Meta-murder mystery more style than substance

In his return to the recursive world of the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, British mystery maven Anthony Horowitz has decided to up the metafictional ante.

For the uninitiated, Horowitz has written a series of novels in which his protagonist, novelist and television writer “Anthony (don’t call him Tony) Horowitz,” plays Watson and biographer to the ill-mannered but brilliant private detective Daniel Hawthorne. A Deadly Episode is the sixth book in the series.

This time, Hawthorne and Horowitz find themselves embroiled in a murder that takes place on the set of a film adaptation of their first case/book, The Word Is Murder.

So… the real writer Anthony Horowitz has written a mystery novel in which the fictional writer “Anthony Horowitz” accompanies his associate Hawthorne to the set of an adaptation of a past case that is both a real novel in the real world and a work of non-fiction within the fictional universe of the series. A Deadly Episode is simultaneously the real (fictional) novel and the “real” account of this murder in the made-up world. Oh, and the victim? The actor playing Hawthorne. Are you keeping up?

Your tolerance for A Deadly Episode will likely depend on how much of this sort of self-referential malarkey you find charming. But nestled within all the circular prose is the mystery itself.

Up-and-coming actor-slash-careerist weasel David Caine has been stabbed to death in his trailer during production of The Word Is Murder. There’s no shortage of suspects — and for good reason. David was awful: smug, devious, cynical and seemingly engineered from every well-trodden cliché about narcissistic actors.

Was it the production assistant he had fired? The director he’s infuriating? His jilted agent? The writer with whom he shares a past? His co-star and rival? The financially busted producer? Or was David Caine not even the intended target at all? Could the whole thing be a mix-up in which the real target was Hawthorne himself, as payback for a case from his past?

With production shuttered, Hawthorne and the fictional Horowitz are on the case. The real Horowitz seeds the novel with all the hallmarks of the genre: red herrings, plot twists, a stately manor house and dark secrets uncovered. As the author of five previous Hawthorne novels, not to mention the 13-book young-adult Alex Rider series, two Sherlock Holmes novels, the Susan Ryeland mysteries and countless Midsomer Murder TV episodes, the real-life Horowitz remains a steady hand at detective fiction.

Where A Deadly Episode falls short is not so much as a whodunit but as a “who cares.” The characters are paper-thin, drifting in and out of the novel without making much of an impression. The constant self-reflections of the fictional Horowitz quickly become tedious, and even the brilliant but caustic Hawthorne barely registers as a presence. The result is an episode that may be deadly but also feels oddly weightless and, at times, dull.

What we’re left with is an exercise in style over substance: a clever structural gimmick without the memorable characters needed to sustain it.

Capably executed but slight, A Deadly Episode feels aimed primarily at devoted fans of the series. For everyone else, it lands somewhere between skippable and the sort of beach read you wouldn’t kick yourself for forgetting at the beach.

Scott Montgomery is a Winnipeg-based writer with a limited tolerance for malarkey. He is the co-creator of Apple TV’s Camp Snoopy and a writer on numerous other shows you may or may not have seen.