Digging into deadly secrets

Winnipeg Free Press

7 days ago

Dang that Anthony Horowitz — he so confoundingly makes us think about every single word from start to finish, makes us work so hard to try to understand what goes on inside Atticus Pund's mind in 1955 even as Susan Ryeland struggles to sleuth how the murders in Pund's world hold clues to murders in her fictional 2025.
Understand any of that? Great, then you know where we're going, and you're delighted with a successor to Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders.
Don't have a notion where you are? Despair not, for you have an amazingly awesome murder mystery ahead of you.
Anna Lythgoe photo
Anthony Horowitz's mystery-within-a-mystery novels starring book editor Susan Ryeland demand the reader's attention.
Horowitz is the 70-year-old devilishly-clever English author who created Foyle's War, adapted novels for Midsomer Murders, wrote new novels featuring Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, writes murder mysteries in which he plays himself as an always-a-step-behind, fumbling, bumbling John Watson-type chronicler to former cop Daniel Hawthorne.
He wrote Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, both turned into magnificent series on PBS, and now here's Marble Hall Murders, even more complex than its predecessors. Though just oh-so far beyond good.
Do not under any circumstances call it The Marble Hall Murders. The word 'The' does not appear in any of Horowitz's titles. You have been warned.
Susan Ryeland is a book editor living in our time. It was her job to edit the Atticus Pund murder mysteries written by Alan Conway, a very difficult man who obviously ripped off Pund from Hercule Poirot, but did a very good job of doing so.
Pund identified as a Greek Jew living in Germany who survived the Holocaust and ended up as a private detective in London in the 1950s. Conway despised the Pund books, always seeing himself not as a mystery writer but as a literary genius whose works would be dissected in PhD theses at Oxford and Cambridge. Alas…
Conway wrote Pund with characters and events drawn from his real life. In Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, Horowitz gifted us with full-length Pund books-within-a-book, in which were hidden clues about who murdered whom in the world inhabited by Conway and Ryeland.
Major characters in Pund's life mirrored people in Conway's life. That's why so many actors played dual roles.
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Marble Hall Murders drives us much further up the wall because Ryeland finds herself reading not a book-within-a-book, but a Pund book delivered in four chunks of 10,000 to 30,000 words each, interspersed with contemporary adventures in which even Ryeland became suspected of — no, wait, can't get ahead of ourselves.
As Marble Hall Murders begins, (spoiler alert) Alan Conway is dead, Susan Ryeland is an unemployed book editor in England no longer living in Crete with her one true love, and she gets hired to edit a 'continuation' novel — the Conway estate having approved the Pund books continuing through author Eliot Crace.
Crace has a three-book contract, despite which he calls his first book-in-progress Pund's Last Case, poor Atticus having a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
Eliot is the ne'er-do-well grandson of Miriam Crace, whose dozens of books about a tiny-sized human family made her the most adored children's author in the universe and controller of a vast fortune. She died in her sleep of a heart attack 20 years before.
Marblee Hall Murders
In Pund's Last Case, an exceedingly rich English woman who's dying asks Pund to come to her estate in France to sort something so evil — well, she'll tell him when he gets there. And Pund arrives, hours after the woman dies of a heart attack immediately after drinking her daily tea that tasted a little funny.
Crace accuses his rather large and scurrilous family of having murdered granny Miriam — each character in Pund's Last Case is based on a character in the Crace family, and Eliot promises the book will reveal who murdered granny Crace.
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The Crace family can't afford a scandal — Miriam's books are having a resurgence, and Netflix has proposed a $200-million series of movies and a multi-year TV show.
Susan Ryeland is caught up in the middle of all this mess, desperately trying to decipher who among so many nasty people in a piece of fiction is the avatar of a killer in her world.
Horowitz plays fair. The clues are there, both in Atticus Pund's world and in Susan Ryeland's, if only we are keen enough and sufficiently sharp to catch them.
Anthony, you are a devious and wicked fellow — do keep it up.
Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin was dismayed to learn that Susan Ryeland does not approve of pets sleeping on their humans' bed at night. He had been unaware such attitudes even existed.