The Twist of a Knife (Hawthorne & Horowitz #4)

by Anthony Horowitz

He might have a moral compass, but he was the one who would decide which way it pointed.

I don’t like walking three steps behind you like the murder-mystery equivalent of the Duke of Edinburgh. I’m sorry, Hawthorne. But this hasn’t been much fun for me. I’ve been stabbed twice! I’ve never come anywhere close to getting anything right. And even if I did want to continue, you haven’t got any more cases for us to investigate together – besides which, I made a mistake with the titles.’ ‘You should have called the first one Hawthorne Investigates.’ ‘That’s not what I mean.’ I snatched one of the KitKats after all. I didn’t want to eat it. I just wanted to spoil the pattern. ‘It’s the concept. It doesn’t work.’ I’d decided that all the titles would have some sort of literary reference. After all, I was a writer; he was a detective. The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’d already run out of grammatical allusions. Life Comes to a Full Stop? It wouldn’t make sense in America, where they have periods. The Case of the Missing Colon? It would only work if a body part went missing from a morgue. No. Even the titles were telling me that I had agreed to a trilogy and that was as far as it would go.

The trouble is, once the rules have been broken, nobody will be excited when someone else does it a second time. If something is unique, it can’t be done twice.

‘The first time he walked into the office, I warned you against him. All the violence in that play! You can’t write things like that without being disturbed.’ ‘That’s not true,’ Ewan remarked, unexpectedly taking my side. ‘Shakespeare wrote some extremely violent tragedies. Look at the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear or the multiple killings in Titus Andronicus, some of them utterly disgusting, and yet—’ ‘I think we can manage without a lecture in English drama, thanks all the same,’ Hawthorne cut in.

‘Not too many suspects. Everyone likes the theatre. And why do you think I gathered everyone on the stage like that? I did that for you, mate. It’s a terrific end – just like Agatha Christie!’ ‘You did that for the book?’ ‘Just trying to help.’

My whole life is spent looking for stories. Was I prepared to give up this one? I took out a pen and sighed. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Where do I sign?’