Magpie Murders
by Anthony Horowitz
First posted October 2018
I was fiending for a mystery novel for no reason that I can pinpoint when I Don’t Even Own a Television offered this one up during their “good things they like to read” section.
Scratched my mystery itch!
I’ve always loved whodunnits. I’ve not just edited them. I’ve read them for pleasure throughout my life, gorging on them actually. You must know that feeling when it’s raining outside and the heating’s on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover.
Magpie Murders is a book about mystery novels more than it is a mystery novel itself.
Okay. Now that the clichéd sentiments are out of the way, let me say this—I am amazed that a mystery novel could break my desire to uncover the mystery so thoroughly.
That’s not meant to disparage. There is a nested mystery here, this book within a book. It’s a device which is laid out within the first ten pages, so knowing it is coming isn’t much of a spoiler. But I forgot, at some point, that the ninth (and final) entry in the Atticus Pünd series wasn’t the whole book until I flipped ahead to check the page count and realized the numbers jumped around and changed location. When Magpie breaks back into the real world—the opening framing device—I was frothing for a satisfactory conclusion to Pünd’s dilemma. As I was meant to. But a dozen or a hundred or however many pages later, once I forgot the immediacy of the mystery and was reminded, again and again, that the book I just read was only a story, well: “The funny thing is, after all that I didn’t even want to read the missing chapters of Magpie Murders.”
I expect that is the point, but it drove itself into me more deeply than I was prepared for. Magpie Murders—our physical book, not the story that is read by our narrator also titled Magpie Murders—becomes much more interesting. It, not the nested fiction, is the detective tale we were promised, and its nearness to reality highlights the trope-y pointlessness of the whodunnit genre. In fact, by the time we get to the conclusion of the novel-within-a-novel—what could have been the climax had we not been interrupted—it lacks any sort of punch. Instead all I can see are the manipulative forces mystery stories employ to push the reader along. It feels…pointless.
Pünd, our Poirot-alike, waxes eloquent: “For a moment the murder seemed almost irrelevant. After all, what did it matter? People had come and gone. They had fallen in love. They had grown up and they had died. But the village itself, the grass verges and the hedgerows, the entire backdrop against which the drama had been played, that remained unchanged.” It’s true, at that point, that the story-within-the-story doesn’t matter: the stakes of the framing tale are much higher because it is what is really happening.
Which, of course, isn’t true. None of it is happening. And that’s the real rub, isn’t it? Fiction is fiction is fiction: you can point out tropes and clichés from here to kingdom come, but regardless of whether you are using them for satire or sincerity, you’re still using them:
The unsigned will is one of those tropes of detective fiction that I’ve come to dislike, only because it’s so overused. In real life, a lot of people don’t even bother to make a will but then we’ve all managed to persuade ourselves we’re going to live forever. They certainly don’t go round the place threatening to change it in order to give someone the excuse to come and kill them.
A mystery novel wrapped around a purposefully stock-standard whodunnit is still a mystery novel. It isn’t that the action or plot or characters are new or unique; they aren’t. What’s new is the acknowledgement—the anticipation—of how audiences will interact with the conventions of the mystery genre, and how Magpie Murders leans into those conventions to make something new; a whodunnit that knows its place in the world of literary fiction.