Last year I was delighted to review Anthony Horowitz's experimental crime novel Magpie Murders, and did so very enthusiastically. Now we have this year's offering - equally experimental but in a very different way. That was a multilayered text, full of intertextuality, including extracts from a Christie-esque golden age crime novel. This one is not like that - it's a supposedly straightforward account of the solution to a murder. However, one similarity is that the main protagonist of Magpie Murders was a literary editor turned detective and here in The Word is Murder the protagonist is a crime writer turned detective - but the crime writer here is called Anthony Horowitz and he shares most of his creator's life history and presumably his personality. This is a truly brilliant metafictional concept and works extremely well.
The story starts in 2011. Horowitz has just pressed the 'Send' button on his computer, dispatching the finished MS of his Sherlock Holmes sequel, The House of Silk, to the publishers. Now he's temporarily unsure what the future holds. His ongoing TV series, Foyle's War, is on the back burner until a decision is made whether to continue. He thinks he's finished the successful YA series on Alex Rider - he's written 10 books and feels its time to move on. He's been hired by Spielberg to write the screenplay for Tintin 2, but isn't at all sure his script will be accepted. So he's actually feeling somewhat at a loss, and, when he gets a surprise telephone call asking him to meet the caller, a retired detective inspector by the name of Hawthorne, he agrees to go. He just about remembers Hawthorne, who had been hired as an advisor on one of Horowitz's projects, and recalls that, though obviously useful and well-informed, he was awkward and rather unpleasant to work with. Now Hawthorne has a proposition:
'I want you to write about me,'
'What do you mean?' I asked
'I want you to write a book about me'.
'Why would I want to do that?
'For money.'
'You want to pay me?'
'No. I thought we'd go fifty-fifty.'
Hawthorne explains that he's doing consultancy work for the Met, and they've handed him a puzzling case. A wealthy widow, Diana Cowper, recently paid a visit to a firm of undertakers, where she planned and paid for her own fairly elaborate funeral. Later that she day, somebody murdered her. Horowitz is intrigued, but feels it's too far from his usual remit - not enough creative control - and turns the offer down. A few days later a chance question at a book signing ('Why don't you ever write anything real?') causes him to have second thoughts and soon he is following Hawthorne around as he tries to solve this indissoluble case. Essentially he becomes Watson to Hawthorne's Holmes and that's the pattern for the rest of the case.
In fact the resemblance is valid in more than one way. Hawthorne is clearly brilliant, always one step ahead of everyone else. He has the disconcerting ability of knowing things about people without being told, by Holmesian methods of following small physical clues. He refuses to divulge any facts about his past or his personal life, though Horowitz is constantly pointing out that he won't be able to write about him without them. He's condescending and patronising in his treatment of Horowitz, who he persists in calling Tony in spite of being told nobody ever calls him that. Horowitz, on the other hand, finds himself constantly wrong footed. He thinks he may have ways of helping the investigation, as Diana Cowper's son is a well-known actor, frequently working in Hollywood, and he follows up his theatre contacts, hoping to get some info that Hawthorne hasn't already acquired, but needless to say it misfires. He keeps thinking he's solved the case but he's always got it wrong, Eventually he finds himself in deep trouble - can Hawthorne get him out of it?
I found this novel a sheer delight from start to finish. I loved the way fact and fiction were constantly sliding together - a good example is the character of the actor/film star Damian Cowper, whose stage and film work are a wonderful amalgam of that of a number of other successful British actors (he's just back from the US, for instance, where he's been filming a successful TV series called Homeland). It was huge fun trying to separate the truth from the fiction, and I'm sure there were more instances I missed. Characters like Horowitz's agent, his wife and his sons put in an appearance, and several of his other media contacts too. Great fun to read, and I'm absolutely sure it was great fun to write too. As for Hawthorne, the only definitively and wholly fictional central character, he's a totally brilliant creation and we can only hope that he may reappear again, though maybe this joke is only good for one outing? In any case I need hardly say that this is highly recommended.
