|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Anthony Horowitz's alter ego "Horowitz" and Hawthorne are back for another reluctant collaboration. As fans of the "Horowitz" and Hawthorne series know, the protagonist is a fictionalized version of author Anthony Horowitz. He is assisted in detection and mystery-writing by one Daniel Hawthorne, a lowlife whose street smarts balance out "Horowitz's" book smarts. Throughout this series, Hawthorne provides the frequently writers'-blocked "Horowitz" with the details of murder mysteries, helps him to solve them, and collects monetarily when "Horowitz" writes up their adventures. If "Horowitz" is Hawthorne's Watson (or, as Sherlock Holmes would put it, Hawthorne's Boswell), Hawthorne is "Horowitz's" mashup of Holmes and blackmailers with whom Holmes sometimes tangles. "Horowitz" needs Hawthorne and also deeply resents him.
This time, we get a few chapters in without meeting either of them. CLOSE TO DEATH starts like a particularly uninspired Agatha Christie novel. There's a gated community with a digital gate in posh Richmond - the area of London known for Virginia Woolf's suicide and Kew Gardens. Occupying a former manor house, its stables, and its cottages are some Christie-like groupings: a twice-married chess champion, a celebrity dentist (or, rather, dentist to celebrity), a patrician doctor, a pair of Marples who own - of course - a cozies-only bookshop straight out of a cozy - and the "neighbors from Hell." Giles and Lynda Kenworthy, plus their duo of nasty little boys. Did they kill a neighborhood dog? Did they exploit the gardener? Did they park the wrong way? Who cares: they want to rip up the historic lawn to install a swimming pool and Jacuzzi.
Everyone hates them. Of course, Giles ends up dead.
That's where "Horowitz" and Hawthorne enter, helping handsome but slightly hapless Lestrade-figure Det. Khan solve the mystery. Once H&H arrive, the pacing improves. Their solution to the mystery is less interesting than the metafictional digressions it produces, "Horowitz" has much to say on the mechanics of Christie mysteries and their effects on their audiences, and in particular the artifice of the "locked room" plot. These digressions are enjoyable and re-readable. And yes, Christie fans will know far, far in advance to which of Christie's plots the too-close-for-comfort neighbors of Riverview Close have paid too much attention—but that turns out to only be half of the mystery's solution.
If you liked Horowitz and Hawthorne's previous deconstructions of the mystery genre, you'll like this one. If you don't, Horowitz might be a little sad and insecure, and Hawthorne won't care.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, April 2024
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
