The manuscript, “Magpie Murders,” was written by Alan Conway, an enormously successful mystery writer and the mainstay of Susan’s employer, a small publishing firm. The story opens with a book editor, Susan Ryeland, reading a manuscript. Okay, that might have been a tad confusing so I’ll back up. The murders are unconnected except that the author of “Magpie Murders,” the book within the book, is also the victim in “Magpie Murders,” the novel. “But “Magpie Murders” is a cozy mystery within a cozy mystery, giving the happy reader not one but TWO mysteries to solve. Don’t ask me why I am so enamored of vicars, fêtes and jumble sales-I just am. “Magpie Murders” is by definition a cozy and an English cozy at that. Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane epitomize the hardboiled mystery, with gritty, urban settings and down-at-heel, cynical detectives like Mike Hammer. Agatha Christie is, of course, the great-grandmother of the cozy mystery with her English villages, eccentric detectives, crumpets and tea. It’s actually more like two separate genres, because cozy readers often don’t like hardboiled mysteries, and vice versa. “Magpie Murders” by Anthony Horowitz is just that kind of mystery.īut before we get into the novel, let’s talk about the two basic genres of murder mystery: cozy and hardboiled. And occasionally, an author manages to pull off a tour de force that both respects the contract and rises above it. These restrictions can make mysteries rather formulaic, but great mystery writers rise above them. Thou shalt not invent random crap like time travel to explain how the criminal managed to pull off the crime. Thou shalt not make the criminal easy to identify because that would be no fun at all.Ĥ. Thou shalt not conceal the one piece of information needed to identify the criminal.ģ. Thou shalt provide the reader with the clues needed to solve the mystery, if the reader manages to look at the clues in the right way.Ģ.

Mysteries are different from other genres in that the author has a specific contract with the reader.

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