Making it past chapter one

I've not had much luck with my reading of late. Books have been laid aside or abandoned altogether after a few pages after failing to engage me. Sometimes I've willed myself to continue: novels where you've read the first chapter without getting hooked are less likely to be picked up again than completely unread novels, and having too many of the first category lying around is depressing. So I did, for instance, manage to finish another book in the fairy-tale-inspired fantasy genre, although it was too slow-moving for me, in spite of goblins being present. One book where perseverance paid off, though, was The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz.

I usually enjoy Horowitz's writing, whether in crime novel or TV screenplay form. I really liked the TV series Foyle's War, and the crime novels The House of Silk, Moriarty and Magpie Murders all proved good reads. Thus, I bought The Word is Murder, regarding it as a sure thing. The first chapter failed to spark my interest, however. With hindsight, I can see why it was laid out the way it was, but at the time it only looked like an overlong scene-setting for one of the key elements of the murder mystery: a woman arranges the details surrounding her own funeral, and is killed later the same day.

Things brighten up, however, when we're introduced to our crime-solving duo: ex-policeman turned freelance Daniel Hawthorne, and... the author himself. The novel's conceit is that it's supposed to describe an investigation that really happened: Anthony Horowitz agrees to follow Hawthorne around and then write about his solving of a murder case, and then they split the profits. At first very much against the idea, Anthony (as I will call the character, as opposed to Horowitz the author) finally agrees to this plan for various reasons and becomes the Watson to Hawthorne's Holmes - not that Hawthorne has much in common with Holmes apart from an uncanny power of observation.

It's usually tricky for authors to insert themselves in their own work, and other examples from the world of crime fiction are not encouraging. Sweden's own 20th-century Queen of Crime, Maria Lang, created an author character called Almi Graan (an anagram of her pen name), who first started to appear in Lang's popular whodunnits in the Sixties. The problem is that Almi Graan's first appearances coincide with the decline of quality in Lang's books, and she is not as easy to like as was perhaps the intention. Agatha Christie's Ariadne Oliver, though good fun, isn't an unqualified success either: she adds little to the plots and is something of a self-indulgence on the author's part.

I thought Anthony Horowitz the character works well, though, as he is treated pretty mercilessly by Anthony Horowitz the author. The whole "this is a true crime" conceit can be a bit grating, with coquettish asides from the author bemoaning the fact that he doesn't have control of his material and would have written the whole thing up differently if it was all fiction. But it is all fiction, and the murder has enough fantastical elements - like the dramatic conclusion of the case - not to resemble "true crime" in the least. However, it's worth going along with it all for the sake of having Anthony as a Watson figure: not a complete clown, but pretty clueless compared to Hawthorne, whom he doesn't much like. For my part, I enjoyed the uningratiating Hawthorne and his dynamic with his author assistant. Anthony thinks that he needs to include colourful details about Hawthorne's character and private life in order for the book to sell, and tries to pump him, but Hawthorne is having none of it: the murder's the thing. On the other hand, one gets the feeling that Hawthorne likes Anthony rather better than the other way around. This looks like a crime novel series worth sticking with. Incidentally, another thing that warms me towards Hawthorne is that he didn't like the first chapter of Anthony's book.

Another crime novel where I had problems with the beginning chapter was Booked for Murder by Val McDermid, or V.L. McDermid as she signed herself for this book. It starts ostensibly from the point of view of a female hit-man (hit-woman?), but you can see there's a twist coming. I was glad when the story proper started, but all in all I got on considerably less well with this crime story compared to The Word is Murder. To be fair, this is an old novel of McDermid's, published in the Nineties, and is probably not one of her more ambitious works. Still, my goal was to try out McDermid, and as I wasn't that impressed, I'll probably be giving her Tony Hill books etc. a miss. The crime solver in Booked for Murder is Lindsay Gordon, a Scottish lesbian ex-journalist with a working-class background. Which doesn't have to mean she's chippy, but... she is. Or perhaps opinionated would be a better word. I didn't really warm to her, and the fact that her all-female circle of friends all share her views didn't make things better. The murder victim is killed in a flat in Islington, and I don't think it's wrong to say that the book's outlook overall is very Islington. Although the murder motive was pretty much impossible for the reader to figure out beforehand, I had no problem guessing who the murderer would turn out to be.

I'll say this much for Booked for Murder, though: it's an easy read, and what with all the reasonably sparky dialogue, it's a good distraction on the bus or if, like me at the moment, one is nursing an aching jaw. If Islington is your spiritual home, you may very well enjoy it.