Marble Hall Murders

Putting real life figures in fiction is dangerous. It gets both Alan and Eliot killed. Horowitz presents these extreme examples, but also considers how fiction can reveal truths about humanity generally.

In Horowitz’s previous Susan Ryeland novel, Alan blurs fiction and reality in the real-life murder of Frank Parris. His novel-within-a-novel is titled Atticus Pund Takes the Case. Alan went to Branlow Hall in Suffolk and “recognized the killer as someone he knew, but instead of calling the police, he strung a whole lot of clues through the novel he was writing” (393). In the end, writing about the crime, rather than reporting it, got him killed. Alan’s writing also mirrored real life in how he “distorted people he knew, turning them into often unsympathetic caricatures” (469). This can be compared to Dante putting his enemies in hell in The Inferno. Horowitz uses Marble Hall Murders to illustrate a tendency of many authors, but in the extreme.

Eliot continues Alan’s extreme and dangerous blurring of fiction and reality. He says Pund’s Last Case is “inspired by what [he] saw at Marble Hall and if you read it carefully, [he’s] put in a secret message. That’s what Alan Conway used to do” (363).