Close to Death (2024) by Anthony Horowitz

Getting the next instalment in the Daniel Hawthorne series is always a treat that I look forward to and I was intrigued by the murder method used, the archery theme putting me in mind of John Bude’s The Cheltenham Square Murder (1937).

Synopsis

‘Richmond Upon Thames is one of the most desirable areas to live in London. And Riverview Close – a quiet, gated community – seems to offer its inhabitants the perfect life. At least it does until Giles Kenworthy moves in with his wife and noisy children, his four gas-guzzling cars, his loud parties and his plans for a new swimming pool in his garden. His neighbours all have a reason to hate him and are soon up in arms. When Kenworthy is shot dead with a crossbow bolt through his neck, all of them come under suspicion and his murder opens the door to lies, deception and further death. The police are baffled. Reluctantly, they call in former Detective Daniel Hawthorne. But even he is faced with a seemingly impossible puzzle. How do you solve a murder when everyone has the same motive?’

Overall Thoughts

From the beginning, this mystery goes for a more traditional or classic crime setup (although given this is Anthony Horowitz writing, the story is far from old hat). The central murder is located within a close. Moreover, due to the topography of the area and its accompanying security technology, this setting has a closed set of suspects: ‘Once the gate swung shut, the close lived up to its name in every respect. It was a tightly knit community. In fact, it was almost hermetically sealed.’

The nuisance neighbours, headed up by Giles Kenworthy, are introduced by a noisy car arriving late at night, car stereo blaring; an action which makes a chess playing champion lose a game in an online tournament. The opening chapters move focus from one neighbour in the close to another, so piece by piece a picture is built up of the annoying neighbours. The problems they cause don’t start too high, and instead are allowed to grow and escalate. I felt this was an effective strategy. A meeting is organised so everyone living in the close can get together and see if their issues can be sorted out. Although seasoned mystery readers will be wondering if it will only increase the acrimony. In some ways this proposed meeting feels like a modern version of the familial dinner party where tempers invariably boil over.

There is one bit of the characterisation that mystery fiction fans, and to be honest even book lovers in general, will appreciate and that is the fact that two of the close’s residents: Mary Winslow and Phyllis Moore, own a crime fiction bookshop:

‘The Tea Cosy was a bookshop with a café attached […] It specialised in detective stories – but only those that belonged to the so-called Golden Age of Crime or modern novels that reimagined it.’

Surely, I am not the only one who daydreams about owning a vintage mystery bookshop? It’s not something I will ever do, but this has not stopped me deciding where I would have my shop. Another aspect of the characterisation that I appreciated was the inclusion of a woman who suffers from ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis). Anthony Horowitz avoids the hurtful stereotyping that people with this condition are just being lazy or attention seeking, yet he also gives her a meaningful part in the plot. She is not on the page as much as some of the other characters, but she is not brushed aside or forgotten.

After the aforementioned meeting at the close, the narrative switches to the usual first-person narrator of this series, Anthony Horowitz. For those new to the series Anthony Horowitz includes himself as a character in his own books, with the role as the Watson narrator. To reduce confusion, I will refer to the narrator as Horowitz and the author as Anthony Horowitz. Horowitz directly addresses the fact the book started in the third person: ‘Anyone who has read the four books I have written about my adventures with ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne, may be surprised by this one. Where is Hawthorne? Where am I? What’s going on with the third-person narrative?’ The answer is simple. There has been no fresh murder case from Hawthorne for Horowitz to write about, so instead, to meet a publisher’s deadline, he will be writing about one of Hawthorne’s past cases, before he knew Horowitz. I found this framing device interesting as the immediacy of the first section in the third person, with the tension of an impending murder, is switched in the second section, which locates this killing in the past as something that has already been solved.

Daniel Hawthorne continues to remain something of an enigma in this novel, with Horowitz opining that: ‘The more I learned about Hawthorne, the less I knew him.’ Due to this story being focused on a past crime, the investigation for which Horowitz was not present, means that Hawthorne has a greater role within the writing process, as he holds so much more of the information. In typical Hawthorne fashion, he still likes to remain several steps ahead of Horowitz:

“I’ll give you everything you need – but in instalments. You write two or three chapters. I read them. Then we talk about them. If you get anything wrong, I can steer you back on the right track.”

Hawthorne’s stipulations and rules, such as not telling Horowitz the solution ahead of the ending, also provide him with the opportunity to deliver a Poirot level backhanded compliment: “You never know the solution, mate. That’s what makes your writing so special. You don’t have a clue.”

Unsurprisingly Hawthorne is critical of what Horowitz writes about the case, in a way which reminded me of the tension between Sherlock Holmes and Watson, when Holmes criticises Watson’s way of writing up his cases. Hawthorne and Horowitz’s editing discussions were some of my favourite parts of the mystery and I felt they were an engaging way of foreshadowing important clues for the murder which follows. These discussions also allow for some metafictional fun, such as when Hawthorne complains about the way Horowitz mentions the crossbow in a suspect’s garage:

“It’s the narrative principle known as Chekhov’s gun. If I simply mention there’s a crossbow in Roderick’s garage, it’ll be obvious that it’s going to be used as the murder weapon.”

“So why mention it at all?”

“Because it would be unfair not to! What I’ve done, though, is I’ve disguised it by adding the life jacket and the golf clubs. That way, it might still come as a surprise.”

This is quite an ironic passage as given the blurb and the cover artwork, the murderous archery element is well-signalled to the reader anyway. Nevertheless, I think the passage below features my favourite Hawthorne criticism:

“I mean reading this, do you really get the position of the houses and what you could see from one to the other? You’ve got to get that right.”

“We could put a map in at the beginning. Would that make you happy?”

“It would certainly cheer up some of your readers. I’m not saying it’s confusing, but going through this, I’m not sure I could deliver the mail.”

The third section of the novel, back in the third person, takes the reader to the time of the murder of Kenworthy, with the police inviting Hawthorne and his assistant, John Dudley, to help with case. Dudley provides an interesting layer of friction to the narrative, as Horowitz is consumed with curiosity about this man, an interest arguably fuelled by jealousy to a degree. Dudley, an ex-cop, assists Hawthorne in a different way to Horowitz, due to his greater technical expertise and police training. Nevertheless, he did come across as a bit of a flat character for me, with his interactions with Hawthorne containing less of a spark. However, I did wonder if this was deliberate in a way, as Hawthorne complains to Horowitz that he has not portrayed Dudley accurately. Hawthorne’s irritation over the perceived misrepresentation leads him to being quite blunt with Horowitz:

“But I’m telling you, he was sharp as a knife. In fact, I’d never have solved the case without him […] I know you’ve been out with me a few times and you’ve never noticed a thing. In fact, you’ve helped the killers more than you’ve helped me. But he’s not the same.”

Reflecting on all the books in this series so far, I wonder if this one shows Hawthorne and Horowitz’s working relationship and friendship at its most attritional. Perhaps what also added a sense of flatness to the early Hawthorne and Dudley scenes is that the first chunk of questioning they do, largely delivers a repetition of the information we were already told in the first section. Maybe this is an issue connected to the story switching from the third to first person, as there was a stronger feeling of information overlap in this mystery. However, that did not stop me from enjoying the author’s prose style, which has many a great turn of phrase, such as when Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan is considering how unwelcome the close is: ‘He’d found himself in drug-ridden sink estates in the worst parts of south London that had been more open and accommodating than Riverview Close. So far, they hadn’t given him so much as a Mr Kipling cake.’

As my review has already touched upon, Anthony Horowitz modernises established tropes of the genre and is comfortable playing around with them in a metafictional fashion. His is an experienced hand, at doing this well, which is probably why he is able to pull off throwing a live grenade into the middle of his story: He has a character tell Horowitz the solution before the end. Naturally Horowitz is as shocked as the reader: ‘He had just committed the cardinal crime in crime fiction, the one thing that no critic, however vituperative, has ever done. He had told me the ending before I had got to the end.’ Well aside from the fact real life critics have spoiled the endings to books in the past (as Agatha Christie knew to her cost), I was genuinely intrigued to see how this plot device played out in the second half of the book.

One of the differences between Close to Death and its predecessors in the series is that Hawthorne and Horowitz are not really working together. Horowitz is not following Hawthorne around and their conversations are limited, as Hawthorne pulls back from communicating with Horowitz and even has a third party deliver the final batch of paperwork relating to the case. As such the pair do not share a lot of the time together and Horowitz questions surviving suspects/witnesses independently. Some readers might not mind this, but I think the narrative needed more Hawthorne in it. In addition, I don’t feel we learn more about Hawthorne in this story, which is a shame, as for the last couple of books there has been a mounting tense feeling of Hawthorne’s past hiding something interesting, but there has not been much in the way of developments to bring us closer to finding out what that is.

The solution is a good one, but I felt like it was delivered with a great deal of supposition, rather than hard evidence. The denouement was also surprisingly bleak and abrupt, making me wonder if this story was used to push Hawthorne and Horowitz further apart in order to lead up to a big showdown in a later novel in the series.

Rating: 4.25/5

See also: The Puzzle Doctor has also reviewed this title here.

P. S. An additional comment on the solution, written in ROT13 Code to prevent spoilers:
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