One Book, Two Mysteries

To say that Anthony Horowitz is a prolific writer badly understates the case. Nor is it just the volume and quality of his production that is astonishing, but also the variety. He started out writing primarily for children and young adult audiences with the Alex Rider and Diamond Brothers series. He has also done plays, story collections, graphic novels and movie screenplays. But he is probably best known for writing television scripts for such popular series as Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders, as well as doing many of the adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories for the TV series starring David Suchet.

It is only in recent years that the OBE has turned his attention to writing novels for adult audiences, spurred on by the estates of Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming, who commissioned him to write two new Sherlock Holmes adventures (The House of Silk and Moriarty) and a new James Bond thriller (Triggermortis).

Now Horowitz has crafted the double barrelled Magpie Murders. Your host and narrator for these two interconnected mysteries is Susan Ryeland, a book editor for Cloverleaf Books. Her boss, Charles Clover, has given her a manuscript to read over the weekend. It is the ninth in the very popular Atticus Pünd series by Alan Conway.

Pünd is largely an imitation of Christie’s Poirot. Instead of being a Belgian refugee from WWI, he is a German prison camp survivor from WWII. Like Poirot, he is a fastidious dresser, vain about his appearance and his detecting abilities, and he even has a clueless assistant named Fraser.

When we meet Pünd, it is 1955 and he is at the doctor’s receiving the bad news that a brain tumor has left him with only a few months to live. This revelation sets off alarm bells for Ryeland and Pünd. The Pünd novels are Cloverleaf’s most popular books and their chief source of income. If Conway is writing the end to this character, Cloverleaf is in almost as much peril as Pünd himself.

So it is no surprise that when Joy Sanderling, a young woman from the village of Saxby-on-avon in Somerset, asks Pünd to investigate the death of her boyfriend’s mother, Atticus politely refuses. Mary Blakiston had fallen down the main staircase in Pye Hall where she lived and worked as the housekeeper. The police are treating her death as an accident. But the last words her son Robert shouted at her outside the Queen’s Arms pub were, “I just wish you’d drop dead and give me a bit of peace.” Suspicious tongues in the village are wagging. It is only when there is a violent death in the same building a few days later that is unquestionably not an accident that Pünd decides he might have time for one last case.

One of the things we learn about Conway is that he loves word games and puzzles. Atticus Pünd turns out to be a three word anagram. The names of the main characters and suspects all have a common theme. Sir Magnus Pye, the lord of Pye Hall, is evidently the Mag Pye of the story who will be revealed as the murderer or the murderee.

The investigation proceeds apace until Atticus finally announces in true Poirotian fashion that it is time to summon the suspects and the police so that he can demonstrate how clever he has been in solving the crimes. And that is where the manuscript ends. The last few chapters are missing. When Ryeland tells Clover about this, he informs her that Conway won’t tell them: he has died over the weekend, the victim of a fall from the upper terrace at Abbey Grange, his home in Suffolk. A note in the mail from Conway reveals that he too was dying of cancer and appears to have taken his own life.

Ryeland sets off for Suffolk to look for the missing pages. She does not find the rest of the manuscript, but she does find people who don’t buy the suicide story and evidence that they may be right. This makes the quest for the manuscript pages more urgent. Ryeland thinks that Conway planned to reveal more in those pages than just the fictional killer in Saxby-on-avon. And that revelation was damaging enough to make it worth someone’s while to kill Conway and steal the final pages. So if she can find the missing pages, she can find Conway’s killer. Or vice versa.

If a murder mystery can be described as fun, Magpie Murders is it. The one complaint I have is that the whole enterprise is a bit long. But who cares when you are enjoying yourself, as I certainly did?

-Vincent Cuddihy

All of the titles mentioned in this review are in the Lennoxville Library.

The Saturday children’s activities will start again tomorrow morning.