Ten Mysteries for Fans of Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders
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By Jen Collins Moore
Did you love Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders as much as I did? Judging by the book’s awards and accolades and recent PBS broadcast, I’m guessing yes. If you’ve already read its sequel, Moonflower Murders, here are some ideas on what to read next.
If you loved the shifting narration between Susan Ryeland and Alan Conway in Magpie Murders, check out Lucy Foley’s The Guest List, where wedding guests are trapped, Agatha Christie-style, on a storm-beaten island when a murder occurs. Told from multiple points of view, it’s a modern take on a classic form. Another spin on the closed-circle mystery is Stuart Turton’s The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which takes the shifting narrator form a step further: the narrator spends each day in the novel inhabiting a different witness, so we see the story from different points of view along with the detective.
If you loved the intricately plotted book-within-a-book aspect of Magpie, check out Hernan Diaz’s Trust. It’s three stories in one, including a purported bestseller and a lost diary, all telling the same events from three different points of view with questions all along as to who was to be trusted and who wasn’t in a story of high finance in the Jazz Age. Another great choice is Ruth Rendell’s (writing as Barbara Vine) Anna’s Book, in which a novelist suspects the solution to a sixty-year-old murder lies in her grandmother’s diary. The diarist is sharp tongued, witty, and quite probably unreliable.
If you loved the British wit of Magpie, check out Lynne Truss’s A Shot in the Dark (Constable Twitten Mystery #1), where very droll, very British humor is on full display in 1950s Brighton. Another great choice is Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, featuring four septuagenarians in Kent tackling a developer’s untimely death with wit and humor.
If you loved the cozy Golden Age British mystery that is spoofed (celebrated?) in Magpie, look no further than Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Akroyd where Hercule Poirot solves the death of a wealthy industrialist in a small town. Already read all the Christies? Check out Nagio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dead (Inspector Roderick Alleyn #1) where a game of “Murder” turns into the real thing at an English country house.
And, of course, there are always more books by Anthony Horowitz. He’s a master at his craft, and his other series are just as–or even more–inventive than Magpie. My favorite is his Hawthorne and Horowitz series, starting with The Word is Murder in which Horowitz creates a fictional world in which his real-life author self plays Watson to a problematic Holmes in need of a ghost writer. And there are his two Sherlock Holmes continuation novels, House of Silk and Moriarty, which are fresh, fair, and faithful to the originals but with a modern sensibility.
Did you love Magpie Murders? What books would you recommend?
Photo from PBS