Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders
© Harper Perennial
Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders features two sleuths. The first one, Susan Ryeland, a book editor, is unwittingly pulled into trying to solve the mysterious death of an author, Alan Conway, one of her clients. At the same time, she is reading a book featuring a fictional detective, Atticus Pünd, who is the creation of the recently deceased author Alan Conway. Unfortunately, the last chapter of Conway’s novel has gone missing, prompting Ryeland to begin her investigation.
Horowitz’s 2016 novel within a novel format works brilliantly, drawing the reader into two separate, yet intertwined mysteries. This is the first novel in his Susan Ryeland series. If you aren’t familiar with Horowitz and his Alex Ryder series, then perhaps you have watched some of his episodes of Midsomer Murders or Poirot. He is also the creator of Foyle’s War, along with several other police and legal dramas. When you are reading Magpie Murders, it is easy to see the influence that Horowitz’s work adapting Agatha Christie's novels has had on his creation of Atticus Pünd, who feels like the soul mate of Hercule Poirot.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the Atticus Pünd novel, I believe that Susan Ryeland’s investigation into the missing final chapter as well as Alan Conway’s death bookends the narrative ingeniously and humanizes the investigation. While the Atticus Pünd novel feels like an older Agatha Christie novel (which is a great thing), the Susan Ryeland narrative is contemporary and a startling contrast to the Pünd novel. While Pünd is mired in beliefs from another era, Ryeland isn’t held back by gender bias or inequality. She’s a superior sleuth, even if she is an amateur. She has better insight than DI Locke, who claims Conway’s death is a textbook suicide.
In short, Rye is a modern-day female sleuth, while Pünd represents the historical golden age of detection. They are both thrown red herrings throughout each narrative and each protagonist navigates through a mire of misinformation using their own skillsets. This book is a celebration of the old-school methodology with the contemporary sensibility of a woman, who might be far more messy in solving her case, but just as effective in the end.