‘Magpie Murders’ a clever riff on the whodunit genre

Imagine that you’re totally absorbed in an Agatha Christie-style whodunit.

There is a quaint English village, a horrific murder, a quirky detective, no shortage of suspects and myriad motives. Then you get to the part where the brilliant sleuth is ready to unmask the killer and explain everything that went down.

But — heavens, no! — the last chapter is missing.

This is precisely the problem that a mystery-loving book editor encounters in “Magpie Murders,” a fiendishly clever literary puzzle from Anthony Horowitz. In a genre in which just about everything has been done to death, the prolific English novelist and screenwriter has come up with a unique premise.

“Magpie Murders” (Harper, $27.99) opens with an introduction from Susan Ryeland, head of the fiction division at Cloverleaf Books. She informs readers that bestselling writer Alan Conway has delivered the manuscript for his new Atticus Pünd mystery and that she’s going to read it over the weekend.

Then comes more than 200 pages of Conway’s book, set in the 1950s village of Saxby-on-Avon, where a busybody housekeeper falls to her death down a flight of stairs and nasty Sir Magnus Pye loses his head (literally) in a gruesome murder.

But Susan, and the rest of us, are left hanging without the classic concluding scene in which the suspects are gathered together and Pünd, a Greek/German detective and Holocaust survivor, explains all.

At this point, we embark on a new adventure as Susan sets out to find the missing pages of the manuscript. It won’t be easy — in large part because Conway, the author, has taken his life.

Or was the unhappy and unpleasant writer murdered?

In the second half of the book, Susan morphs from armchair detective to amateur sleuth. Many of the clues that will help her explain Conway’s death are hidden in plain sight within the pages of his final manuscript, the dual plots of “Magpie Murders” thus becoming interconnected.

As Susan notes, “This must be the only crime ever committed that an editor was born to solve.”

Horowitz has made a career of playing with conventions of classic mystery and adventure fiction.

He is the author of two ingeniously plotted Sherlock Holmes bestsellers (2011’s “The House of Silk” and 2014’s “Moriarty”) and of the best James Bond caper that Ian Fleming never wrote (2015’s “Trigger Mortis”). His series of Alex Ryder novels, featuring a teenage British spy, isn’t just kids stuff. And as a TV screenwriter, he created such hit U.K. programs as “Foyle’s War” and “Midsomer Murders.”

At one point in “Magpie Murders,” Horowitz makes a sly Alfred Hitchcock-style cameo when Susan says, “I’ve watched every episode of ‘Poirot’ and ‘Midsomer Murders’ on TV. I never guess the ending and I can’t wait for the moment when the detective gathers all the suspects in the room and, like a magician conjuring silk scarves out of the air, makes the whole thing make sense.”

In that regard, Susan delivers as well — and, yes, so does Atticus Pünd, because the elusive book ending (a chapter fittingly titled “A Secret Never to Be Told”) is ultimately recovered.

You can skip the 200-plus pages of Susan’s mystery and go straight to conclusion of the Conway novel if you insist.

But do so knowing that you’ll be cheating yourself out of a satisfyingly mind-bending experience along the way.

This story was originally published May 30, 2017 at 12:28 PM with the headline "‘Magpie Murders’ a clever riff on the whodunit genre."