“In retrospect, it’s a pity that I decided to write all this in the first person as it will have been obvious all along that I wasn’t going to die.” (The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz)
“It hadn’t been a brilliant meeting. I’d been told my publishers preferred my main character to me.” (A Line to Kill by Horowitz)
I have tried to get into mysteries a few times before, only to fail when confronted with some of the genre’s questions (are you supposed to guess the murderer? Are you supposed to read every book in the series, chronologically?). Penny’s Gamache series won me over (which is less episodic and blends thriller/mystery) , but I’ve picked up and discarded several others that weren’t quite the right fit. It turns out that I was just waiting for Horowitz and his Hawthorne and Horowitz series. Or maybe even just everything by Horowitz(?)
The Word is Murder:
I am all about this book – the blend of fiction and nonfiction is just delightful. Horowitz puts himself into the book as a character who has a real, fact-checkable past (work on Foyle’s War, publishing Alex Rider and Moriarty, etc) and meets a fictional detective. Horowitz plays with the autobiographical and fictional throughout the book so the reader feels a sort of meta climbing, a teasing picking apart of fiction and non-. The formula allows Horowitz to create a completely unlikable detective and still have it work because Horowitz himself can hold the weight of our affections.
The Sentence is Death:
Though the second book isn’t quite as surprising as the first (we already know about the delightful blend of fiction and non), it is still imminently readable. Hawthorn interrupts a real scene in Foyle’s war, which you can watch, and Hawthorn even writes the acknowledgements to fictional people, never breaking character. On the other hand, one of the villains, a feminist writer, seemed an unflattering caricature of feminism instead of a real person, and I saw one of the twists coming from a mile off. Yet, this is still, hands down, the world I want to spend my summer in.
A Line to Kill:
Here, Horowitz and Hawthorne find themselves on a sparsely populated island for a book festival. We get a lot of fantastic blending of fiction and non- here since the murder doesn’t happen until about 30%, so the beginning reads like a journal and deals mostly with the forthcoming actual publication of The Word is Murder and how it reacts with the fictional world of Horowitz and Hawthorne. You get a lot of scenes where Horowitz is worried about people liking his main character better than they like him, and others at the end where Horowitz worries his book will be boring because the (red herring) killer is too unsympathetic. It’s all so phenomenally meta.
The only problem I have with this series is that I only have two more to read (why, oh why, couldn’t this have been one of those ubiquitous detective series with 20 books already published?!)
Book Lion 