{"id":4685,"date":"2022-10-11T08:52:53","date_gmt":"2022-10-11T08:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/?page_id=4685"},"modified":"2022-10-11T09:39:44","modified_gmt":"2022-10-11T09:39:44","slug":"moonflower-murders-by-anthony-horowitz","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/writing\/book-reviews\/moonflower-murders-by-anthony-horowitz\/","title":{"rendered":"Moonflower Murders, by Anthony Horowitz"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Moonflower Murders<\/em>, by Anthony Horowitz<\/strong><\/p>\n

Horowitz has written for Poirot<\/em> and Midsomer Murders<\/em>, and he created Foyle\u2019s War<\/em>. He\u2019s a man who loves to tinker with the crime story format; he also knows exactly how publishing works. He already has a series in which a struggling hack writer called Anthony Horowitz plays Watson to the Holmes of a disgraced Scotland Yard detective. Now here\u2019s another way to do it. Eight years ago, a guest at a swish boutique hotel \u2013 one Frank Parris \u2013 was murdered. The police quickly arrested the culprit, helped by the fact that he made an open and unforced confession, and the guy was sentenced. He is still in jail. Soon after, an obnoxious but highly successful crime writer called Alan Conway visited the hotel, met many of the witnesses to the crime, and used them as thinly disguised characters in his next novel, a Poirot-esque novel set in the 1950s. The actual crime in that novel bears little relation to the murder of Parris \u2013 but, the daughter of the hotel owners read Conway\u2019s book, phoned up her parents to say the police had arrested the wrong man (it was \u201cstaring her in the face\u201d) and promptly disappeared. Still with me? The police still believe they got the right man and as far as they are concerned, the daughter has just run away. Alan Conway has since died, so her parents in desperation call in the narrator of the story: the woman who was Conway\u2019s editor.<\/p>\n

The real genius of Horowitz\u2019s book is that, halfway through, the editor finally accepts she is going to have to reread Conway\u2019s book \u2013 and so we get that, all 70,000 words of it, written in a very different style to \u201cher\u201d book. Both Conway\u2019s whodunnit and the one in the \u201creal\u201d world are genius \u2013 well, I didn\u2019t see them coming anyway \u2013 and though the two stories are linked, they are also sufficiently different to keep the reader interested.<\/p>\n

I wish I could do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moonflower Murders, by Anthony Horowitz Horowitz has written for Poirot and Midsomer Murders, and he created Foyle\u2019s War. He\u2019s a man who loves to tinker with the crime story format; he also knows exactly how publishing works. He already has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":368,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4685","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4685"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4726,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4685\/revisions\/4726"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}