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Magpie Murders

Book by Anthony Horowitz · 22 quotes · Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders, Murder Mystery

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Magpie Murders Quotes

“I had chosen to play the detective—and if there is one thing that unites all the detectives I've ever read about, it's their inherent loneliness. The suspects know each other. They may well be family or friends. But the detective is always the outsider. He asks the necessary questions but he doesn't actually form a relationship with anyone. He doesn't trust them, and they in turn are afraid of him. It's a relationship based entirely on deception and it's one that, ultimately, goes nowhere. Once the killer has been identified, the detective leaves and is never seen again. In fact, everyone is glad to see the back of him.”

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“Much later that night, I thought the door opened and a man came into the bedroom. He was leaning on a stick. He didn't say anything but he stood there, looking sadly at Andreas and me, and as a shaft of moonlight came slanting in through the window, I recognized Atticus Pünd. I was asleep, of course, and dreaming, but I remember wondering how he had managed to enter my world before the thought occurred to me that maybe it was I who had entered his.”

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“The unsigned will is one of those tropes of detective fiction that I’ve come to dislike, only because it’s so overused. In real life, a lot of people don’t even bother to make a will but then we’ve all managed to persuade ourselves that we’re going to live for ever. They certainly don’t go round the place threatening to change it in order to give someone the perfect excuse to come and kill them. It looked as if Alan Conway had done exactly that.”

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“In a whodunnit, when a detective hears that Sir Somebody Smith has been stabbed thirty-six times on a train or decapitated, they accept it as a quite natural occurrence. They pack their bags and head off to ask questions, collect clues, ultimately to make an arrest. But I wasn't a detective. I was an editor—and, until a week ago, not a single one of my acquaintances had managed to die in an unusual and violent manner. Apart from my own parents and Alan, I hardly knew anyone who had died at all. It's strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative fiction to survive without them. And yet there are almost none in real life, unless you happen to live in the wrong area. Why is it that we have such a need for murder mystery and what is it that attracts us—the crime or the solution? Do we have some primal need of bloodshed because our own lives are so safe, so comfortable? I made a mental note to check out Alan's sales figures in San Pedro Sula in Honduras (the murder capital of the world). It might be that they didn't read him at all.”

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“This business with Sir Magnus Pye had got off to an inauspicious start. It was one thing to be stabbed in your own home—but to be decapitated with a medieval sword the moment darkness fell was quite simply outrageous. Saxby-on-Avon was such a quiet place! Yes, there had been that business with the cleaner, the woman who had tripped up and fallen down the stairs, but this was something else again. Could it really be true that one of the villagers, living in a Georgian house perhaps, going to church and playing for the local cricket team, mowing their lawn on Sunday mornings and selling home-made marmalade at the village fête, was a homicidal maniac? The answer was yes—quite possibly.”

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“And then a door opened and a man appeared, coming out of the living room. He was in his late thirties, with dark hair and a moustache, wearing a blue blazer with a crest on the front pocket. He had a lazy walk, one hand in his pocket and a cigarette in the other. Fraser had the immediate thought that this was a man whom it would be easy to dislike. He did not just arouse antipathy; he almost seemed to cultivate it.”

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