The Word Is Murder (A Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery)

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What I understand is that this is the first of a series of crime novels starring these two gentlemen. And I'm already looking forward to the next. The cops in London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) need Diana's case solved fast. So an MPS official prevails on a former police detective, Daniel Hawthorne - a brilliant sleuth who was fired for bad behavior - to 'consult' on the investigation.

A woman has already planned her own funeral, but when she is found dead six hours after she finalizes the arrangements, it has the police wondering if she planned her own death, too? And that ending. Oh, that ending drove me bonkers, because it relied on one of the worst genre tropes--tv tropes--there is. We also end with not learning much about Hawthorne, for all Tony's attempts at 'investigation,' but we do know too much more about Tony. I will give him credit; he was willing to allow himself to be perceived as an insecure and obtuse person. Dr. Watson indeed.One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper – the wealthy mother of a famous actor - enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service. Note--I had scored a cheap trade edition at Half Price Books. And it'll be passed on. Not worthy of my library space. The Word Is Murder takes us into the highly creative and originial thought processes of the very talented Anthony Horowitz. He's turned the tables on us readers. Instead of a passive reading experience on our usual part, we become more privy to the writer's approach to developing his characters and his storyline. We get inside the author's head which makes for a wild ride through this one. There's even a revealing dialogue between Hawthorne and Horowitz at the end.

With its unorthodox protagonist, clever plotting, brilliantly imperfect characters, and escalating sense of urgency and intrigue, THE WORD IS MURDER is an instant crime classic that will keep you reading as fast as you can… one of the best and most compulsively readable mysteries of the year. Hugely satisfying on every level." ( Written by Sime) The mobbing disturbs him, though. He thinks it’s symptomatic of a rage in society that has grown since the Brexit vote. “There is a rigidity in the way we have begun to think and speak. If we step outside certain lines on certain issues, we find not just people disagreeing, but disagreeing to the extent of death threats. When somebody says something untoward in the press, and I am not saying this about myself, people don’t just say that was a stupid thing to say. They say, ‘Lose your job.’ They want you to never ever have an income again.” The plot is further enhanced by several foreshadowing clues. The first instance of this is at the end of the opening chapter when Horowitz comments, “It was definitely a mystery and one that required a specialist approach. At the same time, it had absolutely nothing to do with me. That was about to change.” Diana Cowper’s choice of a specific poem and Beatles song also foreshadow Hawthorne’s final conclusions about her death. The author’s bumbling investigation techniques, which frustrate Hawthorne to no end, further allude to the ending of the mystery. By the time the novel draws to a close, readers will find themselves shaking their heads at the twisted directions in which they have been taken. Nolan, Tom. “Mysteries: A Postmodern Procedural.” Review of The Word Is Murder, by Anthony Horowitz, The Good Son, by You-Jeon Jeong, and Still Lives, by Maria Hummel. The Wall Street Journal, 15 June 2018, www.wsj.com/articles/mysteries-a-postmodern-procedural-1529093835. Accessed 5 Oct. 2018.

Although still a work of fiction, “The Word Is Murder” is written in first person, and the narrator is Horowitz himself. He stays true to the facts about himself, detailing his work as a creator on the show “Foyle’s War” and his successful “Alex Rider” children’s book series. Horowitz takes the first person to the next level, explaining throughout the narration how he decided what details from this “real life” investigation to include and exclude in the novel while discussing how certain aspects of writing this story gave him difficulty like starting the writing process before even knowing if the detective, Hawthorne, would ever be able to solve the case. This adds another mystery to the novel: How much of what is written is real and how much is fake? The facts of Horowitz’s life are true, but the famous actor Damian Cowper, whose mother is murdered in the first chapter of the novel, is fictional. Yet again, Horowitz has stuffed one mystery inside another. When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. ― Anthony Horowitz, The Word Is Murder The Ciphers of our Amusement Told from Horowitz’s first -person perspective, the reader is schooled about the life of an author, while he takes every available opportunity to promote himself and his work along the way.