The Word Is Murder: A Novel

Loved the pace and narrator voice of the story. Read in 2 days on a weekend away when I couldn’t sleep and it didn’t disappoint.

This novel is the first in a series where Anthony Horowitz places himself as a principal character in the story. I found it one of the most entertaining mysteries I've read lately. The premise is a wealthy woman in her 60s, Diana Cowper goes to a funeral parlor to give the proprietor instructions for her modest, quick funeral. Six hours later, Cowper is dead, strangled by an unknown assailant. Daniel Hawthorne, a former Metropolitan homicide detective, is brought into the case as a consultant investigator. He, in turn, asks Horowitz to document his work on the case and turn it into a novel. He suggests they split the proceeds from the book.At first, Horowitz is nonplussed. His previous experience working with Hawthorne on a TV series was not exactly pleasurable. The men constantly fought over whether the main character, a detective, would do this or that. Horowitz found Hawthorne to be rude, aggressive, and insufferable. But…Horowitz knows that Hawthorne is brilliant at his job, and the Cowper case is intriguing. When giving a book lecture, an audience member asks why Horowitz never writes about actual crimes. That seals it. Horowitz calls Hawthorne and says he will work with him. Thus begins a Sherlock Holmesian partnership with Horowitz as Watson and Hawthorne as Holmes. In this case, though, Horowitz is less an amiable sidekick and more of a sorely put-upon partner. The dialogue between the two men is reason enough to read the novel, not even figuring in the exciting mystery.As the men interview people close to Cowper, they are pulled into a baffling set of circumstances. Diana Cowper was the mother of a famous Hollywood actor Damien Cowper. The son is set to inherit millions through his mother's estate, and he is having money problems, which pique the two investigators' interest. There is also the issue of a car accident that happened years ago when Diana hit a child running across the street and didn't stop. The child had a permanent brain injury, and the parents were inconsolable. They never forgave Cowper for the accident and running away. These are just a few of the suspects and red herrings for the reader to consider.I found the novel to be delightful. The crusty character of Hawthorne is the perfect foil for the urbane Horowitz. I plan to read every one of the books in this series. Mystery lovers who enjoy a tongue-in-cheek style will not be disappointed.

This is the third mystery I have read by this author. His first two that I read were a story within a story. His books are not the norm. He mentions that he wrote Foyle’s War, one of my favorite British series. I recommend you give him a try. I will read another in this series.

Horowitz pulls off author as a character quite well. Hawthorne's observations are a bit <eye roll>, but Tony's narrative keeps it light and makes it pleasantly interesting.

After reading Horowitz’s MAGPIE MURDERS, I was compelled to read this one straightaway. I am a big fan of his small screen series, such as Foyle’s War, a nuanced, intelligent series about a British detective during WW II and beyond to the Cold War, the short series Injustice, a tense drama about a tormented attorney, and the eccentric but suspenseful Midsomer Murders about a quaint English village and its people, coupled with murder. Magpie Murders had a combination of a vintage English murder, mixed with a contemporary meta-fiction that renders it more complex and twisty.In this, another murder case, Horowitz is even more brazen by casting himself as himself, layering fictional characters and a storyline with the authentic Horowitz, in a sometimes gleefully tingling meta- scene. For example, the writer is in an actual meeting with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, and…well, I won’t reveal what happens, but it really blurs the lines between fact and fiction, that scene being the most arch of all the meta-scenes due to the billion-watt celebrities going eerily from foreground to background with a few strokes of a keyboard.The story: It starts with a short narrative: a 60s-aged woman, Diana Cowper, walks into a funeral parlor to arrange her own funeral, and is murdered six hours later. This was more of a prologue, demonstrating the author’s draft of a story, and then the next chapter we get to the meat of the set-up, and how that funeral parlor scene came to be.In London, Anthony Horowitz, busy with different writing projects and a screenplay, is contacted by a peculiar ex police force detective named Daniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne was once hired by Horowitz’s production team to be used as a consultant in his five-part miniseries, INJUSTICE, to help keep the script’s police procedures credible and methodical. He was brilliant with his advice, and apparently a crack investigator, but was fired by the Metropolitan police force prior to working with Horowitz on the series. Anthony never liked him—he found him morose, socially miscued, prickly, annoying, and intrusive, but he put up with him for his use on the series.Horowitz is inwardly outraged and outwardly dismissive when Hawthorne calls him to offer him a 50-50 book deal to write about himself. Why would anyone want to read about Hawthorne? And how brazen for him to call Horowitz to write this? And 50-50??? Yet, when he finally does meet up with him and Hawthorne tells him about the Cowper case, Anthony is legitimately intrigued. The fact that she has a famous son, a stage and screen actor he’s familiar with, amps up the buzz.Horowitz agrees to do it, i.e. to follow Hawthorne around (who has been curiously hired by the Met to consult, and seems to have primary privileges). The problem— to Anthony’s chagrin, Hawthorne is a cipher and refuses to answer any questions about himself. Anthony expresses to him that if he is going to write about him, “I’d have to know where you live, whether you’re married or not, what you have for breakfast, what you do on your day off. That’s why people read murder stories.” Hawthorne’s response? “I don’t agree. The word is murder. That’s what matters.”As the case and story unfold, and the suspects pile up, it becomes just as thrilling to witness the testy relationship of Hawthorne and Horowitz as it is to watch how the investigation progresses. Moreover, the writer shares the writing process. Although the case is fiction (but treated as fact), you totally believe in it! Horowitz is a genius at including himself BUT getting out of his own way. Only an accomplished, meticulous writer is able to pull that off. You won’t be disappointed.

This is another cracker from Anthony Horowitz, hot on the heels of The Magpie Murders. If that book had begun deconstructing, playing around and having a lot of fun with the form of the whodunnit, this brand new adventure carries on that theme: this time Horowitz puts himself into the story - and in the reluctant role of the Watson/Hastings sidekick to boot. His detective this time is a million miles from a Poirot, a Holmes or a Father Brown. Hawthorne swears like a squaddie, chain smokes his way through the case, is as politically correct as Bernard Manning and is not at all easy to get to know. It's clear that he's somewhere on the autistic spectrum, but is far from being endearing in the way that, say, Christopher was in The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time.Horowitz seemlessly mixes reality with fantasy (of course it's fiction and none of it happened, but your disbelief is very readily suspended) until you don't know where one ends and the other begins. Is he using the real name of his agent? Did that building really exist? Has he ever met someone like Hawthorne in real life? There is a wonderful scene where the gruff detective bursts into a meeting about a Tintin film script Horowitz is having with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. How much of this happened? You don't know and, naturally, you don't care but it creates a deliciously ambiguous halfway house between the world we know and the parallel universe of detective fiction. In fact, Hawthorne is perhaps the most realistic new detective to appear for a very long time.I thought I'd worked it out quite early on and was delighted when the fictional version of Anthony Horowitz (or 'Tony' as Hawthorne calls him) began thinking along the same lines. We were, of course, both completely wrong. The real Horowitz had flummoxed us as usual.

I was intrigued by the concept of this tale (elderly woman goes into an undertaker's, arranges her own funeral and is murdered 6 hours later) but a few chapters in, I realised that Anthony Horowitz features in the novel as himself and alarm bells started ringing ........Having been pressurised into writing about the case by ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne - an oddball character a bit like Adrian Monk from the US TV series 'Monk' (ie darting off all over the place and never explaining himself) - who has you reaching for the headache pills by Chapter 3: why employ a writer to document a murder you are investigating but keep them in the dark about what's going on? The line between fact (Horowitz writing for Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson) and fiction (the murder) becomes really blurred and I found myself having to go back and re-read many pages in order to keep up with what was the 'unravelling of the murder' story and the Anthony Horowitz 'real-life' narrative (very weird) but even so, it's not hard to work out 'whodunit'.As another reviewer says, some readers are not going to like this book AT ALL. That would be me. Yes, it's well plotted and brilliantly written as is most everything produced by Mr Horowitz but it would have been much, much better if he had taken himself out of the equation and written a first-class 'whodunit' of which he's more than capable having done an utterly brilliant Sherlock Holmes re-boot with the sensational 'House of Silk', but this book will leave some readers disappointed, some puzzled, some closing the book in wonderment and some wishing they hadn't bought it. It appears that there are more of this genre to come, but I won't be back for No. 2, sorry.

A large proportion of this book was dull and irrelevant to the story line. It’s really Horowitz on Horowitz in large part, with page after page about himself, how clever he (thinks he) is, how talented, how well respected, all the projects he’s ever worked on and how successful he is blah blah blah. At first it’s irritating and dull, but after a while it comes across as rather sad. embarrassing and pathetic. Horowitz is either his own biggest fan or he has a massive inferiority complex and deciding which category he falls into is the biggest mystery in the book.I guessed the murderer very early on, because it’s not difficult. The reason why the murders were carried out doesn’t stand up - the murderer is just plain bonkers - and the ultimate clue rests on a panic message, sent by one of the victims, being corrupted by auto correct. Except that autocorrect doesn’t transpose the word, sent in the panic message, into the alternative used in the book so that twist doesn’t stand up either.The premise of the book, a writer approached by a police consultant to tell the story of a murder, is a good one but since it was used purely to give Horowitz a vehicle to tell everyone how great he is, it falls flat on its face with a dull thud.

I have heard Mr Horowitz speak and thought then he had a big ego, yet I quite enjoyed his books. I only got to page 109 on this book as I was fed up of reading about him and his writing for children and television, I'm sure if he had just left it as a murder mystery it would have been a good read, it's just not my cup of tea.

I have to start by saying this has been the book to surprise me the most this year! I’ve never read a book by Anthony Horowitz before so this audio CD was my first experience of his work. And I absolutely loved The Word Is Murder. EVERYTHING about this book worked for me! As I listened to it in the car I found myself taking unnecessarily long journeys whenever I had anywhere to go and once sat on the driveway for nearly an hour “finishing off” takeaway coffee just because I was so caught up in the drama that I didn’t want to turn it off and go into the house!!The story seems to be a simple murder mystery with a private investigator brought in to solve it. But unlike other books, the author himself is actually a character IN HIS OWN BOOK!! Yes, that’s right Anthony Horowitz appears as himself and this gives the book a truly authentic and original feel! Sometimes it felt almost autobiographical as Horowitz talked about his writing plus his current and past projects with plenty of name dropping along the way. The narrator Rory Kinnear really brought him to life, to the point where I would actually hate to hear the real Anthony Horowitz speak as it would ruin my illusions! This was definitely one of the best audio book narration I have heard for a very long time and I would highly recommend listening to this if you like audiobooks.Hawthorne, the private investigator, comes to Horowitz to ask him to write a book (preferred by Hawthorne to be called Hawthorne Investigates!!) about a murder that has taken place. They then work together like a modern day Sherlock Holmes and Watson to solve the crime presented. There are clues along the way that I have to admit I failed to notice but I was so completely involved with the storyline that I was just enjoying the ride too much to even think about solving the crime itself!The characterisation kept me focused throughout the plot as the wonderfully intriguing and enigmatic Hawthorne managed to both wind up and impress Horowitz in equal measures. His way of using his powers of perception to get a rise out of his unlikely partner-in-crime-solving was very funny to listen to. In fact, there was far more humour in the book than I was expecting, and some of it very dark indeed. The comment about the Stieg Larsson book by the side of the dead woman’s bed, actually had me laughing aloud to myself in the car at a moment where there should have been a quiet respect for the murder victim! And I loved listening to Horowitz being “Sherlocked” by his new partner!I’m so glad this is going to be part of a new series because I can’t wait to meet Hawthorne again. For a man of hidden depths, he certainly managed to keep many of those layers under wraps for us to uncover next time! This ingenious crime drama was polished and gripping with a dark sense of humour that worked perfectly within the characterisation and the plot. The factual information threaded throughout the fictional story was fascinating and intrinsically linked to the plotline, raising the standard of what could have been just a solid piece of crime fiction to a very high level indeed. I was surprised by how much I thoroughly enjoyed this and was very sad to leave it by the time the last CD came to an end.Highly recommended by me in any format but the audio CD version really did work well for me.