Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz Analysis Essay Example

“I had been the detective and now I was the murderer and do you know what? I think I liked it more.” (Horowitz, 236). Susan dreams about pushing Alan off the cliff, a dream she shouldn’t have, after she put away the murderer of the belved book series’s author. She suddenly finds herself questioning the rash decisions and assumptions she made before– after all, Alan did make her life a lot worse. Similarly to Susan, readers slowly find out that Alan is a bitter person and Charles is quite the opposite. Anthony Horowitz juxtaposes Charles’ and Alan’s personalities to ask whether there are circumstances where murder is socially acceptable.

To begin, Horowitz portrays Alan Conway as arrogant and self-absorbed, purposefully hurting people and even ruining their lives for his own enjoyment. Andreas, Susan's boyfriend, in an argument about why she is trying to solve the muder of a horrible person, tells her that Alan not only used his books to laugh at Susan, “He was laughing at everyone” (Horowitz, 165). This aggravated tone and mood gives signs right away to the reader that the author is characterizing Alan as a sadist who loves seeing people fail. Horowitz portrays Alan this way to create the notion in readers' minds that Alan is an unpleasant person. Thus, readers begin to associate Alan with real people, which makes the decision between good and bad more personal. Primarily, Susan, the narrator and trustworthy character that readers are more inclined to believe, sees Alan as unsympathetic. In her mind, he is making her life miserable, but she is so obsessed with the thrill and excitement of solving a mystery that she puts her common sense and hate for Alan aside. Additionally, Susan feels used and blindsided because all Alan does is “play mean tricks on the people who loved his books,” (Horowitz, 223), her being one of them. Alan’s books were filled with riddles, and he found pleasure in watching people not being able to solve them. Even the titles of the nine books he worked on for eleven years were planned out from the beginning, so Alan could enjoy seeing people not discovering his little secret. The secret, though small and comes up in anagram and riddle form. This secret causes readers to see that Alan has tendencies toward epicaricacy, when a person derives pleasure from the misfortune and humiliation of others. In fact, the way Horowitz writes about Alan makes readers uncomfortable, which slowly leads readers not to be on Alan’s side. Later, due to their distrust of Alan, readers are quick to to question the terms of his murder.

Simultaneously, Horowitz compares Alan to Charles, describing Charles as nice, easy going, and an all-around decent person. Charles’s personality opposes Alan’s arrogant manner. Susan says, “Charles always struck me as a godfather figure” (Horowitz 14). The words God and Father represent the two most powerful, yet comforting figures in life. The Oxford dictionary defines god as the creator of the universe, superhero who is worshiped, a deity. Similarly, people define the role of a father as the protector, the provider, and the disciplinarian. Both are figures who affect lives and are loved and respected from many angles. It seems as if, by using these two words, Horwitz is foreshadowing that in the end, Susan will lean toward being on Charles’s side. Same as a father, Charles has authority over Susan, but he is not someone of whom she has ever been scared. Susan also describes Charles as a comforting figure in her life. She describes his room in Cloverleaf as an “Elegant, square room, with three windows, bookshelves” (Horowitz, 14). It’s a humble, yet rich room, a room that’s non threatening, a room that, in readers’ minds, plants the idea of a trustworthy and genteel man, thus making Susan’s journey to identify him as the murderer even harder. Horowitz uses the characterization of Charles to manipulate readers into thinking he isn’t a suspect. This makes the reader’s experience much more enjoyable when they discover the murderer was right under their noses, the best quality af a mystery novel. In fact, Charles’s characterization is a big red herring that readers and characters alike couldn’t foretell because nobody was expecting the godfather figure to be the murderer. Charles has already gained readers trust, so when they discover that he is the murderer, they have to ask questions. Similar to if a person's child or friend did something bad but they love them so they are a bit more hesitant to make accusations. This bias that Charles is a decent person has been planted into Susan and the readers’ minds, which eventually leads them to question whether the murder of Alan, a bitter person, who made Susan’s life a living hell, was–for lack for a better word–forgivble.

Lastly, Horowitz asks readers if they think murder is ever justifiable, intentionally making connections to the fight between good and evil. To begin, in an argument between Charles and Susan, Charles tries to support the fact he murdered Alan by attemting to convince Susan that the world won’t be a “worse off place without Alan Conway” (Horowitz, 222). Horowitz uses this sentence as an abrupt shift in plot to further lure the readers into a place where they question what they were taught about right and wrong, and they start mixing up violence and justice. Most readers have already established that Charles is the antagonist, but Horowitz is tipping the scale by asking if he is really the person that should be exonerated in this situation. Furthermore, this leads readers to question whether an antagonist is required in every situation. In the same way, Horowitz poses this same rhetorical question again to readers throughout the whole book. Readers observe this once more at the end of the book when Susan was in Crete and imagaines it was her, pushing Alan to his death, saying it was, “Exactly what he deserved.”(Horowitz, 236). Susan, who is a lovable and trustworthy character, tells readers that she would voluntarily perform the worst sin in the book: murder. Why? This leads to readers thinking that maybe Charles was in the right. In fact, the question is: does the author want readers to feel guilty for supporting the murderer?

Today, in the United States of America, there are currently 2,474 people on death row, each for their own reason, but most revolve around one thing: murder. Lots of people in the world pose the argument that murder cannot be solvedwith more murder, which inevatbly leads people to question the death penalty. Similarly, the narrator Susan, is forced to question whether the person who murdered someone she and many others hate should be convicted. In the end, it seems as if Horowitz wants readers to consider the full picture, in the real world, before jumping to stereotypes of good and evil.