Having, at the end of previous book The Twist of a Knife (2022), signed up to relating at least three more cases following around ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne, Anthony Horowitz faces a problem: interesting murders are not determined by publishing deadlines. So, with a contractual obligation looming and no death on the horizon, Anthony asks Hawthorne for details of a past case, and Hawthorne obliges by slowly feeding him notes on the murder of Giles Kenworthy in Richmond some five years previously. Can Anthony make this format of mystery work for him? And is there an appropriate amount of peril in an investigation already signed, sealed, and delivered well before his involvement?

“I’ll give you everything you need — but in instalments. You write two or three chapters. I read them. Then we talk about them. If you get anything wrong, I can steer you back on the right track. Like — you know — fact-checking.”

“But you will give me the solution!”

“No. I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“You never know the solution, mate. That’s what makes your writing so special. You don’t have a clue.”

There’s some fun to be had in this, allowing Horowitz our author to inject his character with some extra misgivings: a policewoman involved in the case seeming “like one officer too many and would barely make it into my second draft”, or having to explain to Hawthorne the need to add obfuscation and character to factual events so that the narrative fulfils the expectations of the genre. These books have always had an eyebrow cocked at the expectations of the reader, and in framing his story this way Horowitz mines fresh ground very cleverly.

This is particularly true when the killer is revealed to Anthony by a tertiary character at the halfway point (“the cardinal sin in crime fiction…”) and so the second half of the novel takes on a different shape, with Anthony wondering how he’ll get something surprising out of the remaining pages. And then, much to the delight of this reader, a potentially impossible crime presents itself: an ostensible suicide in a locked car in a locked garage, the solution of which isn’t quite fair but does superb work updating the subgenre in a way I’ll not even hint at here.

This gives time in the second half for Horowitz to play with the world of his milieu, both reflecting on the lives of the people involved, most of who are still alive…

“You write murder stories, don’t you? Well, perhaps you should think a little more about the people who have to live through them and what it does to them. To this day, there are still people who believe I had something to do with what happened. It never goes away.”

…and adding fuel to the fire of the mystery behind Hawthorne himself, with certain details added and, of course, more questions going unanswered. For me, this is one of the things I can see being a drawback in these books as they progress: Horowitz has spoken of this series extending to a possible 12 books, so, with seven remaining, the current rate of output means I’m going to be kept hanging on the matter of Hawthorne and his Mysterious Past for another decade…and, honestly, I don’t know if I’m going to maintain both clarity and interest for that long. Time will tell, of course, but it’s one reservation I have — especially as we seem to be setting up something pretty dark for Hawthorne and, since he is the protagonist of a long-running series, I fear this aspect might fizzle out somewhat.

The solution here, while coming a little out of nowhere with some logical leaps and a little bit of hand-waving, is clever and feeds into the structure of the narrative well, and Horowitz is to be applauded for altering the winning formula so successfully. A few nods to the classics — the name of the bulldog, the name of the doctor — always go down well with genre nerds, and as a fan of the traditional mystery I love that someone is making a success of that sort of book in the 21st century. That there are meta-fictional elements added in (for example, the first page is a map, and later Anthony opines that adding a map to a book is going to be an extra expense) simply adds to the fun without feeling like an exercise in beard-stroking. One must meta carefully, and Horowitz is proving himself a master of that.

So, yes, this series remains a genuine pleasure for how it updates the classic mystery for the modern audience. With its clearly-drawn characters, swift prose, canny misdirection, and tongue-in-cheek game-playing it shows the giddy delights of this genre when adopted well, and, the above slight hesitation aside, I thoroughly look forward to seeing where we go in future.

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The Horowitz & Hawthorne mysteries: