Another Great Horowitz Mystery

The Sentence Is Death     Anthony Horowitz     (2019)

I’m unabashedly a fan of Anthony Horowitz’s mystery novels. On this blog I’ve reviewed his 2017 offering, Magpie Murders, as well as the first of his metafictional Daniel Hawthorne mysteries, The Word is Murder (2018). With The Sentence Is Death, Horowitz presents the second volume that features the private detective Hawthorne, a former police officer now hired by the police to help on particularly challenging murder cases.

As with The Word is Murder, The Sentence Is Death features as first-person narrator a character named Anthony Horowitz, who bears a startling resemblance to the real-life Anthony Horowitz in his work life and in his family configuration—hence, metafiction. Watch for zingers that play off the insertion of the author into his own fiction. For example, the fictional Horowitz notes that Jill Green, actual wife of the author Horowitz, “has made it clear that she’s uncomfortable being a character in my book. Unfortunately, truth is what it’s all about.” (303) Uh, “truth” in this case is a fictional narrative about a fictional murder.

The case involves the murder of a prominent divorce lawyer in London, with red herrings and potential suspects abounding. Key clues include an overheard doorway conversation shortly before the murder and the number “182” painted on the wall near the corpse. Throughout his writing career the author Horowitz has been captivated by word play—mistaken similar names, anagrams, homonyms, crosswords, multiple meanings, and such. Word play often has an important plot function in the episodes of Foyle’s War, the World War II mystery series (2002-2015) that he wrote for British television. Fictional Horowitz also loves words, as he transcribes the details of the murder case that Hawthorne is investigating in The Sentence Is Death. Hawthorne says to fictional Horowitz, “You’ll choose all the right words and you’ll make it come to life. There’s no way I could do anything like that. Which is why it’s such a great partnership. I do the legwork. You do the rest.” (358)

Fictional Horowitz also chastises writers who break the “fair-play rule” of mysteries:  “Whenever Hawthorne saw anything or worked something out, he deliberately kept it from me as if the whole thing was some sort of game. This is often the case in detective stories and I always find it infuriating . . .” (164-65) Of course, author Horowitz leads his readers down many cul-de-sacs before he reveals the solution to the crime. This is despite his avowed approach:  ”In a museum, a department store, a theatre, a Tube station, I’ll find myself wondering what goes on behind those locked doors. I sometimes think that it’s actually a good definition of creative writing: to unlock doors and take readers through to the other side.” (131) Multiple doors in The Sentence Is Death open and shut and then open again.

Mystery lovers, don’t miss this one.  

An Irish Cozy Mystery

Holding     Graham Norton     (2017)

A village in the west of Ireland, a human skeleton unearthed at a building site, gossip about old love triangles, and a bumbling local police sergeant:  all the ingredients for a classic cozy mystery novel. Holding is indeed that, but it goes beyond the genre.

In Holding, Graham Norton has produced some noteworthy character studies of mature people who are at turning points in their lives. He has readers sympathizing with the middle-aged police sergeant, PJ Collins, who is overweight, underutilized, and desperately lonely. Norton also pulls us into the plight of middle-aged Brid Riordan, who loves her kids but often gets drunk to forget how unhappy her marriage is. Another character is Evelyn Ross, who’s stuck in the past, lamenting a failed romance from twenty-odd years ago. There’s also PJ’s elderly housekeeper, Lizzie Meany, whose background is revealed in a heartbreaking and surprisingly violent segment of the novel.

The mystery plot is not that tricky for readers who read a lot of cozies—I guessed the identity of the bones early on and had a good idea who buried them by the midpoint of the book. Still, the climax of the book, with the solution of the mystery, was suitably tense for me. It’s the unraveling of the story, with the appropriate red herrings, that gives the author scope for more interactions of his characters. PJ, for example, compromises his professionalism in his dealings with two of the murder suspects, and Brid makes some major changes in her family situation.

Holding has such a classic-1930s-mystery vibe to it that modern elements like DNA testing and mobile phones seemed slightly odd at first, but Norton skillfully integrates twenty-first-century technology into a rural Ireland that in some ways has not changed for a century—the pubs on the main street, the church fete, the outlying farms and hedgerows. He does allow, of course, for occasional lapses in phone reception that will advance his plot!  

Although I had never heard of him before, Irish-born Graham Norton is a well-known television personality and cultural commentator in Britain. This status might have gained him some book sales in the European market, but it clearly didn’t influence my decision to pick up Holding at my local library and stick with it to the end. (I have a “50-page test.”  I assess each title that I start reading at the 50-page mark to decide if I want to invest more time it in. I abandon many, many books even before page 50. Holding easily passed this test.)

The epilogue of Holding contains suggestions that more adventures of Sergeant PJ Collins may be forthcoming. I hope Norton takes time from his television career to produce another PJ mystery. I’ll be on the lookout!