Read my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies now (in paperback, hardback, or on Kindle)! If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.
Review (3.5 out of 5)
The latest in Horowitz’s series of Daniel Hawthorne meta-fictions, this novel takes a step back from the Watson-and-Holmes construction of the first three books, wherein a fictionalised version of Horowitz follows the detective on a ‘live’ case. Instead, Horowitz goes back to an old Hawthorne case. The detective drip-feeds him the information about it so that Horowitz can reproduce the experience of trying to solve the crime for himself, but Horowitz also uses it as an opportunity to do some of his own investigating into Hawthorne’s past.
This is an approach that many authors writing ‘new’ novels with classic detectives take, like Sophie Hannah’s Hercule Poirot novels, which fit into a period uncovered in Agatha Christie’s primary stories. It certainly offers us a different perspective on Hawthorne, partly fictionalised through Horowitz’s presentation of the materials relating to the murder of Giles Kenworthy with a crossbow after a series of petty neighbour disputes.
The break of format enables Horowitz to construct the story differently, which he nods to in the first metafictional portion of the novel; we get a more traditional third-person structure for the main murder mystery itself. It also means that we get much less interaction between Horowitz and Hawthorne. There is not so much that we can do to better understand Hawthorne at such a distance, and the contact that Horowitz has with others in Hawthorne’s orbit—his employer, his former aide—do not really make up for this gap. Horowitz’s own efforts at detection, like turning up at the crime scene and speaking to the remaining protagonists there, do add a little to the primary mystery investigation through another layer of re/misdirection, but do relatively little for the relationship between author and detective that is at the heart of the series.
The murder of Kenworthy is itself a reasonably interesting mystery. As the front cover indicates, everyone seems to have the same motivate. So, of course, we know that someone will turn out to have some extra ones. Perhaps the ex-wife and her French lover decided to take matters into their own hands? Do people really kill over the smell of chlorine and loud music? Perhaps there’s already a killer on the street, and what’s a second murder when you’ve already killed before? Perhaps there’s more than one killer on the street? (And what are the odds?)
I did enjoy reading this, but it felt quite different to the others in the series, and it didn’t quite hit the notes that made the other Hawthorne/Horowitz books such fun.
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 Meinir Davies Casebook (me!)
- The Monogram Murders (Sophie Hannah)
Read my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies now (in paperback, hardback, or on Kindle)!
Dominique Gracia 
Leave a comment