Double trouble

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/01/2021 (1929 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Publisher Susan Ryeland reluctantly turns sleuth when a woman disappears after declaring that a book Ryeland edited contained clues to show that a man convicted of murder was innocent.

And two delightful games are afoot.

Two?

Indeed — you get two books for the price of one.

Let’s try to explain. It helps if you’ve read Horowitz’s amazing 2016 novel Magpie Murders, but not necessary. You do, however, have to pay attention and keep your wits about you. Horowitz created the Foyle’s War detective TV series, and adapted Caroline Graham’s Midsomer Murders for TV, and expects his readers to be worthy of the tangled tales he tells.

Ryeland had worked with the thoroughly unpleasant author Alan Conway, who wrote nine books featuring German consulting detective Atticus Pund in postwar England — an obvious ripoff of Hercule Poirot.

In Ryeland’s contemporary fictional world, there’d been a society wedding at an elegant hotel in a small English town. Just as the reception began, a maid discovered the butchered body of a very odious man; an immigrant Romanian handyman was quickly arrested and sent to prison for the murder.

Soon after, Conway arrives at the hotel, and chats up the dozen or so key players of every class and station who’d been around at the time of the murder. Heavens no — not writing a book, not going to quote you, what an outlandish idea, just curious is all, Conway tells everyone.

And then Conway goes ahead and shamelessly writes Atticus Pund Takes the Case, changes the era, tinkers with the names but keeps the characters, fudges the setting and a few details, and basically uses the murder to create a bestseller. People whose identities he’s appropriated see right through him and are outraged.

With us so far?

Advance eight years in Ryeland’s contemporary timeline — Conway is dead, and the woman who got married the day of the murder reads Atticus Pund Takes the Case and lets it be known that the novel contains clues that show the imprisoned murderer was in fact not the murderer at all. Whereupon she disappears, and her rich parents persuade Ryeland, as the book’s editor, to ferret out those same clues.

And what does Horowitz do at that point? What else can he do but give us our own copy of Atticus Pund Takes the Case? Thus, for 200 and so pages, we take time out on the primary plot and read the book within a book.

It’s quite intriguing, considering it’s deliberately written as an Agatha Christie stolen template.

And, finally, we return to the main plot, trying (as does Ryeland) to spot the clues in Atticus.

It’s quite a challenge to keep track of all the plots and people — which character becomes whom in the Atticus Pund novel, reckon which events match, search for clues, and then make the switch back again to the main plot.

It’s much more Midsomer Murders than Foyle’s War. And it’s devilishly fun.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin insists he could follow all the plots, but wants to know — Atticus Pund is a real person, right?