if on a winter's night a detective- Magpie Murders (Anthony Horowitz)

Like every Indian kid growing up in the '90s and watching Kajol waltzing in the snow capped Swiss mountains wearing a chiffon saree, I also dreamed of snow-laden landscapes where I, instead of dancing in saree and of course falling and breaking my ankle, sat reading a crime thriller detective story in a bench in the park. Well like all things in reality, I realized what a truly terrible idea this was when I did try doing it in snow covered Leiden. It was windy, my hair kept slapping my face, my bum froze on the iron bench and my Bengali ancestry laughed at me as I tried my best to be comfortable as my bones turned to immovable stone. The only good part of this absolutely ridiculous failure of my childhood fantasy was the book that was a witness to this embarrassment. 

My first encounter with Anthony Horowitz was at my workplace Oxford Bookstore (yes, I am advertising it again) when I roamed about at lunchtime to calm myself before a particularly nasty meeting which resulted in a lot of shrieking like a banshee. I always knew him to be a YA writer (that dreaded group I swear) and someone who was rewriting Sherlock Holmes and James Bond (I of course am judgemental about it since NOONE can rewrite Doyle and Fleming together and be good at it), and was quite surprised to find an adult detective book of his, snucked away in between the James Pattersons and the Johns and the Grishams. It was a book called "The Word is Murder" and it was actually really good. I raved about it to a few friends and forgot all about it and him when I moved on to the next book.

 Like all good things in the universe, I met Horowitz again at a Waterstones store in Brussels where I went lured in by the "sale" sign. After doing long mental calculations about cheap South Asian editions and the not-so cheap European ones, I ended up buying Horowitz's Magpie Murders not because that was the best book on display, but it was within my budget and seemed perfectly Agatha Christie-ish in the blurb for my long bus-ride to Rotterdam. Oh but how wrong was I!

Magpie Murders is a lot like Christie's Murder of Roger Ackroyd--not in terms of story-line but in terms of what it does to the detective genre. Magpie is a book within a book, a meta in every sense of the term where an editor of crime fiction novels turns into a detective herself when her writer mysteriously commits suicide after sending in a very odd suicide letter and a manuscript of a murder mystery that has missing pages just as the detective is about to reveal the murderer. There are of course two mysteries to solve in this book--one fictional and one supposedly real where Susan, the editor makes lists like all reader-detectives like me, trying to figure out who could be the killer. Horowitz takes the book within a book concept literally--as soon as you crack open the first page, there are fake reviews of the murdered writer Alan Conway's earlier books, a list of his earlier publications, down to the copyright and the publishing rights. Horowitz turns the classic detective story on its head, telling two stories simultaneously, one where the reader is reading through the eyes of the all knowing detective and the other through the frustratingly limited view of Susan who much like the reader seems to be ill-equipped and one who derives all her detecting skills from reading detective stories. 

The book taps its hat to the Queen of detective stories, Agatha Christie, not only in terms of names of places and characters but also in bringing in a surprising cameo of her real life grandson Mathew Prichard as a witness in the murder of Alan Conway. The ending is both unexpected and underwhelming, specially for the real life one (that is real within the book...everything gets confusing by this time!), as it makes you realize that like everything even murder mysteries in real life are actually quite mundane and people kill for the most unromantic of reasons.

Writing a good murder mystery is much like cooking biryani--a lot of people think they can do it but very few can actually get that taste which is just perfect. Horowitz is like those fabled cooks who keep getting handed hundred years old recipes from their grandparents and smile triumphantly at all those who are not so lucky. Reading him one understands why in the world people would invest in him to re-create not only Holmes but also Bond--completely bonkers as an idea but somehow his secret recipes make it possible. So, while you catch up on one of the most interesting detective stories of the recent times, I will make a journey to 2011 and read House of Silk and hopefully meet the non-sexy Cumberbatchy Holmes in the 21st century. 

till the next time

keeping it bookish