The Word Is Murder

Honestly, this is really not bad. I'll definitely be continuing this series. The murder mystery in itself was entertaining enough, and had a serviceable plot twist, but it had a pretty interesting gimmick that I haven't seen before. The author wrote himself into the book, starring himself (yes, Anthony Horowitz) as the book-writing Watson to his fictional Sherlock, ex-detective Hawthorne.

It was trippy enough when Anthony begins talking about his past works and careers, even having a cameo of Peter Jackson and Stephen Spielberg, with whom he the author really did almost collaborate with on the script of Tintin 2, a movie that never got made in the end. The result is that the story almost felt like an autobiography, and lends it a really weird non-fictional air. It blurred the line between fantasy and real life. Horowitz really dialed the trippiness up to eleven, even in his Acknowledgements at the end of the book, where he thanked certain people at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for their assistance in his research, but also spoke about how they were also linked to the fictional character in the story who also attended RADA.

One contentious point in his book, though, is positioning Hawthorne, as the central detective, as being somewhat intensely homophobic. I'm pretty sure this wouldn't fly with a lot of readers, and it was also fairly obvious that Horowitz is using this potentially triggering plot point as a launchpad from which he can contrast and air his own liberal views. Yet, at the same time, it also feels like he's subscribing to these liberal views because that's just where the wind is blowing at the time, without really understanding why homophobia can be triggering to audiences - if that makes sense. It left a bad taste in one's mouth and I can't really feel any kind of empathy for Hawthorne after that, although I must confess I'm a little curious to know how Horowitz intends to somehow explain this incongruous homophobia away in later books. I'm of the belief, though, that the first book should at least contain enough teasers of what might come in later books to keep people reading, and not trust to blind curiosity alone, and this book didn't give me enough meat to keep me hoping that Hawthorne would be in any way “redeemed” in the future books. It also doesn't help that even if we disregarded the homophobia, Hawthorne is still a pretty intensely rude and unpleasant character. He's clearly based off of Sherlock Holmes, who has always had a reputation for being prickly, but while Holmes still manages to retain some endearing and intriguing quality to him amongst readers, Hawthorne is almost completely repulsive and... just not someone I'd ever like to meet.

Nevertheless though, there's still enough of Horowitz in here to dilute the Hawthorne unpleasantness, and the murder mystery was definitely well written. There was a huge red herring but it sort of made sense and I didn't feel cheated out of it at the end when we finally realise how big a red herring it was. There was also just enough clues scattered throughout the story for the resolution to feel satisfying and like we maybe could've solved it all along if we had been paying attention, a classic hallmark of the cozy mystery.

I'll definitely try out the next installment of the series.