Tag: anthony horowitz

series

Series Redux: Hawthorne and Horowitz

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Cover of A Deadly Episode

The new Hawthorne and Horowitz came out this week, so the time has come for a redux post for the very meta but very fun series from Anthony Horowitz. I have read the new book and it’s even more meta than ever – and I’ll get to that in a minute, but first your basic set up: a fictionalised version of Anthony Horowitz is the Watson figure to ex-policeman and now private investigator Daniel Hawthorne. At the start of the series in The Word is Murder Horowitz is chosen to be the ghost writer for Hawthorne, who is investigating the murder of a woman who was found dead hours after she visited a funeral directors to plan her own memorial. As you go through the series Hawthorne’s status increases as Horowitz’s seems to decrease and there are plenty of references to Horowitz’s real life and other works – including his other meta-mystery series featuring Atticus Pünd.

The latest is A Deadly Episode and I know I often say this will work best if you’ve read the others in the series but it’s especially true here – at least the first book – because the set up here is that The Word is Murder is being turned into a film – the script is written (not by Anthony), the roles are cast (the Anthony character is just called “the writer” and is played by an actor who is mid career crisis) and filming is underway (Hawthorne is a consultant and gets a car to set, Horowitz is not and does not). You won’t necessarily get spoiled for the outcome of that first book by reading this but you’ll definitely get more out of the story if you have. And I have to say I enjoyed this book so, so much. I basically read it in one evening – stopping only to eat my dinner – and it raced by so fast that I was sad and surprised when it was over.

I have often said before that I prefer the Atticus Pünd series to this one – but perhaps this is the book that tips me over the other way. The whole series is really worth reading, but this one especially. And full respect to Anthony Horowitz for making his fictional self so downtrodden and behind the curve. The temptation as an author must surely be to make yourself the clever and popular one, but he’s really leaning into the Hastings (getting the wrong end of the stick) and Watson (only there because Holmes is) of it all. Just delightful.

Have a great weekend!

Book previews

Out Today: New Magpie Murders

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Honestly. I’m so excited about this. I’ve been saying in my reviews of Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorn and Horowitz books that I hoped that there would be another Magpie Murders book and today is the day: the third Susan Ryeland mystery book is out. This has a continuation to the Atticus Pund series being written by the grandson of a beloved children’s author who, coincidentally thinks his grandmother was murdered. The reason why I wasn’t sure if there would be another in this series is because how many murders could be tied into the Atticus Pund series. So I’m incredibly excited to see what Horowitz has come up with – and it’s already been bought up for a third series of the TV adaptation. I can’t wait!

Book News

Third Magpie Murders coming!

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I spotted this on Friday night and honestly I nearly screamed outloud with excitement:

I’ve been saying for ages that I would like another book in the Susan Ryland series and now my prayers have been answered. I’ve wondered as well how easy it would be to come up with another plot for this given that the author of the Atticus Pund series is dead, and in the second book Susan seemed to have unravelled as many secrets as had been hidden there, so I’m thrilled Horowitz has come up with something – and the blurb is intruiguing:

Susan Ryeland has had enough of murder.

She’s edited two novels about the famous detective, Atticus Pünd, and both times she’s come close to being killed. Now she’s back in England and she’s been persuaded to work on a third.

The new ‘continuation’ novel is by Eliot Crace, grandson of Miriam Crace who was the biggest selling children’s author in the world until her death exactly twenty years ago.

Eliot believes that Miriam was deliberately poisoned. And when he tells Susan that he has hidden the identity of Miriam’s killer inside his book, Susan knows she’s in trouble once again.

As Susan works on Pünd’s Last Case, a story set in an exotic villa in the South of France, she finds more and more parallels between the past and the present, the fictional and the real world – until suddenly she finds that she has become a target.

Someone in Eliot’s family doesn’t want the book to be written. And they will do anything to prevent it.

This is coming out at the end of March and I’ve no idea how recent this announcement actually is – I’ve checked the usual places and there was nothing, but I think it must be pretty recent because it’s the first time Amazon has suggested it to me and that algorithm knows I like Horowitz so suggests them to me on the regular, and of course it hasn’t got a cover yet. Anyway, I’m really excited about it – and in addition to that, the TV adaptation of The Moonflower Murders is hitting the screens in the US this weekend, so hopefully it’ll be here in the UK soon too.

book adjacent, book related

Book adjacent: Magpie Murders

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Something a bit different today – and I’ve been watching the TV adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s novel Magpie Murders. I read the book back when it first came out and I really enjoyed it – but had no idea how they would manage to turn it into a TV series, so I got myself a Britbox subscription especially to watch it!

In case you haven’t read the book, a reminder of the plot: Susan Ryeland has been editing the Atticus Pünd novels for years. The series’s author, Alan Conway is not her favourite person, but she puts up with him because the series has been incredibly popular with fans of the Queens of Crime. But when she reads the latest manuscript, not only is the end missing, but she’s convinced that Conway has hidden another story within his new novel.

Now, what the book blurb doesn’t tell you, but the TV trailer does, is that Alan Conway ends up dead and that as she searches for the missing chapter, she’s also trying to figure out who killed him. I had no clue how they were going to make this work on screen because of the book-within-a-book nature of the story but it really clicks – with cast doubling their roles and different filters on the camera to make it even easier to tell the two apart – as well as the different costumes for the different time periods. I was a bit sceptical about whether the adaptation really needed six parts but it turns out that it sort of did – because there is a lot of plot with two parallel mysteries to a solve and not a lot to cut. Anthony Horowitz has adapted this himself from his novel -and it really works. As you can see from the trailer, a lot of the cast play two roles – the real people who knew Alan and their fictional equivalents in the book.

There are a lot of familiar faces in the cast and the performances are great. Lesley Manville makes a great Susan – tenacious about trying to find the missing chapter of the book, but guarded and prickly about her personal life. I’m not a Game of Thrones viewer, so I’m not sure I’d seen Conleth Hill in anything before I saw him in Holding, and then here he is again in this turning in another great – but very different – performance. I really hope they do the second in the series, The Moonflower Murders, and I also really hope that Horowitz writes a third. He does have two meta-murder mystery series though, and he seems to be doing more with the Hawthorne books – which is even more meta as a fictional version of Horowitz is in that one. I really can’t imagine how they would do a TV version of that. But I said that with the Atticus Pund series, so what do I know! There is a fourth Hawthorne book coming this summer which I’m already looking forward to reading.

As I said at the top, this one is on Britbox, which you can get direct from them or as an add-on to an Amazon Prime subscription. You get a seven days free trial, and there are a couple of other Britbox originals that I fancy having a look at, so I’ve gone beyond the trial for now!

Enjoy.