Blue
You might have noticed that this book has been my Currently Reading book for over a year. Yeah…got distracted and fell off of it, and then remembered it was gathering dust on top of my desk and realized, “Oh, yeah. I was reading that.”
I was really struggling to get through this book at first for a lot of reasons, some related to the book itself and some related to outside life circumstances that kind of sapped my reading energy away from me. But it was always there. Sitting on my desk.
And I guess after a year, I got sick of it just sitting there and accusing me, so I picked it up and finally finished reading it.
I got about halfway through it before I dropped off of it and picked it back up, and I find that most books improve as they go on, and so that also helped me finally finish it.
There are two parts of the book: an in-universe mystery novel by Alan Conway about Atticus Pund, a Sherlock-esque private detective who goes to investigate a wealthy man's death (Sir Magnus) in the quaint British village of Saxby-on-Avon. Conway’s novel is very much a traditional mystery novel in the vein of Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. However, Pund’s story ends rather abruptly, and then we transition into the narrative surrounding Conway’s manuscript: his editor, Susan Ryeland, dissects the story and tries to solve the mystery of the missing chapters and dives into the hidden secrets that are locked away in the manuscript itself.
I admit, part of my lack of enjoyment of this book may have been that I haven’t read a whole lot of mystery books like that. I’ve read Murder on the Orient Express years ago, which I remember liking. I’ve dabbled in Sherlock Holmes a bit, which I was moderately entertained by. I’ve read a few cozy mysteries (unfortunately not my thing, but I absolutely see the appeal).
The main problem with Magpie Murders is that the titular Atticus Pund story that the narrative revolves around is…boring. It is by far the part of the book that took me the longest to get through. It’s just so…I don’t know how to explain this…unengaging? I remember being enthralled by Murder on the Orient Express, and Sherlock Holmes is fun to read about (once you get past the older language barrier). The cast of people in Pund’s mystery and Pund himself are all so dull. The mystery in Murder on the Orient Express captured my attention, and Holmes himself is an eccentric character who’s fun to read about (along with the foil he makes with his assistant, Watson), but there’s nothing of that sort in this book. There’s nothing that makes anybody interesting.
So much of the book is Pund interviewing people, they infodump about who they are and their relation to everybody else and the murdered, and then Pund is off to interview the next person. By far the most interesting parts of the mystery story is at the beginning when we get a glimpse of the people of Saxby-on-Avon and a hint of all of their dynamics with one another, but that’s quickly cut short when Pund arrives. It’s too bad, because as an outsider, I feel like it would heighten the supposed eccentricities of the people, but through his super analytical eye, he’s just boiled down everybody in his point of view to very boring set pieces. There are some legitimately interesting character backstories and some intriguing drama between characters in the story, but we only get them through Pund interviewing people in these giant infodumps and that’s it. It’s like a small peek into this much more richly-defined cast.
Pund himself is also just so boring and dull. It feels like he has no personality. Even his relationship with his assistant feels so underutilized. They don’t feel like friends or allies or really anything other than two people having boring conversations without any emotion in them. I feel like Horowitz made him too analytical and logical and just deprived him of anything to make him pop out. Pund is the character equivalent of sitting in a college lecture class for two and a half hours while the professor drones on and on about something. It’s ironic because in the part with Susan Ryeland, she notes at one point that Pund apparently survived a Nazi concentration camp, but she had Conway pull back on it and de-emphasize that part of his character.
Pund was a sympathetic character and the fact that he had come out of the concentration camps - we eventually cut back on some of this - gave him a certain depth. (pg. 24-25 of Ryeland’s story, but not page 24-25 in the overall book).
WHAT DEPTH, SUSAN? That would have actually made him kind of interesting, but at no point in the manuscript (that I can remember) does this come up or even have any kind of affect on his personality. I guess because Susan had Conway pull back on it. Way to go, Susan. You actively made Conway’s potential novel even worse as an editor.
I also don’t know how I feel about the format of the book itself. You basically get a few-page introduction from Susan establishing the framing of the whole book, and then you get almost the entirety of Conway’s manuscript just in one sitting, which is over 200 pages long. Then you jump into Susan’s part of the book, an entire novel in itself, and you get the last chapter of Conway’s manuscript at the very end. You basically get two books underneath one cover. It might be because I didn’t care much for Pund’s story, but I feel it would have served the book so much later to have excerpts of Conway’s manuscript scattered throughout instead of making me sit through reading one book (novel-length, I would like to remind), and then essentially having to read another one afterwards. It was like I was assigned an entire book to read as homework for the story that came afterwards. The transition was very jarring to me.
Adding to my point above, I feel like adding excerpts throughout would have benefited the story so much more as a lot of discussion surrounding Pund takes place in other books that Conway has written, i.e. ones that aren't included in Horowitz’s novel. It's a strange decision to me to put an entire Pund story into the novel, and then spend a lot of time referencing other Pund stories and fictional events that don't occur in the ~200 page manuscript we had to read.
The part with Susan was more entertaining to read. I liked the slight deconstruction that Susan did about whodunnits and detective stories, which was a nice angle that took into account how she's an editor.
Horowitz probably didn't mean for this, but there was also a strange, morbid sense of humor and curiosity as I was reading that oddly added to my entertainment while reading. Susan, in my opinion, really crossed some boundaries during her investigation. I couldn't stop laughing at the idea of an editor going around doing private investigations. Imagine being flagged down and then questioned by an editor. Imagine saying “I'm an editor” and that gets you into private clubs and residences and gets complete strangers to open up to you. I don't know, I'm not an editor, so I'm sure this isn't as weird as I'm making it out to be. I just found it kind of hilarious. There was definitely some slightly strained suspension of disbelief in the investigation part, but I might be taking this too seriously. I think maybe if the transition from retrieval mission to criminal investigation was a little bit more gradual, it would feel less ridiculous. Or if there was more lampshading about the whole situation.
Also…Matthew Prichard is in the book. I didn't know who that is, but the book informed me that he is Agatha Christie’s grandson. My first thought was “Did Horowitz make a fake family member of a real person?” But I was wrong. Matthew Prichard is a real person who exists, and he was written as a side character in this story with fictional people. That was an…interesting choice. I wonder what the story is behind that.
It's these weird, kind of zany writing decisions that made the Susan Ryeland part of the book kind of fun to read. But I don't really know if that was Horowitz’s intention. Honestly, in the end, I kept thinking about how I couldn’t give less of a shit about Pund and just wanted to read about this editor becoming a private investigator all on her own.
At the end of the book when we finally get to see the rest of Pund’s story, I had no investment. I was much more invested in Susan. I think that’s the main downfall of the book for me. The two aspects of the novel are supposed to compliment each other and play into one another. In reality, for me at least, one half of the book I couldn’t care less about and thought was actively dragging down the decent part of the book.
I’d honestly probably rate this slightly higher, maybe a 3.5/5 just for Susan’s parts, but the Atticud Pund parts make me bring it back down to an even 3. I can easily see this becoming a 4 star book for me if Horowitz focused on her and didn’t try to make me read two books at once.
So, decent book with some interesting parts that were dragged down by the not-so-interesting parts. I’m glad that I finally managed to finish it, at least.
You might have noticed that this book has been my Currently Reading book for over a year. Yeah…got distracted and fell off of it, and then remembered it was gathering dust on top of my desk and realized, “Oh, yeah. I was reading that.”
I was really struggling to get through this book at first for a lot of reasons, some related to the book itself and some related to outside life circumstances that kind of sapped my reading energy away from me. But it was always there. Sitting on my desk.
And I guess after a year, I got sick of it just sitting there and accusing me, so I picked it up and finally finished reading it.
I got about halfway through it before I dropped off of it and picked it back up, and I find that most books improve as they go on, and so that also helped me finally finish it.
There are two parts of the book: an in-universe mystery novel by Alan Conway about Atticus Pund, a Sherlock-esque private detective who goes to investigate a wealthy man's death (Sir Magnus) in the quaint British village of Saxby-on-Avon. Conway’s novel is very much a traditional mystery novel in the vein of Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. However, Pund’s story ends rather abruptly, and then we transition into the narrative surrounding Conway’s manuscript: his editor, Susan Ryeland, dissects the story and tries to solve the mystery of the missing chapters and dives into the hidden secrets that are locked away in the manuscript itself.
I admit, part of my lack of enjoyment of this book may have been that I haven’t read a whole lot of mystery books like that. I’ve read Murder on the Orient Express years ago, which I remember liking. I’ve dabbled in Sherlock Holmes a bit, which I was moderately entertained by. I’ve read a few cozy mysteries (unfortunately not my thing, but I absolutely see the appeal).
The main problem with Magpie Murders is that the titular Atticus Pund story that the narrative revolves around is…boring. It is by far the part of the book that took me the longest to get through. It’s just so…I don’t know how to explain this…unengaging? I remember being enthralled by Murder on the Orient Express, and Sherlock Holmes is fun to read about (once you get past the older language barrier). The cast of people in Pund’s mystery and Pund himself are all so dull. The mystery in Murder on the Orient Express captured my attention, and Holmes himself is an eccentric character who’s fun to read about (along with the foil he makes with his assistant, Watson), but there’s nothing of that sort in this book. There’s nothing that makes anybody interesting.
So much of the book is Pund interviewing people, they infodump about who they are and their relation to everybody else and the murdered, and then Pund is off to interview the next person. By far the most interesting parts of the mystery story is at the beginning when we get a glimpse of the people of Saxby-on-Avon and a hint of all of their dynamics with one another, but that’s quickly cut short when Pund arrives. It’s too bad, because as an outsider, I feel like it would heighten the supposed eccentricities of the people, but through his super analytical eye, he’s just boiled down everybody in his point of view to very boring set pieces. There are some legitimately interesting character backstories and some intriguing drama between characters in the story, but we only get them through Pund interviewing people in these giant infodumps and that’s it. It’s like a small peek into this much more richly-defined cast.
Pund himself is also just so boring and dull. It feels like he has no personality. Even his relationship with his assistant feels so underutilized. They don’t feel like friends or allies or really anything other than two people having boring conversations without any emotion in them. I feel like Horowitz made him too analytical and logical and just deprived him of anything to make him pop out. Pund is the character equivalent of sitting in a college lecture class for two and a half hours while the professor drones on and on about something. It’s ironic because in the part with Susan Ryeland, she notes at one point that Pund apparently survived a Nazi concentration camp, but she had Conway pull back on it and de-emphasize that part of his character.
Pund was a sympathetic character and the fact that he had come out of the concentration camps - we eventually cut back on some of this - gave him a certain depth. (pg. 24-25 of Ryeland’s story, but not page 24-25 in the overall book).
WHAT DEPTH, SUSAN? That would have actually made him kind of interesting, but at no point in the manuscript (that I can remember) does this come up or even have any kind of affect on his personality. I guess because Susan had Conway pull back on it. Way to go, Susan. You actively made Conway’s potential novel even worse as an editor.
I also don’t know how I feel about the format of the book itself. You basically get a few-page introduction from Susan establishing the framing of the whole book, and then you get almost the entirety of Conway’s manuscript just in one sitting, which is over 200 pages long. Then you jump into Susan’s part of the book, an entire novel in itself, and you get the last chapter of Conway’s manuscript at the very end. You basically get two books underneath one cover. It might be because I didn’t care much for Pund’s story, but I feel it would have served the book so much later to have excerpts of Conway’s manuscript scattered throughout instead of making me sit through reading one book (novel-length, I would like to remind), and then essentially having to read another one afterwards. It was like I was assigned an entire book to read as homework for the story that came afterwards. The transition was very jarring to me.
Adding to my point above, I feel like adding excerpts throughout would have benefited the story so much more as a lot of discussion surrounding Pund takes place in other books that Conway has written, i.e. ones that aren't included in Horowitz’s novel. It's a strange decision to me to put an entire Pund story into the novel, and then spend a lot of time referencing other Pund stories and fictional events that don't occur in the ~200 page manuscript we had to read.
The part with Susan was more entertaining to read. I liked the slight deconstruction that Susan did about whodunnits and detective stories, which was a nice angle that took into account how she's an editor.
Horowitz probably didn't mean for this, but there was also a strange, morbid sense of humor and curiosity as I was reading that oddly added to my entertainment while reading. Susan, in my opinion, really crossed some boundaries during her investigation. I couldn't stop laughing at the idea of an editor going around doing private investigations. Imagine being flagged down and then questioned by an editor. Imagine saying “I'm an editor” and that gets you into private clubs and residences and gets complete strangers to open up to you. I don't know, I'm not an editor, so I'm sure this isn't as weird as I'm making it out to be. I just found it kind of hilarious. There was definitely some slightly strained suspension of disbelief in the investigation part, but I might be taking this too seriously. I think maybe if the transition from retrieval mission to criminal investigation was a little bit more gradual, it would feel less ridiculous. Or if there was more lampshading about the whole situation.
Also…Matthew Prichard is in the book. I didn't know who that is, but the book informed me that he is Agatha Christie’s grandson. My first thought was “Did Horowitz make a fake family member of a real person?” But I was wrong. Matthew Prichard is a real person who exists, and he was written as a side character in this story with fictional people. That was an…interesting choice. I wonder what the story is behind that.
It's these weird, kind of zany writing decisions that made the Susan Ryeland part of the book kind of fun to read. But I don't really know if that was Horowitz’s intention. Honestly, in the end, I kept thinking about how I couldn’t give less of a shit about Pund and just wanted to read about this editor becoming a private investigator all on her own.
At the end of the book when we finally get to see the rest of Pund’s story, I had no investment. I was much more invested in Susan. I think that’s the main downfall of the book for me. The two aspects of the novel are supposed to compliment each other and play into one another. In reality, for me at least, one half of the book I couldn’t care less about and thought was actively dragging down the decent part of the book.
I’d honestly probably rate this slightly higher, maybe a 3.5/5 just for Susan’s parts, but the Atticud Pund parts make me bring it back down to an even 3. I can easily see this becoming a 4 star book for me if Horowitz focused on her and didn’t try to make me read two books at once.
So, decent book with some interesting parts that were dragged down by the not-so-interesting parts. I’m glad that I finally managed to finish it, at least.