Magpie Murders

The best word I can use to describe, Magpie Murders, is "clever."  "Clever" popped into my head, thirty pages into it, and it remains there as an apt descriptor now that I have finished.

Yesterday, when done, I thought that while it is certainly clever I am not sure I can recommend spending 470 odd pages with it, just to be impressed with the author's impressive ability to have thought this up.  Today, I am not so sure. I find myself thinking about how he put it all together and some parts that I did not get until this morning.  There are a number of instances in the novel when a sleuth realizes that a key to solving the mystery lies in an anagram.  So, this morning I took the name of the main character, Susan Ryeland, and tried (and am trying) to sleuth out what that anagram might be.  (I will succumb after I finish writing this review and check Amazon to see if someone smarter than me got it, if indeed the name is a revealing puzzle of sorts).

In short, hats off to Anthony Horowitz-the author- for putting this together, but readers of this blog might get enough out of the following to decide not to read it.  I will not give essential parts away.

A non revealing synopsis:

A fiction editor of a publishing company sits down to read a whodunit which is the most recent one of a series.  This series about sleuth Atticus Pund has been the key breadwinner for the editor's publishing company.  So, four pages into the book, the editor (and we readers) begin Magpie Murders which is both the title of the most recent fiction featuring Atticus Pund detective, and the title of Horowitz's book.

It's classic British whodunit.  There's a funeral, all the potential suspects are introduced, someone seeks out Atticus Pund for his wisdom, Pund comes to town with his assistant, and works collaboratively with the local police.  Meanwhile 217 pages later the editor (and we readers) stop reading the detective story.  The editor has to solve a new (real life) mystery that is related to the novel's fiction.  She then becomes the sleuth for the real mystery and in several ways mirrors Pund, the fictional character, as she interviews all potential players in the real life mystery related to the fictional mystery set decades earlier.

Eventually, the fictional and real life mysteries are solved, in the way that fictional whodunits are solved. There is a scene at the end of both where the sleuths reveal who done it and how they come to know who has done it.  Life imitating art using art to demonstrate.

Sometimes I think I am very creative, but I don't think I could conceive of this intricate novel that contains another novel.  Horowitz even paginates the book separately from the Pund novel.  So you read four pages in the beginning and then start on page 1 of the Pund novel. Then 217 pages after that, you go back to page 5 of Horowitz's Magpie Murders that encompasses the fictional Magpie Murders, for 200 plus pages. Then the reader is taken back to page 218 of the fictional novel.   You can pick up this fat book and look at the last page and see it is numbered 236 which makes no sense given its heft.  But then you realize there is a 241 page novel inside.

What I liked second most (beyond just the idea) was the Pund novel. It was as good as the Agatha Christie type books I have read. Horowitz really imitates that style. And it is a good story in and of itself. (No, I did not figure out who done it).

If you like puzzles and like to read, you will probably enjoy Magpie Murders. However, I think the thing you will come away with more than anything else is an appreciation for the creativity of the author. And you will enjoy how sleuth Pund solves his case as well.  If, however, you want a straight forward short novel, with perhaps a message that will hang around in your head, I'd put this one on the back burner.