Reviewed by Harriet
Back in 2016 I reviewed Anthony Horowitz’s hugely entertaining Magpie Murders [here], in which book-editor Susan Ryeland takes up detection when she discovers that Alan Conway, the writer whose books she has been editing, has been murdered, and that the last chapters of his final novel have gone missing. This was followed in 2020 by an equally enjoyable sequel, Moonflower Murders – here, Susan has to re-read one of Conway’s novels to solve a crime committed several years earlier. You’d think with Conway dead, and Susan, at the end of Moonflower, having retired to Crete to run a hotel with her partner, that would be as far as this series could go. But now Horowitz has brought her back to London, because a Conway continuation series has been commissioned by the publisher, who thinks Susan is the perfect person to edit it. The author is a young man called Elliot Crace, who Susan happens to know, as she had edited his series of rather poor detective novels a few years earlier. Rather dubious but in need of an income, she agrees to take the book on, only to discover that Elliot is following Conway by hiding clues to a real murder in the pages of his new book. What’s more, the victim in his new Conway novel is clearly based on his own grandmother, Miriam Crace, who was one of the most successful children’s novelists of all time. Elliot, having been brought up in Marble Hall, the grand stately home where she lived with her children and grandchildren, tells Susan that far from the paragon of virtue his grandmother pretended to be, she was in fact an unpleasant, promiscuous racist, and treated them all with great unkindness. So although her death has not been seen as suspicious, Elliot is not only certain that it was murder but also claims to know who did it. However, he won’t tell anyone, so Susan has to follow the clues in his new, incomplete, work to find the identity of the killer.
As in the two previous novels, Susan’s story is interwoven with extracts from the novel she’s working on. This one is going to be called Pünd’s Last Case, and takes the Poirot-esque (though German) detective to a luxurious chateau in the South of France, to investigate the death of a wealthy Englishwoman. The chateau is full of her family members: her second husband, a rich American art-collector, her children and their spouses, and various employees. Needless to say, all of them turn out to have motives which Pünd, working with the French detective Frédéric Voltaire, have to painstakingly uncover.
So, as before, there’s fun with intertextuality, with Golden Age parody, with the not always admirable backstairs of the publishing world, and of course with the solving of a contemporary whodunnit. There’s a subtext looking at Nazi war-time art thefts, and Miriam Crace is clearly partly modelled on Enid Blyton. There’s also a particularly nice police detective, Ian Blakeney, whose job is to investigate Susan when she’s suspected of murder, but who, she begins to suspect, seems to be anxious to befriend her.
As everyone reading this probably knows, the first two novels have been adapted into a very successful BBC TV series, of which Horowitz’s wife Jill Green is the executive producer. Horowitz has said in an interview that it was her idea to write a third part of the series, which put him under a great deal of pressure:
So I had to write a 550-page novel very, very quickly, and then adapt it into a TV screenplay, also very quickly. By the end, I felt my head had shrunk so my brain was the size of a walnut.
Walnut-sized or not, Horowitz’s brain has done him proud yet again. The TV series has been excellent so far and I’m sure the new one will be equally good. However, if you want the true depth and complexity of the stories, please read the books. But be warned – if you haven’t read or seen them before, start at the beginning of the series, as there are spoilers in each one revealing the outcome of the previous novel.
Have we seen the last of Susan? The finale seems to suggest so, but knowing Horowitz (and his persistent wife) who knows?
Harriet is one of the founders and a co-editor of Shiny.
Anthony Horowitz, Marble Hall Murders (Century, 2025). 978-1529904345, 592pp., hardback.
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