"Magpie Murders" by Anthony Horowitz

Atticus Puend ... Dust In Teacup ¹

The "story within a story" device has been around since before Hamlet. In Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz uses it fully: the inner "book" (a manuscript, really) having its own author's blurb for the fictitious author, a frontispiece including other works by the said fictitious author, and even its own page numbering. The division between the "outer" and "inner" story is almost even: 230-odd pages for each narrative; which makes this two-books-in-one-cover a good candidate for a "buy one mystery, get one of equal length free" marketing slogan.

With two equal-length stories compacted and somewhat intertwined like this, a comparison of each with the other is inevitable. Anthony Horowitz does this himself by using the inner ("fictitious") story to drive the outer ("real") one. The outer story chases the shadows of the inner one in interesting ways -- the most interesting being the list of suspects, the denouement, and the fates of the protagonists.

Given this much overlap and the resultant limit of about 230 pages per story, it's impressive that Horowitz is able to weave in sufficient twists and turns in the inner story (less so in the outer one). There is only so much limelight; so most of it falls on Herr Pünd (inner protagonist) and Alan Conway (outer one). There are the unavoidably serendipitous events that allow Horowitz to quickly make the story flow -- a chance encounter at a train station that catapults the plot of the outer story or the extremely convenient and equally unlikely appearance of a beau to save her woman from dying in an assault-arson.

The inner story is independent enough to be read on its own. Indeed, that's how I first read it: it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the entire work.

All in all, the two stories work sufficiently well enough to make this 460+ page codex enjoyable.

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1 "Pünd" without umlauts is properly "Puend"; which, happily, also makes the anagram work^↩