Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz Review
If you’ve read Anthony Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland novels, you’ll know the drill by now and if you haven’t they’re about a book editor who keeps finding herself embroiled in murder mysteries that have an uncanny resemblance to an Agatha Christie-ish mystery that runs parallel to her own.
This is the crappiest novel I’ve read by Horowitz by far and I think it might have something to do with a detail he mentions in the acknowledgements. Apparently this novel only exists because Lesley Manville, the actress who plays Ryeland in the TV adaptations, wanted to do another. So this is what happens when you become a starfucker and you crank out something arbitrary to please a celebrity rather than because you have something worthwhile to write.
In the interminable Marble Hall Murders, an evil, rich matriarch is killed twice - once in the typical English country house setting that Christie favoured and once in the south of France, for no other reason than presumably because Manville told Horowitz she wanted to shoot there.
Atticus Pund should be dead by this point so the Pund book in this one is a prequel-ish continuation-type novel by a different writer than the original creator (the kind Horowitz himself has done with varying success with Sherlock Holmes and James Bond) where he’s still alive but on his way out. Meanwhile Susan once again finds herself inexplicably doing the same bizarre thing she’s already done twice before and should really only ever happen once to a literary editor (if at all): solving a murder mystery.
The storytelling is so bland and the prose so workmanlike - it’s like reading a manual on how to assemble furniture. The plot plays out in a plodding, predictable fashion with zero tension or excitement to be had. The scenarios and characters are so derivative and uninteresting. The twists are dull and patronisingly stupid - do the police really think Susan is the culprit? Nobody’s that idiotic. The whole thing is dreary to get through and completely uninspired.
Magpie Murders was fine for a one-off but it’s far too convoluted a concept to convincingly replicate again, much less three times. Marble Hall Murders only shows how stale it is to keep doing the same metafictional schtick over and over. The Susan Ryeland novels aren’t just the worst series Horowitz has produced in the last few years but Marble Hall Murders is also the worst novel he’s ever written.