Title: The Word is Murder
Series: Hawthorne and Horowitz #1
Author: Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Mystery
Trigger Warnings: Murder, death, blood, death of parent (mentions), homophobia, child death
Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.
Read To: 25%
Back Cover:
One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper – the wealthy mother of a famous actor – enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service.
Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home.
Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator who’s as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. Hawthorne needs a ghost writer to document his life; a Watson to his Holmes. He chooses Anthony Horowitz.
Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself a the center of a story he cannot control. Hawthorne is brusque, temperamental and annoying but even so his latest case with its many twists and turns proves irresistible. The writer and the detective form an unusual partnership. At the same time, it soon becomes clear that Hawthorne is hiding some dark secrets of his own.
A masterful and tricky mystery that springs many surprises, The Word is Murder is Anthony Horowitz at his very best.
Review:
I am not much of a mystery person. I picked this up on concept alone – that the author is taking self-insert to the extreme and putting himself, as himself, into the novel as the Watson-esque sidekick to a modern-day Holmes.
The concept did bring a unique meta aspect into the story. Since at least one of the characters was verifiably real, it gave an almost-nonfiction feel to this fictional novel and I did enjoy that. However, that’s the only good thing I can say about this book.
I’ll start with my minor quibble: Horowitz’s motivation to start writing for Hawthorne is weak. He initially refused to do it when Hawthorne asked. Then he went to a book fair, where a woman asked him why he only wrote fantasy instead of things that were real and true, which are objectively better to read about. His response was that he preferred it, which is perfectly valid. Leaving aside my blinding rage about nonfiction being presented as always and forever 100% more valuable than fiction and it’s not worth reading fiction if one could read nonfiction instead, this exchange makes Horowitz decide that he should write something “real” for once and change his mind about writing for Hawthorne. He didn’t need the money and he didn’t even particularly like Hawthorne, but I guess that exchange made him realize that nonfiction is inherently better than fiction and he should try writing something true for a change.
But I kept going because I was a bit intrigued by the mystery. And honestly, I really like Sherlock Holmes and I know Anthony Horowitz is a good writer (I loved his Alex Rider books as a kid), and I kept hoping it would get better.
Hawthorne is very much like Holmes in many ways. He does have Holmes’ seemingly-magical deductive ability, but in the first 25% of the book you get to see it in action several times but only once with the explanations that make Sherlock Holmes books fun. Hawthorne also captures all of the asshole parts of the original Sherlock but without any of the charm. Perhaps it’s because Horowitz doesn’t live with Hawthorne and therefore didn’t get to see the humanizing moments like Watson did with Holmes, but Hawthorne is an incredibly unlikeable person. I gave up when he went on a homophobic rant – which was challenged by Horowitz, to be fair, but it was still a moment that made me realize that this guy, who I wanted very much to be a modern Sherlock Holmes, was in no way shape or form tolerable to read about.
Also, the original Sherlock seemed to like Watson at least some, or at least recognize that he could be useful. Hawthorne seems to have nothing but hatred and contempt for Horowitz, and if I had been Anthony I would have ducked out the first time I got yelled at for doing the thing he asked me to do.
This book ended up being modern Sherlock Holmes but worse. It captures all of the negative aspects of the original Holmes, amplifies many of them, and downplays the best part about Holmes – the amazing deductive reasoning powers. It leans so hard on the Sherlock Holmes parallels, even in the book itself, that I can’t separate it out to judge the story on its own merits. But Hawthorne himself is terrible and unlikeable, so I can’t imagine I would have enjoyed it much regardless.
The Hawthorne and Horowitz series:
- The Word is Murder
- The Sentence is Death
- A Line to Kill
Bluejay Reads 