Magpie Murders

Susan explains that she works for Cloverleaf Books, a small press with a handful of successful titles. Alan Conway is, by far, their biggest. Charles Cloverleaf, the head of the company, is old-fashioned. He’s very close friends with Susan, plays the cello, and likes to read. Susan has been on the road with an author and hasn’t seen him for a week. He’s already in his office when she returns to work on Monday. She describes him as a handsome older man, with a Labrador named Bella.

He tells her that he received a letter from Alan earlier in the morning. Alan must have written it immediately after they had dinner together two days prior. Susan includes an exact reproduction of the handwritten letter. In the letter, Alan says that he has cancer and has decided against chemo. Alan indicates that he has cut his partner James out of his will, and left Charles a small bequest. He mentions a book he had written called The Slide, and other arrangements concerning his death. Susan and Charles agree that it is a suicide letter. Charles says that he had no idea about Alan’s plans or his illness. When they met for dinner, they had had drinks, caught up, and talked about the book. During dinner, a waiter dropped a handful of plates and Alan became agitated. Later that night, he said he wanted to pull a radio interview taking place later in the week. Both Susan and Charles are puzzled and disturbed by Alan’s death.

Susan discovered Alan Conway through her sister, whose children went to the school where Alan worked as an English teacher. Susan took a liking to the manuscript, but didn’t like Alan. Although she’s not Alan's number one fan, she really does love the Atticus series.

When she returns to Charles's office, he says that he already called the police, and that Alan must have jumped from a tower attached to his house. Charles also tells her that his assistant Jemima recently handed in her notice. Susan proposes that she drive up to his house to see if she can find the missing pages of the manuscript. As she leaves the office, she notices that “the letter was handwritten” but “the manuscript was typed” (193).

Susan drives to his house in her fancy car and checks into a hotel in the town where Alan lived. She drives to Abbey Grange, Alan’s house, and realizes that it appears very similar to the way Alan described Pye Hall in the books. She reflects on the fact that this is where Alan must have died only days earlier. On impulse, she takes a photograph of the house; she notices two tire tracks near the house and takes a picture of them as well. After the publication of his third book, Alan came out as gay, and left his wife for a younger man named James Taylor. James comes out of the house and invites her in.

The interior of the house is much plainer than the interior of Pye Hall in the book. James reveals that Alan asked him to move out two weeks ago. James says that they had already broken up when Alan died, and that Mr. Khan, Alan’s solicitor, found the body. He tells Susan that he was the inspiration for the character of James Fraser, the “dumb blond assistant” (199).

Alan’s office is right beneath the tower, which is organized and full of reminders of his status as a bestselling writer. She notices a photograph sticking out of a journal of a still from a movie. James tells her it was the inspiration for Atticus’s appearance. Susan flips through the journal, noting the appointments of the past few days but finding nothing remarkable. She accesses his computer but can’t find any copies of the latest manuscript. James tells her that Alan has another computer in London and a laptop, but this was the computer he used to write the book. They can’t find anything related to the latest book in the room. James suggests talking to Mr. Khan or Alan’s sister.

Susan finds a dumbwaiter in one of the walls. They check out the tower, and from the top, they can see the house of a neighbor, John White. Susan descends from the tower and reflects on the information she has uncovered, puzzled that he booked appointments for the following week. She wonders whether he really killed himself.

Susan goes to see Mr. Khan, Alan’s solicitor. She explains why she’s there; Khan tells her he was the one to find the body, and that the two had been friends. Khan reveals that Alan hadn’t signed the new version of the will when he died, and that legally all of his things now belong to James.

Susan shares with the reader an excerpt of Alan’s unpublished novel, which is about an older, aristocratic man written in a very stilted style. Susan thinks the novel is not very good and understands why Charles didn’t want to publish it. She is confused how this could be the same writer who penned a hugely popular series. Susan considers the possibility that Alan did not write the novel at all.

Susan reflects that all of Alan’s novels take place in fictitious settings, and that small towns lend themselves to pettiness and secrecy. She claims that things “fester around the village square, driving people to psychosis and violence” (215). She visits Orford, where Alan’s sister lives, and realizes that it is very similar to the town of Magpie Murders. Alan took all sorts of real places and people and fictionalized them in his work. Susan suspects his sister Claire will be a stand-in for Clarissa. Claire had been close with her brother and had no idea that he had been ill. After her husband died, she moved to be closer to her brother. Claire confesses to Susan that she doesn’t think Alan killed himself.

Susan goes to visit her younger sister Katie, who lives with her husband and children in a countryside house. Susan tells Katie about Alan’s death and her search for the missing chapters of the manuscript, and Katie notes that no one liked Alan very much when he was a teacher at her children’s school. Katie worries that Susan isn’t married and lives alone, but Susan reassures her.

Finding herself caught up in the murder mystery concerning Alan’s death, Susan realizes she hasn’t known many people who have died in real life, except for Alan and her parents. Susan made a copy of the letter before Charles handed it over to the police, and when she gets home, she looks it over. It’s Alan’s handwriting, but as she examines it, she realizes that he never explicitly mentions suicide, only referring to his illness and eventual death.

That night her boyfriend, Andreas Patakis, comes to her apartment with gifts from Greece. Andreas once taught at the same school as Alan and his ex-wife. Andreas asks about Alan’s death and Susan tells him the whole story. He warns her that it could be dangerous to dig around in Alan’s life, especially with murder involved. Andreas tells her he is thinking of returning to Crete and wants her to come with him. Susan doesn’t know how to answer and isn’t sure she wants to give up her life in London. That night, Susan replays “snippets of conversation” from the various suspects, and dreams of Atticus (235).

Susan meets with Charles to tell him that she hasn’t had any luck finding the chapters, but doesn’t tell him about her suspicions about Alan’s death. Susan asks again about Charles’s last meeting with Alan and decides to go to the club where they ate to further investigate. She speaks with Donald, a waiter who dropped plates and whom Alan had spoken to during the meeting. When he is reluctant to speak with her, she reveals that she thinks someone may have murdered Alan.

Donald tells her that the idea for one of Alan’s previous novels was his idea. He took a writing workshop with Alan and claimed that Alan stole his concept for a murder mystery. Donald tried to get in contact with Cloverleaf Books and with Alan, but never heard back. At the restaurant, he dropped the plates because he was shocked to see Alan. After dropping the plates, Alan passed Donald on the way to the bathroom. Donald asked if he remembered him, but Alan claimed he had no memory. Susan asks Donald to look up who was sitting next to Alan and Charles the night they ate at the club. She reflects that, “he already knew where Alan lived,” and might be another potential suspect (243).

Agatha Christie's grandson Matthew Prichard sat next to Alan and Charles that night in the club. Susan calls him and asks about the discussion, and he agrees to meet her at a bar to talk. Matthew explains that Alan and Charles argued about the title of the book. Matthew also notes that Alan had borrowed a lot of small details from his grandmother’s work. Susan wonders if all the subtle hints to Agatha Christie works are clues somehow related to his murder.

That Friday, Susan and Charles drive to Alan’s funeral. Charles tells Susan that he’s thinking of stepping aside from the publishing company and retiring, and he asks her if she would like to take over. They arrive just in time for the funeral, and Susan takes note of all the suspects in attendance, including Alan’s ex-boyfriend James Taylor, his sister Claire Jenkins, his neighbor John White, and his ex-wife Melissa and their son.

In real life, the vicar looks just like Robin Osborne, the vicar in the book. He reveals that Alan had donated a large sum of money to the church in order secure burial there. Toward the end of the funeral, Susan spots a man in a black fedora leaving the funeral, and “set off in pursuit” after him (257).

Susan catches up to the man in the hat but isn’t sure what to say to him. He turns out to be Mark Redmond, a producer who had optioned the rights to Alan’s series. Susan persuades him to stop at a café with her and asks him when he last saw Alan. Mark confesses that the day before his death, Alan invited him to dinner at his house. Alan was difficult to work with, and Mark thinks that the production of the show will go much more smoothly now that he is out of the picture. He also reveals that Alan had told him there was another production company with whom he was considering working. When Susan gets back to the inn, she checks the registry and sees that Mark and his wife were staying there when Alan died, and that Mark had “been lying” about his whereabouts and “had actually been in Framlingham at the time Alan had died” (264).

After talking with Mark, Susan makes her way back to the inn to join the reception. She talks to the vicar about his sermon, and he seems surprised that she thought he and Alan might have had a bad relationship. She finally tells her suspicions about the death to Charles, who doesn’t believe her. James makes a toast, and then Charles leaves to catch his taxi to the train station. Leaving the reception, Susan runs into Claire Jenkins, who has typed notes for an autobiography on Alan.

Susan includes Claire’s notes in the following chapter. Claire reiterates her belief that Alan didn’t kill himself. She describes how they grew up with a father who was “a horrible man,” the headmaster of the boarding school that Alan attended (270). At night, Claire and Alan would tap messages to one another through the walls. Alan had a difficult childhood, was solitary, and loved reading and wordplay. Their father used to beat Alan, but when Alan moved on to high school, he was happier. Alan was an English major in college, and then worked in advertising.

A year before he turned 30, he applied to and accepted into a creative writing program. Alan continued writing, became an English teacher, and got married. His wife Melissa encouraged him to write mystery novels. Alan found success with his new series, and “was suddenly a famous author” (277). After the publication of several novels, he divorced Melissa, came out as gay, and moved in with James. Claire insists that Alan “was a fighter all his life” and would never have committed suicide (279).

Susan considers Claire’s notes, and thinks that she has come to the right conclusion but for the wrong reasons. She is killing time walking around the town before dinner when she sees the vicar in the cemetery and decides to follow him. Susan asks the vicar about his relationship with Alan, and he reveals that they went to boarding school together and that Alan played cruel pranks on him, including taking some photographs—though he won’t say what was in the photographs. His wife interrupts their conversation before he can elaborate.

Susan has dinner with James Taylor and gets drunk. James tells Susan that he’s inherited the house and much of Alan’s fortune, but that he plans to sell the house. He tells her how many of the character and place names in the books draw from other sources, and how he makes deliberate use of patterns and wordplay. These tricks were “a game he played to stop himself getting bored” (288).

James grew up in a religious family, left school early, and moved to London to pursue a career in acting. He was working as a sex worker and part-time actor when he met Alan—one of his clients. Toward the end of their relationship, James felt trapped in Framlingham and began to see other people in London. Alan got angry and threw him out. James and Susan are both drunk, and she calls him a taxi to get home.

The next morning, Susan wakes up hungover. She flips through the manuscript again and realizes that all the characters have bird-based names. Susan reflects that character names are important, but that for Alan they were a sort of game that trivialized the work as a whole. After breakfast, Susan drives to Alan’s house to drop off James’s car keys, which he had left the night before. She drops the keys through the letterbox and decides to visit the neighbor, John White. He invites her in, and Susan asks about his disagreement with Alan. John explains that a business deal with a man named Jack Dartford had gone through, and that the investors, including Alan, had all lost money on it.

Susan meets detective Richard Locke in Ipswich. Richard doesn’t believe that anyone murdered Alan, and explains to Susan that premeditated murder is incredibly rare in real life. He argues that, “there are only three motives” for murder: “sex, anger, and money” (303). Locke is angry about Alan's fictionalizing him as Chubb and complains that mystery fiction makes murders more complicated than they are in reality.

Susan returns to London and finds Andreas cooking dinner for her. Andreas is uninterested in her investigation and tells her that he’s already given his notice at the school and made plans to move to Greece. Andreas encourages her to move with him and indicates that he never thought much of Alan’s books, calling them “badly written trash” (310).

Susan returns to work as usual on Monday. Charles is out of the office because his daughter is having a baby. Susan feels caught between going to Greece with Andreas, taking over Cloverleaf from Charles, and continuing to pursue her investigation into Alan’s death. She receives a copy of a manuscript by Donald Leigh, the waiter to whom she had spoken about Alan. She skims the manuscript and compares it to the novel Alan wrote with the same premise, including excerpts from both books for the reader. The plot of the two books is remarkably similar, with only minor details changed, and Susan’s suspicion that Donald may have killed Alan is renewed. Susan also receives a letter with a single photograph inside, showing Alan and John White standing at the top of the tower, with John about to push him off.

Susan reflects on the satisfying nature of detective stories, arguing that they are unique because of the reader’s ability to identify with and share the same goal as the character of the detective. She claims that, “of all characters, the detective enjoys a particular, indeed a unique relationship with the reader” (324). Susan reflects that, unlike the detectives in mystery novels, she has much less information to work with, and is much less prepared to solve a murder.

Confused, Susan draws up a list of potential suspects in Alan’s death, just as she had done for the missing last chapters of Alan’s manuscript. James Taylor has motive and opportunity to have killed Alan, but she’s not convinced it was he. Claire Jenkins has a troubled relationship with her brother and is unfavorably portrayed in the manuscript. Tom Robeson has an old grudge against Alan, and opportunity to enact revenge. Donald Leigh also has reason to hate Alan, has a motive, and knows where he lived. Mark Redmond lied about his whereabouts on the day of Alan’s death, and would have wanted Alan out of the way to produce a TV show based on his novels. Melissa Conway has a motive as a humiliated ex-wife, and Alan’s son Freddy may have a motive.

The town of Bradford-on-Avon, where Alan’s ex-wife lived, was another inspiration for the town in Alan’s manuscript. Susan goes there to meet Alan’s ex-wife Melissa for lunch. Susan asks about Melissa’s relationship with Alan, and Melissa mentions that before she began dating Alan, she had had a fling with Andreas, making Susan feel surprised and jealous. Melissa says that it was her idea for Alan to write mysteries, and that Alan really wanted to write literary fiction. He was disappointed with his success and felt pigeonholed into the genre. On her way back from lunch, Susan realizes that Andreas might also have had a reason to want Alan dead. She looks again at the manuscript to see if there are any clues that she missed. She realizes that the titles of the books in the Atticus series spell out “an anagram” (337).

Getting off the train, Susan bumps into Jemima, Charles’s old secretary. Jemima reveals that she didn’t quit, but that Charles fired her. Susan is intrigued and asks Jemima if she wants to get a drink. Jemima explains that Charles had gotten angry with her for supposedly double-booking an appointment and for spilling coffee, and he asked her to leave. Jemima also mentions that Andreas had come into the office the day before to meet with Charles, even though he was supposed to still be in Greece. Jemima tells Susan that a copy of Alan’s manuscript arrived in the mail on Tuesday— several days before Alan had supposedly handed it over.

Disturbed by the news, Susan heads back to work. She goes into Charles’s office, where she finds the missing chapters of the manuscript in a drawer. Susan flips through the manuscript, piecing together more clues about Alan’s murder. She is about to read a note that Atticus wrote to James concerning his death, when Charles interrupts her in his office.

Susan accuses him of killing Alan. They sit down together and have a drink, and Susan explains to him how she figured out he was the killer. She details how Charles read the manuscript when it arrived on Tuesday, fired Jemima, drove up to Alan’s house and pushed him from the tower, then removed all traces of the manuscript from his office. The manuscript included a suicide letter in Alan’s hand, written by Atticus to James in the novel, and Charles couldn’t let the last chapter be found because the letter would have matched Alan’s supposed suicide note.

Alan planned to go on a radio program later that week and reveal that Atticus’s name is actually an offensive anagram (“a stupid cunt”), ruining the sales prospects for the book (351). Charles wanted to preserve his own family’s financial future. He also argues that people need “literary heroes” who “shine out” and are “the beacons we follow,” and that Alan was going to ruin just such a hero (353). Charles asks Susan to understand his motives and to let the matter lie, but Susan insists that she turn him in.

She says that she’ll give him the weekend to arrange his affairs. As she turns to leave, he cracks her over the head, and she falls to the ground.