‘”Thou shalt not kill”. She whispered the words.’
In 2017, I was starting my degree in Publishing so I became eagerly connected with this book’s framing device – an editor sitting down to read the newest, yet to be released, typescript in the fictional Atticus Pund series of detective stories. This meta-narrative shouldn’t scare you off, however.
Set in the 50s, we are introduced to the cast of this mystery – every other page dedicated to the perspective of an attendee of Mary Blakiston’s funeral. Blakiston stands at the centre of the web, having been found dead – ‘the hoover was still there, a bright red thing, almost like a toy… Somehow she had got tangled up in the wire’ – in Pye Hall, the token big house of this book that ‘had always been there, as long as the village itself’.
Characterisation is fun, the police correspondent Chubb is described as always giving the impression of having put on weight. ‘He had the look of a man who had just finished a particularly good meal’. In the beginning, it is a bit of a task keeping on top of the conveyer-belt of new characters however, as always is the case for these types of stories, you learn that you retain information quite well as you move forward.
Aesthetically, this book is very pleasing. The typescript that the editor reads – that we also get to read – is presented in a typewriter font that is utterly delectable for a murder mystery. Magpie Murders delights in the charm of replicating a classic scenario of a murder mystery, akin to an Agatha Christie. As previously mentioned, the style of this typescript has a few blotches and grammar mistakes which adds to the charm of this unedited story our editor is reading.
As the second murder is committed, the pace of the story increases as Horowitz flits forward and back to the editor’s perspective and the scripted-story. I can attest to the twist at the end being something to look forward to. As a word of warning, do not be put off by the respective bulk of this book – an alien size to classic murder mysteries – and the typewriter font is a style you get used to reading.
Magpie Murders is a definite adventure in this category.
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