Marble Hall Murders
Marble Hall Murders
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Anthony Horowitz on Marble Hall Murders
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
An actress’s request, and no book to show for itThe book exists because of a single conversation on a film set in Crete. On the last day of shooting ‘Moonflower Murders’, the second Susan Ryeland television adaptation, Lesley Manville told Horowitz she wanted a third. Every broadcaster and producer within earshot agreed on the spot, which left Horowitz with a commission, a deadline, and nothing written.
At that moment, every green light on the planet lit up, and we had a production immediately. I mean, PBS, BBC, all the producers, everybody who had worked on this show jumped at the chance of doing a third one with only one slight problem, which is, there was no third book.
Manville had one window in her schedule, roughly a year out, and Horowitz needed both a novel and a six-episode television script inside it. The comparison he reaches for is deliberately punishing: the first book in the Susan Ryeland series had cost him five years.
I had to write, first of all, a novel in less than five months. And I should remind you, the first book had taken me five years to write.
For the six weeks after the commission landed, he had no subject and no setting. His standard approach is to build outward from a world before he decides on a crime, and that world refused to appear. The panic was real enough that he still names its duration precisely.
I remember walking around in a state of panic for about six weeks. I had to work out, what the book was going to be about. What was its milieu? To me, this is always the most important question. I know that someone is going to kill someone else — but why? Who are they? What is their world?
The answer came on a dog walk, when he turned to territory he already knew from the inside. For years he had worked directly with the estates of Ian Fleming, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, and Hergé, which meant he had seen at close range what it costs a family to tend a famous name. He folded that experience into a single question.
And it suddenly occurred to me that literary estates are fascinating. What do you do if you are the grandson, the great-grandson, or if it’s just even the son of a famous writer loved by everybody in the world, but you remember that person as being a monster?
That question produced Miriam Crace, the monstrous children’s author whose heirs are the engine of the plot. Horowitz describes his response to the idea in one word: love.
How he wrote it
A book-within-a-book written for a screen it couldn’t affordThe Susan Ryeland series uses a book-within-a-book device: Susan reads an unpublished manuscript by the fictional detective novelist Alan Conway, and the embedded mystery mirrors and illuminates the frame story around it. ‘Marble Hall Murders’ was the third time Horowitz had built this architecture, and the central craft problem was not repetition.
The key word in your question is ‘differently’. The main challenge is to use effectively the same idea — the book within a book — but to do it in a way that isn’t repetitive. I have a fear of formula.
He set the embedded Pünd manuscript (Atticus Pünd being Conway’s fictional golden-age detective) in the South of France, knowing perfectly well that the television production could never pay to film there. The Nazi art-theft subplot he built around that location would have to be cut entirely when the adaptation moved Pünd’s story to Corfu. He wrote it there anyway, on principle.
I decided to set Marble Hall Murders — the book — in the South of France. I knew from the start that it would be too expensive to film there and that I would probably have to rewrite an entire strand — the theft of impressionist art. But I went ahead anyway. That was how the book has to be.
The television version opens with three children mixing poisons by night, intending to kill their grandmother. He tracked the image to a specific source, one that explains why the scene manages to feel both threatening and oddly playful at the same moment.
The inspiration, if you really want to know, came from Roald Dahl, George’s Marvellous Medicine, in which a child concocts some kind of deadly poison to kill his wicked grandmother. And that’s what the children are doing here. And it just allows you to open the show with something which is both sort of off-beam, out of kilter, disturbing, and yet at the same time wholly innocent.
Susan Ryeland began as a composite of two real editors Horowitz had worked with. By the third book that foundation had been quietly displaced by something harder to quantify: the cumulative effect of watching Lesley Manville inhabit the character across two television seasons.
But of course I can’t write the character now without thinking of Lesley Manville who has appeared in two seasons and soon will be seen in a third... Lesley doesn’t make direct suggestions but watching her on the screen, I see things in the character which I hadn’t noticed before. I also understand, intuitively, the sort of dialogue she favours. And inevitably that influences the way I write.
The personal thread
Living inside someone else’s famous nameThe emotional core Horowitz kept returning to is not the murder but the condition of the survivors: what it means to spend an entire life defined by a person you privately found cruel. He had seen the dynamic at close range through his estate work, and the book gave him room to press on it.
And it occurred to me that there is something very strange and awkward about being the great-grandson, the great-granddaughter, the great-niece, the great-nephew of somebody who is famous, whose talent and whose genius has waved a wand over your own life, made you perhaps a lot of money, but nevertheless, you live your whole life in the shadow of that person.
He compressed that condition into a single sentence that became his pitch to himself for the whole novel. The question of public adoration versus private knowledge is what he calls the dark heart of the book, and it also explains why the Crace family’s grievances feel specific rather than generic.
I’m fascinated by literary estates. What must it be like to have a famous grandmother or grandfather who was loved all over the world for their work, and to live your whole life in their shadow? And what if you secretly know that they were monstrous and cruel and that in the end they were murdered? That’s the dark heart of my new book.
On what the book is wrestling with
What continuation novels owe the deadThe Pünd novels within the frame story are continuation novels: Eliot Crace, grandson of the monstrous Miriam, is writing a new Atticus Pünd book in his grandmother’s style. Horowitz has spent years on exactly this kind of work, continuing Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Fleming’s Bond for their respective estates, and he holds himself to a standard he makes explicit here.
A continuation novel, if it does just continue, if it doesn’t do something more, if it doesn’t add something to the legacy, to the heritage of the writer whose work you are continuing, then I think you have failed. [paraphrased from audio]
Eliot Crace, inside the plot, is failing by exactly this measure, which makes the embedded manuscript both a crime scene and a quiet argument about artistic responsibility.
The same standard applies to how Horowitz himself approaches the Susan Ryeland trilogy’s ending. He planned from the start that ‘Marble Hall Murders’ would close the series, and the farewell had to earn its weight. He chose a French word to name the precise emotional register he was after.
I think the last scenes of the last episode brought a tear to all of our eyes. It’s a happy ending, but there’s a sort of sadness, an awareness that it’s all over. I think the word for it is tristesse.
What he wants us to sit with
The shadow a famous name casts over everyone beneath itHorowitz finished the book in under five months and came to a verdict he offers with characteristic self-awareness: the quality of the result is not his call. But he makes the comparative claim anyway, which from a writer who finished the first book in the series over five years says something about what this pressure-cooked project released in him.
In many ways, I think it’s the best of the trilogy but of course that’s for you to decide.
The question he wants readers to carry out of the book is not whodunit but what-does-it-cost. Fame attaches itself to descendants who never earned it, shapes their finances, their identities, and their private grievances, and can curdle over generations into something lethal. He described the territory in an early interview as an invitation.
I’m fascinated by literary estates. What must it be like to have a famous grandmother or grandfather who was loved all over the world for their work, and to live your whole life in their shadow? And what if you secretly know that they were monstrous and cruel and that in the end they were murdered? That’s the dark heart of my new book.