In Anthony Horowitz’ acknowledgements at the end of Marble Hall Murders, we learn that his original intention was probably not to write a third novel about Susan Ryeland, the book editor with the worst luck in friends. 

“This is the third outing for Susan Ryeland and Atticus Pünd and you wouldn’t be holding it in your hand if it wasn’t for Lesley Manville, the brilliant actress who has played Susan twice – and will return when we shoot this one. On the last day of shooting Moonflower Murders in Crete, she mentioned that she would like to come back one more time and, in that moment, this book sparked into life.”

That’s a charming story, and Lesley Manville is a brilliant actress! If I could grant her such a favor, I would certainly do so. However, upon reading Marble Hall Murders, I wonder if Anthony Horowitz’ initial impulse to stop at two wouldn’t have been the better choice. 

Magpie Murders (2016) is probably my favorite novel by Horowitz to date. The author himself describes the book as “a sort of a treatise on the whole genre of murder mystery writing,” and it certainly delivers a wealth of great ideas and three terrific characters: Susan Ryeland, a successful book editor trying to crack the glass ceiling for women in the industry at the same time that she attempts to balance work and life; Alan Conway, the successful but deeply complex and rather foul modern-day author of a series of Golden Age-style mysteries; and Atticus Pünd, Conway’s fictional detective, who manages to be both a loving homage to Hercule Poirot and a wholly original character. 

With Magpie, Horowitz took a compicated idea and made it look easy. He juxtaposed a modern murder mystery with a lovingly rendered Golden-Age style whodunnit and gave us two books for the price of one. It’s quite a feat to develop two sets of characters, two sets of clues, and do it with such panache. And while I admitted at the time I read the book that neither case managed to fool me, they were well-structured and well-clued mysteries; I was just too clever by half!

Four years later Horowitz gave us a sequel, Moonflower Murders, which expanded upon Susan Ryeland’s history, going into detail about her troubled relationship with her sister, adding bumps in the road of her romance with Greek hotelier Andreas – and mixing all this into a case about the missing daughter of a couple running a luxury hotel in England. Moonflower was even more complex: the girl’s disappearance was tied to a cold case about the murder of a hotel guest that occurred on the daughter’s wedding day. And that case, it seems, became the inspiration for one of Alan Conway’s mystery novels, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. 

Moonflower was nearly fifty pages longer than Magpie, and I felt the difference, primarily in the modern-day scenes which stretched on and on toward a solution that seemed obvious from the start. And yet I thought the mystery-within-a-mystery here was stronger than in the first book. It turns out that Alan Conway was even more despicable than he appeared in Magpie and that his friends were just as rotten. 

I will admit that when Marble Hall Murders was announced, I was pretty happy. And it looked like Horowitz had come up with a clever idea for the final novel in this trilogy: this time around, Susan has given up her Greek paradise and boyfriend to return to England and try and break into the publishing world again. The editor of Causton Books approaches her with an offer: he is hoping to publish a series of Atticus Pünd continuation novels written by an old client of Susan’s. Eliot Crace’s first two books didn’t sell well at all, but he has two things going for him: the huge popularity of his subject, and the fact that Eliot is the grandson of the late Miriam Crace, perhaps the most beloved children’s writer of all time. The editor wants Susan, who knows the world of Atticus Pünd so well, to help Eliot turn this book into a best-seller that will satisfy Pünd’s legion of fans.

The idea of sending up continuation novels is brilliant. People are still arguing about Sophie Hannah’s Poirot novels, and my corner of the social media world recently lit up with strong opinions when it was announced that Lucy Foley would publish a Miss Marple novel next year. Frankly, I couldn’t wait to see how Horowitz would cover the topic; he has such a sharply humorous eye for the worlds of publishing and television that he knows so well. It also gives him an out to write a “new” Pünd mystery through a new, equally troubled author, for Elliot is incredibly messed up, mostly from having lived with Miriam. It turns out that the most beloved children’s writer of all time was an evil witch. 

The problem for this reader is that Pünd’s Last Case, the book within a book, is the weakest aspect here, both as a mystery novel in and of itself, and in the way it is worked into the modern-day case. Everything you might expect to find is here: the characters who correspond between fiction and real life, the anagrams. But it feels like Horowitz is going through the motions here. Or maybe it’s Susan herself who recognizes this pattern so well that she knows what to look for, even when another author steps into Alan Conway’s shoes. It also doesn’t help that virtually every character – in both cases – is a contemptible human being. Spending nearly six hundred pages in such awful company tends to wear you down! 

The book is long, and in the early going it feels like something of a slog. Things really pick up, though, near the 400-page mark when a modern-day murder finally occurs. And then a great deal of exciting stuff happens, full of one twist after another. And that brings me to my second problem. I swear I am not tooting my own horn here, but it seemed to me that every twist here is telegraphed way too early. I did not figure out who killed Lady Margaret Chalfont in the Pünd case, but I challenge anyone to come up with that just plain silly solution. I did figure out all the modern-day mysteries, which weren’t very challenging but made for better reading. 

Minor spoiler: things turn out well for Susan in the end – as they should. And the final paragraph can’t help but be moving to fans of the first two books like me, as it signals not only Susan, but Horowitz her creator, moving on:

“I’d finished with Alan Conway and his famous creation. From the moment they had come into my life, almost thirty years ago, they had caused me nothing but trouble. But as I stood there, I knew I’d finally put them behind me. I had made a resolution as far as Atticus Pünd was concerned, and this time I was going to keep it. Never. Never again.”

See that you stick to that promise, Mr. H.