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As a professional pasticheur, Anthony Horowitz has already copied (and pasted) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming. Here he turns his attention to Agatha Christie. The first 200 or so pages are a perfect parody of a typical Christie mystery by one Alan Conway featuring his regular detective, a German refugee called Atticus Pünd. It is the Fifties and, in an idyllic country village, a nasty housekeeper and then her employer, the ghastly Sir Magnus Pye, are found dead. There are lots of suspects and lots of secrets. So far so good.
However, Horowitz, much to his credit, wants to have his fake and beat it. The last chapter of the Magpie Murders typescript is missing so Conway’s editor goes in search of it — and, when the obnoxious writer is found dead at the foot of a tower, his killer.
It’s almost half a century since Roland Barthes published The Death of the Author — and Gilbert Adair borrowed the title for his 1993 novel — but Horowitz has great fun showing how art imitates life and vice versa. The narrative is full of in-jokes, allusions and anagrams (and unmentioned typos).
Somehow he manages to make all the inconsistencies and interconnections hang together while providing a cynical yet accurate portrait of modern publishing. That said, some of Dame Agatha’s brevity would have made this intriguing and amusing homage all the better.
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