I am a sucker for British mystery novels and a sucker for meta-fictional humor and in The Sentence of Death, Anthony Horowitz once again provides both-- it's the usual set-up, there's a murder-- a high-profile divorce lawyer is bludgeoned/sliced to death with a wine bottle and the police hire the rather unlikeable, rather shady, but incredibly brilliant ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne as a consultant to the case-- and the meta-fictional version of the actual author Anthony Horowitz tags along to document the case . . . Horowitz is pulled from on location of a shoot of the TV show Foyle's War-- a show that the real Horowitz actually created and wrote-- and now meta-Horowtiz is involved in a "real" mystery and a "real" murder . . . and while folks tolerate Hawthorne (barely) they are really annoyed that there's a writer shadowing Hawthorne, taking notes on all that is said-- so you get wonderful scenes, with layers of meta-fictional irony (amidst a complex mystery with loads of clues, characters, and red herrings) like this one, when possible suspect Akira Anno-- a celebrated poet and writer-- realizes that Horowitz is writing a book about this investigation, she says:
"He's putting me in his book? I don't want to be in his fucking book! I want a lawyer in this room. If he puts me in his book, I'll fucking sue him . . . this is a fucking outrage! I don't give him permission. Do you hear me? If he writes about me, I'll kill him!"
and for a moment, I was like: Oh shit, Horowitz put her in the book-- I wonder if she sued? and then, of course, I was like: but this is ALL made up . . . or mostly made up, not the Foyle's War stuff-- that's real-- and some of the other Horowitz stuff . . . but the Hawthorne stuff, that's all made up . . . good stuff Horowitz (and meta-Horowitz).
This feels like the Sentence of Death
ReplyDeletethat's what i would name this blog, if i could do it over again . . .
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