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.
~
The Horowitz & Hawthorne mysteries:
1. The Word is Murder (2017)
2. The Sentence is Death (2018)
3. A Line to Kill (2021)
4. The Twist of a Knife (2022)
5. Close to Death (2024)
The Invisible Event 
My copy should be arriving today so avoiding even your review for a bit, sorry 😁
LikeLike
Gleeps, I better not mention that the robot is the killer, then…
LikeLike
🤣
LikeLike
Just finished this last week – and liked it a lot, even if “Horowitz” is mean about John Dickson Carr. I think it is my second favourite, doing really well with the variant premise. The final pages work as a surprisingly affecting diminuendo and I thought it was extremely well judged.
LikeLike
I’m glad you enjoyed it — as I say, I’m intrigued to see where that ending leads, I just don’t know if I can sustain that interest over another 10 years waiting find out. Especially as I’ll be very surprised — and impressed — if it ends up as dark as Horowitz is implying.
LikeLike
If Horowitz is as smart as I think, it won’t really be 10 years. Hopefully he will present the final novel as written in advance, in the style of CURTAIN, and then have it critiqued post facto by Susan Ryeland.
LikeLike
I need to get to Anthony Horowitz one of these days, but I’ll probably start with Magpie Murders and Moonflowers Murders. They sound like I might enjoy them a little more than this series.
LikeLike
But this contains an impossible crime, TC! And an updating of the impossible crime at that…surely enough to tempt you in?!
LikeLike
Well, Moonflower also has an impossible crime for like five seconds…
I’ve still only read the first Horowitz & Hawthorne book but I do think Magpie Murders is more of a must-read. It’s still one of my favorite books of all time. So I think that’s a good place to start with Horowitz (or you could always just get super into the Alex Rider books like I did)
LikeLike
You are, of course, correct. I had forgotten about the impossible crime in the novel-with-a-novel. Not a bad little deployment of it, either, though, yes, undeniably rather brief in duration.
LikeLike
As I wrote in another comment, I’ve been a huge Horowitz fan since as far as I can remember. Still, I don’t think any of his novels have reached the brilliance of “Foyle’s War” or his sometimes miraculous work on “Poirot” (his adaptation of “The Yellow Iris” which turns a second-rate short story into a riveting hour of TV should be studied in writing classes worldwide). I think his major weakness as a mystery writer lies in his misdirection, or rather the lack of it. As good as he is in laying all the clues and putting together complex plots, he’s not very good at presenting plausible alternatives. I figured out the killers in all of the Hawthorn books almost as soon as they appeared not because I’m particularly good at solving fictional crimes but because Horowitz’s clueing is so damn obvious it may as well be written in red ink.
I enjoyed “Close to Death” about as much as all the other Hawthorn books. With the exception of the Alderney one which I thought was quite poor, they’ve all been very consistent in quality. Interesting characters, well-realised locales, and clever structures are always their strengths. Still, I’m waiting for one to really dazzle or surprise me as much as “Magpie Murders” did, for example. “Close to Death” is a bit of an odd book in that it’s more like two novellas stuck together. Neither is substantial enough to really stand on its own, but together they make for fun reading.
I must confess I’m not awfully interested in Hawthorne’s background, however, so I was a bit disappointed that so much of the “present day” stuff is focused on Hawthorne muddling his way around some shadowy security firm. I wish instead he’d spent more time trying to solve the close murders on his own. The chapters in which he visits the scene of the crime and tries to figure out the locked room mystery are some of the best. The close murders themselves were good if a bit simplistic. I’m still not entirely sure I understand how the locked room trick was achieved. I did really love, however, the way it turns out that the novel’s biggest mystery isn’t whodunit but rather (ROT13) jub xvyyrq gur xvyyre. That’s some clever gamesmanship.
The biggest weakness of the book, however, for me was this: Horowitz spends the whole novel moaning about how Hawthorne won’t tell him who the killer is. So why doesn’t he just bloody Google it? We know that the murders were covered by the press because Horowitz tells us as much in the previous book. If this novel were set in the 1980s or before it would work, but in 2019 the whole conceit is awfully shaky. Ten minutes of Googling would have told Tony all he needed to know including the faiths of all the suspect without having to journey up to Richmond. I understand from the writer’s perspective why he doesn’t do it, but it makes no sense for the character who doesn’t even think of the possibility.
A stray thought for the end: Hawthorne is shaping up to be more of a James Bond figure than the Holmes figure he first appeared to be. The casual cruelty, hinted sadism, half-reluctant work for a shadowy organisation, tragic boyhood… I loved the idea of Hawthorne as a kind of (ROT13) Oevgvfu Qrkgre. Funzr Ubebjvgm qvfzvffrf vg ng gur raq.
LikeLike
I’ve caught the killer in, I think, two of the Hawthorne books, so you’re doing better than me 🙂 I know what you mean about alternative explanations, it would be lovely to have a false solution or two along the way to keep the game-playing element of this genre front and centre.
Funnily enough, the killer in Magpie Murders was so bleedin’ ovbvious to me that I was convinced it must have been dropped in only to shown to be false at the end. There are some great ideas in that book, but I always feel like everyone else who talks about it liked it a lot more than I did.
And, yes, it’s 2024, Anthony, Google is your friend! It’s to be wondered if Chat GPT or Grok end up helping him out in the series going forward…
LikeLike
It has been about 10 years since I read “Magpie Murders”, so it might not stand up to my memories of it. To be fair, I remember wowed by the structure and the way Horowitz cleverly mirrors and ties reality and fiction into a single, coherent mystery plot more than the puzzle itself. Still, I do remember being stumped by the Pund part of the book.
For as good as Horowitz is at updating GAD into the modern world which I find so much more compelling than endless GAD homages set in the 1930s-50s (like the novels by that hack Alan Conway), he doesn’t seem to be very interested in exploring new tech’s role in genre conventions. Other than an occasional mobile phone, most of his novels could easily take place in the early 90s.
One charming thing I never see mentioned about these books are the acknowledgements. They’re also written in-character, feature some nice in-jokes, occasionally give clues as to which parts of the narrative are based on real people/events, and I’m pretty sure that the one in “Close to Death” sets up a future mystery to be explored in the next installment. Horowitz is very good when it comes to these meta-clues.
LikeLike