“There was going to be a funeral. The two gravediggers, old Jeff Weaver and his son, Adam, had been out at first light and everything was ready”.
The funeral is taking place in the church of St Botolphs in Saxby-on-Avon. Mary Elizabeth Blakiston of the Parish, housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye, had met with a nasty accident while hoovering the stairs of the manor. Rushing to answer the phone, she gets her foot caught in the flex and tumbles head first down a flight of stairs until her head meets the hard tiles at their foot.
So that is that, but all aficionados of a good crime story know full well it is not as simple as it seems. A few weeks later the world famous detective Atticus Pünd has a visitor, the fiancé of the dead woman’s son. It seems he was on bad terms with his mother and the day before her death he had been heard shouting at her and wishing she was dead. Now the village suspect him of murdering her.
It is clear from the outset that we are in St Mary Mead country (devotees of Miss Marple will
have no hesitation in realising this) but the detective is a German refugee who survived the camps of the second world war and is now living in England. Hercule Poirot immediately comes to mind. As the reader reaches further into the story we realise that there are many references to Dame Agatha Christie and her works – at one stage a character takes the 2.20 to Paddington. We all know full well that the 3.50 from Paddington was a famous Christie title. Then we note that Atticus Pünd has a well meaning but slightly dim associate, in the Magpie Murders he is called Fraser and, once again, Christie aficionados will immediately realise the reason for this name as Captain Hastings, the companion of Poirot, is played by the actor Hugh Fraser in the television series.
By now the reader will realise we are being led up the garden path and all this is deliberate but to what end? The story progresses and Pünd becomes involved when Sir Magnus, the housekeeper’s employer, also dies but this time there is no wondering if it was an accident as he was killed in a particularly gruesome way.
So Pünd comes to investigate and it is all intriguing and fun and then suddenly, bang, we leap from the 1950s to the modern day, and find that Susan Crosland an editor for a publishing firm is reading the Atticus Pünd for publication and horror of horrors the last chapter of the manuscript is missing.
It is slightly discombobulating to be wrenched from the mystery into Susan’s life and her attempts to track down the missing pages. The author of the Atticus Pünd books is a deeply unpleasant man who does not hesitate to grill people with a smile and then create a version of them, usually derogatory, in his books and is disliked by many. So when his body is found at this country house at the foot of a tower there are many who would be glad to see him dead.
Susan sets out to find out what happened to the missing pages and why he was murdered. The rest of the book is her story, in the first person which I rather liked, and we become so immersed in that story that when it comes to an end, we then have to read the final chapter of the Atticus Pünd manuscript to give us the solution of the earlier murder.
It is clever, it is witty and it is intriguing and Magpie Murders abounds in various Christie hints and names that are a joy if you are a fan of hers as I am.
There is a second, Moonlight Murders, which I am half way through and once again it is split into two time slots.
A Murder has taken place at the Moonlight hotel, an arrest is made and the case is closed. Several years later the daughter of the hotel’s owners reads Alan Conway’s book in which he has used the location and hotel staff in an Atticus Pünd book. Celia reads the book and realises that there is a clue in it which proves that the police arrested the wrong person. She decides to investigate and then she disappears……………..
I am only half way through and am enjoying it immensely. I do hope Anthony Horowitz writes another.
PS there is a tv series of the Magpie Murders, available on Britbox if you have it, and it is very good indeed.
