Magpie Murders
Magpie Murders
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Anthony Horowitz on Magpie Murders
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A decade-old anagram and a writer who hated his own detectiveThe premise began not with a plot but with a grievance: a writer so contemptuous of his own famous detective that he encodes an obscenity across the first letters of nine novel titles, leaving any attentive reader to eventually unscramble the detective’s name into something unprintable. Horowitz held that idea for roughly ten years before he felt capable of executing it.
That was the original idea that I had 10 years before I actually wrote the book. It was a writer who hates his detective so much, he wants to not just kill him, but trash him so that these books will never, ever be read again… The anagram is disgusting. I mean, it’s horrible, really.
The scheme needed an emotional logic, and Horowitz found it in Arthur Conan Doyle: a man who created the world’s most celebrated detective and then threw him off a waterfall out of contempt for the genre. That parallel gave Alan Conway, the fictional crime writer at the center of the novel, a recognizable literary ancestry.
Magpie Murders began with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He created the most famous detective in literature—Sherlock Holmes—but very quickly became bored with him and thought that detective fiction was ‘beneath’ him. So he threw him off the Reichenbach Falls! I created Alan Conway, a writer who is equally unhappy with his own creation, Atticus Pund… and the rest followed.
Doyle was not the only model. Horowitz found the same pattern of creator-versus-creation running through writers he had admired for years, and the repeated discovery sharpened his sense that Conway was mapping something real about what popular success costs an ambitious writer.
These geniuses don’t realize what they’ve created. Hergé, the illustrator and writer of Tintin and another of my great heroes, once drew a picture of himself slaving at the desk, with Tintin holding a whip over him showing a sort of disdain. Agatha Christie sneered at Poirot and said that he was an egotistical, pompous little poppy or words to that effect. I find that really interesting – writers who don’t accept what they have done.
How he wrote it
Ten years of structure, fifteen months of sentencesThe ratio of thinking to drafting was extreme by any standard. Horowitz filled a notebook with handwritten notes, diagrams, and arrows, tracking two completely interlocked fair-play mysteries that had to fit together without giving either solution away too early. By the time he sat down to write prose, the architecture was already load-bearing.
I have to say that the book itself, it took me about 15 months to write, which is much, much longer than I normally take. But it took me more than 10 years to think up and to structure and to get right. [paraphrased from audio]
That structural discipline carries a specific consequence for the reader, one Horowitz has repeated publicly and that most readers refuse to believe until they go back and check. His method for any murder mystery begins with fixing motive at the center before building outward, which means the solution is technically available from the first page.
The motive for the murder, and therefore by extension the identity of the killer, can be found on page one of the book. And I have said this before, I’ve said it many times and nobody has believed me, but people who have read the book have come back afterwards and said, ‘Yeah, it was there, but we didn’t see it.’ [paraphrased from audio]
Adapting the novel for the PBS television series took two more years and around half a dozen drafts, largely because the book presents its two mysteries in sequence while the show needed them running in parallel from episode one. The deeper problem was structural: Susan Ryeland, the editor-protagonist who narrates the outer mystery, doesn’t appear until roughly 250 pages into the novel, which made building six television episodes around her almost impossible without invention.
The whole book-within-a-book thing is really difficult… In the book the mysteries happen one at a time whereas in the show I wanted to do them simultaneously and that gave me the opportunity to do things that have never been done before.
The personal thread
The writer who drew the short strawConway’s bitterness about popular success is not simply a character trait Horowitz invented from the outside. He has described his own version of the same feeling: decades spent as the writer of beloved television series and genre fiction while measuring himself against novelists who occupy a different tier of cultural prestige.
So you ask me if this book is about reading, it’s actually much more about writing. And in particular, the writer who does not like what he is writing. And I find that fascinating in Alan Conway, in that he has world success, what he’s always dreamed of. But it’s not on his terms. He’s angry. He’s twisted. He’s bitter. And this actually leads to his death.
Conway is designed to unsettle rather than simply repel, and part of the reason is that Horowitz built him from a frustration he recognizes in himself. The cultural hierarchy that makes a crime novelist feel like a lesser writer than a literary novelist is real, and he has not entirely made peace with where it places him.
I look at writers like Ian McEwan or Charles Dickens or Kazuo Ishiguro – the great writers – and I think to myself that I’ve drawn the short straw being the populist murder mystery writer.
That admission sits behind every scene in which Conway treats Atticus Pünd, his golden-age detective, as a jailer rather than a creation. The character is an argument, not just a villain.
What he wants us to sit with
The question the genre keeps avoidingHorowitz has spent his career inside a genre that rarely pauses to examine itself, and the unresolved question at the center of that career became the unresolved question at the center of this book. Susan Ryeland, who has edited crime fiction for years and still cannot fully explain its hold on readers, is the character best positioned to sit with it without resolution.
What a murder mystery is about is truth. At the end of the day, it is one of the few forms of fiction I can think of where every ‘I’ is dotted, every ‘T’ is crossed. You come to a conclusion, the world is healed.
The partial answer he offers is about what the genre provides that daily life withholds: a guaranteed accounting, a final scene in which the community disordered by violence reconstitutes itself around a clear explanation of who did what and why. He locates this in the present political moment as something more than comfort.
Murder mystery is an opportunity to close the shutters, to draw up the bed clothes, to make yourself that hot chocolate with marshmallows and sit back and like Sherlock Holmes, just revel in the intellectual pursuit of truth. And that’s what a murder mystery, is pure and simple: an opportunity to make the world a better place.
The book does not let that answer stand unchallenged. Alan Conway spent his career supplying exactly this comfort to millions of readers, and it destroyed him. The reassurance and the warning sit in the same novel.