Preamble
As I read and write and think a lot about detective and crime fiction, I’ve a series of reviews on the theme. Sadly, capacity is too limited to cover detective films and TV series too! If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.
Or you can take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: support on Kickstarter or preorder now!
See also
These lists capture other detective/crime stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
- The Castle TV series
- One of the stories from Alex Pavesi’s Eight Detectives
- General Agatha Christie vibes
Review (3.5 out of 5)
This is the fourth entry in Horowitz’s metafictional series featuring himself and the former-copper-cum-PI Daniel Hawthorne. Horowitz-the-character has a play on, but it’s a disaster. And then the mean theatre critic is murdered, and he is the prime suspect! Chaos ensues, and his not-a-friend Hawthorne may or may not be willing to assist.
The two main characters’ reluctance to work together is now beginning to strain a little at the seams, and I did find myself wondering a bit whether this series might have run out of steam. This is in part because of the more formulaic structure of this plot, in the light of other classic murder mysteries, with the metafictional aspects feeling like a half-hearted attempt to revive a more staid plot. Horowitz himself, after the first in the series was published, reflected on the fact that in this series many of his options were simply rearranging the furniture, variations on a theme. He’s now done it three more times since!
I do still like Horowitz’s wry way of writing himself, of course, so I’m not entirely tired of the metafictional trope. If the Watson figure must always be ever so slightly stupider than the reader, so be it! And his detective is effective enough, of course, as he needs to be. But the continued wringing out of Horowitz’s character is no longer a very satisfying way to maintain the mystery around the life of the detective himself. I don’t particularly enjoy the attempts to evade arrest, for example, and the characterisations of the police themselves goes a little beyond the Holmesian demand for police incompetence. (I’ve written elsewhere about how this trope is key to the extraordinary detective genre.)
The red herrings are many and varied here, so it feels as though there are twists and turns, but the crime itself is not especially interesting, and nor is its solution. I would have been more interested, for example, if Hawthorne had been accused of the crime and Horowitz had had to do his best to save the detective with the ever-present threat of being arrested as a co-conspirator.
Anthony Horowitz’s A Twist of the Knife was Book 59 of my 2022 reading adventure. You can see the whole thread for 2022, and look back to 2021, on Twitter.
Dominique Gracia 
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