From the Barnes & Noble run I made earlier this year, this was one of the books I was most excited about. The cover excellently portrayed the plot in such a way that I had to buy Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders. But from the start of the book, I wondered if Anthony could pull through. And by the end, I was desperate to love it, but I didn’t. Why?
Well, it’s complicated.
Summary
Magpie Murders involves two different murder mysteries. The outer mystery follows Susan Ryeland as she tries to solve the murder of Alan Conway, an author who writes a blockbuster detective series about Atticus Finch for Cloverleaf Books which she edits. The inner mystery follows Atticus Finch as he solves the murder of a wealthy lord in the fictional town Saxby-on-Avon. All but the last chapter of the inner mystery is provided after a short warning from Susan on how the inner mystery changed her life. The book then proceeds with the majority of the outer mystery until the end when the last chapter of the inner novel is revealed.
The inner mystery involves figuring out how three different deaths relate. The first is the death of a young boy who drowned on the grounds of Pye Hall. The second is the death of that boy’s mother 12 years after the boy’s death, which appears to be an accident given she is the housekeeper at Pye Hall and the vacuum cord was winding up the stairs. The third is the death of Sir Magnus Pye, who is found beheaded in his own home.
The entire inner mystery reads like an Agatha Christie Poirot. We have an assistant who always makes the wrong conclusions, a well-intentioned but over-his-head inspector, a girl who wants to marry the surviving son of the housekeeper who fell down the stairs, a pedophilic groundskeeper who had issues with the two boys while they grew up on the grounds of Pye Hall, and a village full of people with a motive to stop Sir Magnus Pye from developing a forested area called Dingle Dell. This is Atticus Finch’s last case since he is dying of cancer.
The outer mystery is contemporary and only becomes of interest to Susan when the manuscript for the Atticus Finch novel is missing the last chapter. She goes searching for it after Alan Conway dies. When all of Conway’s notes are missing and there are no other copies of the manuscript anywhere, she believes he was murdered. As she looks around, she meets people who knew Alan Conway and they all seem to have wanted him dead. Susan realizes that all the characters from the last Finch novel are people from Alan Conway’s life.
Eventually, she solves the murder after a chance encounter. The solution was right in her face the entire time. Alan Conway’s suicide note has a tone shift that she should have caught sooner, being that she is a professional editor. Solving the murder and finding the last chapter almost cost her her life, but her somewhat serious boyfriend saves her.
That’s probably all the plot you need, and it shouldn’t spoil anything.
What Worked
The idea that a mystery writer is mysteriously murdered is fabulous. A classic murder mystery can sometimes feel stale, but this plot is refreshing. The outer story is also set in the modern world but doesn’t use any CSI investigators, which has become the go-to given that PIs don’t investigate murders anymore. Anthony gives us a story that feels different and new.
Since Susan is investigating the murder, the novel takes on a metafiction quality. She’s an editor and thus knows writing. She talks about a story in a story. This is great fun and a little cheeky at the same time.
There are probably more good things I could pick out, but the complexity of what didn’t work has been driving me bonkers. I need to move on.
What Didn’t Work
Unlike other books I have critiqued, there wasn’t some overwhelming flaw that glared at me from the page. This book is technically strong, and I would expect this. Anthony Horowitz has a long writing career and some good editors. The only technical issue I have is a tone shift in the outer story shortly after Susan sums up who she thinks could have committed the murder in the inner mystery. Suddenly she is very formal after reading as casual in the two prior parts she addresses the reader. It was jarring and I wondered if the narrator had changed. Susan introducing herself after the summation felt clumsy. Considering how the tone shift in Alan Conway’s suicide note is the reason Susan berates herself for not seeing the solution sooner, this stings a little worse than it might otherwise. Yet, I still feel like the novel is strong on the technical side.
From a structural point of view, a couple of things irk me. First, the page numbering differs depending on whether you read the inner mystery or the outer. I like page numbers to increase monotonically, but I understand why Anthony did this. The outer mystery repeatedly invites the reader to reference specific pages of the inner mystery.
Second, Anthony dumps the entire inner story (minus the reveal) before giving us the outer story. With so little interaction with Susan before the inner story, you may lose sight of the outer. A better practice (usually) is to interweave the two narratives together so that we as readers can follow each plot in parallel. This would have dramatically changed the narrative in the outer story, so I can understand the giant info dump even if I don’t like it.
I can brush these issues aside, but I can’t say I loved Magpie Murders. There is something else that keeps me from satisfaction. Everything is there. The writing is good, the idea is solid, and I love a good whodunit. So what happened?
I read through other reviews thinking they might clue me in, but most people either loved it or felt like I did but couldn’t explain their discontent beyond, “the outer story was boring”. As I thought about the outer story, I picked out other issues that might have been contributing factors.
Maybe the issue with the outer story is that it wasn’t filtered through the first-person narrative. Much of the outer story is infodumps, examples of other work from Alan Conway, and invitations to reference the inner story. This makes the reader draw conclusions without input from Susan Ryeland. I first thought this to be the case, but the narrative is filtered through her perspective. She constantly tells us what she thinks about evidence and people. Her motivation to solve the case trumps her personal life motivations, and this shows us just how active she is as our protagonist. We don’t get a sense of life from her outside the central plot though. This makes her lack depth. She is a middle-aged editor with few hobbies and few friends. She can be a rather boring protagonist, but she is our filter to the outer story as it ought to be.
The story is first person past tense. How far in the future from the events is the narrator? It is stated near the end that she lived through the events in the outer story approximately two years ago. The tense in the outer story plus the warning before the inner mystery make us aware Susan knows the solution. In a traditional whodunit the guarantee of a solution is implied by the form but not normally explicitly stated. Since this is the case, Susan’s hemming and hawing feels superficial. She reads as if she doesn’t know how it ends, but then on occasion, she will remind us she does. Why not make it present tense and allow us to fall back to the form dictating that the solution will come? Why make it so explicit that Susan knows and we don’t?
The warning before the inner mystery implies that the inner story will change our lives as it did Susan’s. But the inner story reads so much like Agatha Christie that there is little belief that the story itself can change our lives in any way.
Susan mentions craft norms she doesn’t follow, even though she is an editor. This leads me to think that Anthony is playing with us or mocking us like Alan Conway does with his writing. A few moments read as if Anthony is laughing at his own story (such as naming a character is one of the first things that happens even though he doesn’t do it for Susan until after 200 and something pages).
None of these alone escalate to such a high level that they become the central issue. There just doesn’t seem to be one thing keeping me from loving this book.
And I realize something. If a story has a glaring flaw, minor flaws are obstructed to a degree. If a novel has no glaring flaws the minor flaws shine like stars at night. When so many minor flaws glimmer they paint a picture. The picture here: this could have been better.
This novel is so close to where I need it to be, but it fails to cross the line because of several small issues that would have been easy to ignore in isolation. My expectations were high and it didn’t live up to them.
But wait one moment, I have something else to add.
Conclusion and Video
This book didn’t work for me. With so many small issues, I walk away from the text feeling that it could have been better. This is an example of how death by a thousand cuts can kill a novel.
I wrote up my critique (yes the one on this page) before I saw this book was adapted into a television series.
“Let’s see how they adapted it,” I said as I played the first episode. The structural issue I stated before made me think an adaptation would be impossible. I started watching and couldn’t stop.
The two narratives are interwoven. Susan has gained the depth she is missing in the novel. Other issues I had with the book have been fixed. I loved the TV adaptation the way I wanted to love the book. The acting is great and the writing is much more engaging. Anthony Horowitz also wrote the adaptation which shows me that he knows what he is doing when he writes for TV.
I normally think the book is better than the movie/TV show, but for Magpie Murders, this is not the case. I think the TV show is better than the book.
(Voidy, I will make you a deal. You can have the book but not the TV show. How about that?)
(slurp)
