the original Holmes stories, so good that it could have been written by Conan Doyle himself.

Dr. John Watson has been married for a year, living happily with his wife Mary not far from 221B Baker Street. But, rather naturally, he’s seen little of Holmes during that time, pursuing his medical career to provide for his new family. But he misses the excitement, and one say his wife suggests he visit Holmes.

He arrives as Holmes is talking with Inspector Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard (a major character in Moriarty) about a most puzzling case. A burglar has been shot dead by a homeowner. And, as it turns out, the burglar had also visited two neighboring homes, stealing the exact same thing from each – a figurine of Queen Victoria for her Golden Jubilee, of which millions were made and sold. In other words, the figurines are worth virtually nothing. So why would they be stolen?

Leave it to Holmes to find the larger meaning in what seems inconsequential. The Three Monarchs is a story solidly within the Sherlock Holmes tradition.

Top photograph of a jack o’lantern licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Anthony Horowitz’s “Moriarity”

In 1893, the British public was outraged. Arthur Conan Doyle had just done the unspeakable – in a titanic struggle at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, Sherlock Holmes and his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty had struggled and fallen to the rocks below, presumably to their deaths. Sherlock Holmes would no longer grace his way in the minds of the reading public.

It would take eight years, and considerable sullen outrage, but Holmes would finally return, in Doyle’s 1901 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles.

We know what happened to Holmes, but what happened to Moriarty?

Numerous authors have tried answering that question in novel form since Doyle’s death in 1930. Now Anthony Horowitz has now taken a shot at it, with Moriarty.

In short, the novel is enthralling, convincing – and devilish.

Frederick Chase is a detective with the Pinkerton Detective Agency in America. He’s sent to Europe, and specifically to Switzerland, to find clues to the whereabouts of an arch-criminal in America, one Clarence Devereux. He is reportedly in Europe, to step into the place of Moriarity.

In Switzerland, Chase meets Scotland yard detective Athelney Jones, sent by the Yard to verify Moriarty’s death. There is a body; together Jones and Chase examine it. And they find a note, in code, addressed to Moriarty and likely from Devereux. Then it’s on to London; the game is indeed afoot.

With each page, the story becomes more than a mystery. It quickly centers on the growing friendship of the two detectives, one American and one British, one a private agent and the other representing the greatest investigating authority of the time. The developments begin to come one after another, quickening the pace toward what looks to be a horrific conclusion. (In fact, the story is almost as fast-paced as the television series Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.)

Anthony Horowitz

Slowly the reader begins to be ask – was that Moriarty’s body they saw in Switzerland, or was it someone else? And if someone else, then where is Moriarty?

Horowitz has written numerous novels and one previous Sherlock Holmes story, The House of Silk in 2011. He is perhaps best known as the creator of two television programs popular in both Great Britain and the United States, Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War.

What a story Moriarty is, full of twists and turns, keeping the reader on edge and guessing in every chapter. It is mystery writing at its historical best.

Illustration: Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes in their struggle at Reichenbach Falls.