Magpie Murders (Susan Ryeland #1)

by Anthony Horowitz

Our lives continue along the straight lines that have been set out for us. Fiction merely allows us a glimpse of the alternative. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we enjoy it.

As far as I’m concerned, you can’t beat a good whodunnit: the twists and turns, the clues and the red herrings and then, finally, the satisfaction of having everything explained to you in a way that makes you kick yourself because you hadn’t seen it from the start.

Prichard and I talked about his grandmother as we finished our cocktails. It had always amused me how much she had come to hate Hercule Poirot by the time she finished writing about him. What had she famously called him? ‘A detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep.’

It’s my experience that dead authors are forgotten with remarkable speed. Even living authors find it hard to stay on the shelves; there are too many new books and too few shelves.

I’ve always loved whodunnits. I’ve not just edited them. I’ve read them for pleasure throughout my life, gorging on them actually. You must know that feeling when it’s raining outside and the heating’s on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover. That is the particular power of the whodunnit which has, I think, a special place within the general panoply of literary fiction because, of all characters, the detective enjoys a particular, indeed a unique relationship with the reader.