When it comes to metafiction in the crime genre, nobody does it better than Anthony Horowitz. His Daniel Hawthorne detective novels are brilliant, and his Magpie Murders stories have been big hit in print and on screen thanks to the BBC series. Marble Hall Murders follows on from Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, and once again brings us book editor Susan Ryeland working on a mystery novel featuring the 1950s German émigré Atticus Pünd.
While offering us two puzzling mysteries that we will undoubtedly fail to solve without Herr Pünd and Ms Ryeland’s help, Anthony Horowitz also manages to poke fun at the publishing industry and all its tropes and foibles, including eccentric authors. For example, we know that Pünd’s creator Alan Conway was a murder victim in an earlier book and that Pünd has a terminal disease. However, just as Karin Smirnoff and David Lagercrantz have written Salander stories since Stig Larsson’s passing, so a publishing company has acquired the rights to Conway’s character and they’ve lined up a difficult author for Susan to work with.
Eliott Crace is the grandson of Miriam Crace, a famous children’s author whose stories about The Little People have become a global franchise. She has been dead 20 years and Elliot is something of a failed author, but that’s where Susan comes in. She knew Conway’s style inside out, and newly back from Crete, she’s hired to work with Elliot to produce an extension to the Atticus Pünd mystery series, which is set in the 1950s.
Pünd’s Last Case with Elliot Crace in control sends the detective to Nice in the South of France, where he hopes to help Lady Margaret Chalfont with a problem. Like Pünd, the elderly aristocrat has a terminal illness. Unfortunately, Pünd arrives too late and Lady Margaret dies in a suspected poisoning. Now Pünd and his assistant James Fraser will work with a French sûreté detective called Frédéric Voltaire. Voltaire doesn’t want Pünd’s help, but his superiors are keen to clear up the case lest it damage the city’s developing tourist sector.
As she reads Elliot’s draft, Susan makes plenty of notes on how the book could be improved. While you might read Elliot’s words and think, “Well, that’s not a bad start,” she tears into the manuscript and you get a good idea of just what’s required when it comes to editing a mystery. All sorts of things you may not question come out in her critique, and while Elliot is stung by it, he wants the book to be successful so he goes about making the amends.
However, there are problems ahead for Susan. She realises that, just like Alan Conway, Elliot Crace is putting real life characters into his story. In fact, it’s based on his immediate family. Elliot seems to believe that his grandmother, Miriam, was poisoned. He thinks he knows who did it, how and why. Plus, he hated his grandmother and years ago was in league with his siblings in a childish murder plot of their own.
As Elliot writes further chapters, Susan starts asking questions and annoys all the wrong people. It will get very sticky for Elliot, too. His uncle, who now manages the lucrative Little People franchise, is about to sign a multi-million pound deal with Netflix to make a new series for a new generation of viewers. A book alleging that the original creator was a truly horrible person, and was murdered, is not the kind of publicity the Crace family needs right now.
Back in the 1950s, there are big twists ahead for Pünd as the ‘fictional’ detective story unfolds in the manuscript. In the present day, there are equally massive swerves for Susan as the Crace family and one or two characters from past novels converge on her. Peril abounds.
The story is captivating and wonderfully written, however at nearly 600 pages it does feel a little stretched. Just when you sense a Golden Age-style gathering of the suspects should arrive, there’s another new tangent or two. For quite a period, the story focuses on the here and now, whereas the 1950s setting with Pünd feels the more appealing. The way Pünd and Voltaire discover their common ground, based on their different experiences of World War II, is beautifully done.
The present setting is less appealing. There is a dearth of likeable characters, I doubted Susan’s credibility a little and didn’t enjoy her company as much as in the previous stories. How far would a book editor really stray into another family’s business? Although, if she weren’t so nosy there wouldn’t be much of a story. And maybe nosiness is the whole point in some mystery novels and Horowitz is showing us this.
In the notes at the end, the author says he wrote the story for the actress Lesley Manville, who wanted to reprise the role of Susan Ryeland once again on television. It’s not that further Atticus Pünd stories in print and on television is a bad idea. Quite the opposite. They are very enjoyable and Marble Hall Murders is too. You are always in good hands with Anthony Horowitz. However, perhaps this one feels a little forced.
Harper/Century
Print/Kindle/iBook
$22.19
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
