In ‘Moonflower Murders,’ whodunit lies inside another
The private detective Atticus Pünd appears to have stepped directly from the pages of a classic golden-age mystery and into Anthony Horowitz’s newnovel, “Moonflower Murders.” Brilliant, arrogant, indisputably foreign, Pünd prides himself on understanding the inner workings of the human psyche and is prone to dropping aphoristic bon mots. “The more obvious the answer, the more difficult it can be to find,” he declares.
But here’s the thing about Pünd: He’s not technically a character in Horowitz’s book, but a character in another book, “Atticus Pünd Takes the Case,” which is inside the first book.
Yes, there are two novels here — one an old-fashioned whodunit, the other a modern metastory — meaning that what we are reading can literally be described as a mystery wrapped in an enigma. How these books speak to each other is one of many puzzles ripe for solving.
Horowitz himself is a bit of a mystery. How can a person (other than Stephen King) be this prolific and this consistently entertaining? Horowitz, who created the television series “Foyle’s War” and wrote most of its episodes, is also the author of various young adult book series, including the wildly popular Alex Rider spy novels and the “Power of Five” fantasy novels; a pair each of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond novels, written in the styles of their original authors and to my mind just as satisfying; and a number of fiendishly clever stand-alone adult mysteries, including two in which he himself appears as a character, playing the sidekick to a Holmeslike detective.
There are also plays, screenplays and many episodes of the TV series “Midsomer Murders” (which he also created). Perhaps Horowitz considers writing “Moonflower Murders” a relaxing break from all those other things? Probably not. It’s a richly plotted, head-spinning novel about a present-day disappearance, a murder eight years earlier and a fictional murder that may be relevant to both. It is not an example of an author phoning something in.
The story begins in Crete, where Susan Ryeland, the 40-something British book editor who featured in a previous Horowitz novel, “Magpie Murders,” has given up publishing to run a small hotel with her boyfriend, Andreas. A British couple named Lawrence and Pauline Treherne, the owners of Branlow Hall, a (much fancier) hotel on the Suffolk coast, arrive with an enticing proposition: They will pay her 10,000 pounds to help locate their daughter, Cecily, whohas inexplicably disappeared.
Why Susan? Before vanishing, Cecily told her parents some startling news about a murder that took place in the hotel in 2008: The man convicted of the crime and now languishing in prison was not in fact guilty. She found the proof, she said, in the novel “Atticus Pünd Takes the Case,” the third in a series by the late novelist Alan Conway and, it seems, a coded fictional reinterpretation of the crime. The book’s editor? Susan Ryeland.
The Trehernes suggest that maybe Susan can study the book, find the real murderer, and in the process discover what happened to Cecily.
Just as we’re beginning to make sense of the elaborate tale of Cecily, weget to “Atticus Pünd Takes the Case” and plunge headlong into another reality.
Conway’s novel, set in the 1950s, features a beautiful aging actress with a handsome younger husband and a good chance of landing a leading part in Hitchcock’s next movie, “Dial Mfor Murder.” Sadly, she is bludgeoned to death before she has a chance to meet with the director. (Grace Kelly will end up getting the job.)
Alert readers will admire the way Pünd, the detective hired to investigate, recalls the great Hercule Poirot and howthe story itself feels like a return to the cozy mysteries of our youth. But I doubt reading “Atticus
Pünd Takes the Case” will help you solve the mystery in “Moonflower Murders” any more than it helped me. The answers will be uncovered only through Susan’s expert textual analysis.
The book (the real, full book by Horowitz, that is) is too long and almost too labyrinthine. But getting lost in the weeds can be excellent fun, especially when the characters start trashing the very genre in which they’re appearing.