Book Review

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The Sentence is Death, by Anthony Horowitz

If you recognise this author’s name at all, it is probably from the credits of a television programme such as Foyle’s War, but he is also a respected published author, having written stories in the contemporary Sherlock Holmes canon, but also young adult spy stories featuring the Alex Rider character. This book, published in 2018 by Century, London, in hardback; ISBN 978-1-78089-709-7, is a bit of an oddity: it purports to be a true story, the second of a three-book deal undertaken apparently under some duress from his new publisher, detailing the work of an ex-Scotland Yard Detective Inspector, who is currently working as a technical consultant to film & television companies, after having been fired from the Police Service for assaulting a suspect in a child pornography case. The question that is uppermost in my mind when reading this story is: “how true can this actually be?” Horowitz does make it very clear in the acknowledgments at the back of the book that “some of [the people who actually appear in the book] made my life very difficult while others have demanded that I change their names or remove them altogether: one of them has even gone so far as to threaten me with lawyers, although I would say my depiction of her is entirely accurate.” For obvious reasons, he doesn’t specify which character this is.

The first chapter was all the more enjoyable for me for several reasons; I have enjoyed watching Foyle’s War, not least for its period setting, and the vicissitudes of location film & television work are quite well known to me from another life; but also because the director of the episode, The Eternity Ring, which is featured in the story, albeit in parallel with the main plot, was Stuart Orme, with whom I have worked on two occasions, the more memorable of which was Ghostboat in 2005, and I have many happy memories of location work in Rome (at Cinecittá studios) and Malta, all expenses paid, which for a lowly supporting artist (and credit to Horowitz for using that term, rather than ‘extra’, which I dislike), albeit a featured one, which I was in that production, was very possibly a once-in-a-lifetime gig. The story is something of a cross between a biography and a diary, and the entrance of its subject is right at the end of the first chapter, when he blithely blunders onto the set in a real, modern taxi, thereby ruining the take in progress, which certainly stretched my credibility: Horowitz does write “It was impossible of course. The police should have blocked off the traffic. We had our own people at the end of the street, keeping back pedestrians. There was no way any vehicle could have come through.” It obviously did, though, so the only conclusion we can draw, if the event did actually happen, is that Daniel Hawthorne, the interloper, had sweet-talked both the actual policemen (as opposed to the background artists in period uniform) and the crew who had been charged with preventing interruptions to the shoot, to allow him to cause mayhem with his inconsiderate arrival: I would say that the evidently lax crew runners or third ADs would have been lucky to escape summary dismissal for such a transgression, given that Stuart Orme, “usually a pleasant, easy-going man” (which I can endorse), but who had been under tremendous pressure to finish this shoot successfully, displayed a face that “was thunderous as he looked up from his monitor to see what had happened”, and he was not amused when Hawthorne picked out Horowitz as his intended contact.

However, after that fraught beginning, the story proper can commence when Hawthorne, who is occasionally also called in by the police to assist with cases referred to as a ‘sticker’: “that is, a case which presented obvious difficulties from the start.” comes to Horowitz, albeit with blithe disregard for the mayhem he has caused, with a real murder which could be the subject-matter of their next shared book. Again, I have to say that this stretches my credibility, given that it has echoes of the “consulting detective”; the best-known of whom are Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot; but, having said that, I am not very familiar with real-life police procedures, so I suppose I have to accept that it must be possible. The officers with whom Hawthorne & Horowitz have to liaise on this case are eminently dislikable, and if detectives such as Inspector Cara Grunshaw (surely a pseudonym) really exist, it would be very difficult to have much faith in the integrity of the current London police. She makes it her business to make life near impossible for the author, even going so far as to physically assault him to frighten him into informing her of Hawthorne’s progress, to ensure she ‘cracks’ the case before he does: she is mostly successful with this intimidation, although Horowitz does rebel occasionally, even if only in his own mind; Hawthorne seems to maintain swan-like serenity through all this intimidation. The murder of a high-profile divorce lawyer, known professionally as “the blunt razor”, because of his scrupulous integrity, has taken place in Hampstead, and initially the police are baffled, hence Hawthorne’s importation. Initially, there is one obvious suspect, but surely the reason for this is so obvious that she wouldn’t be so stupid? Especially giver her reputation for erudition; also, she has an alibi for the time of the murder.

After this, more potential suspects can be considered after being interviewed by the detective & the author; I must also confess to being somewhat dubious that potential suspects would consent to an author being present at their interviews, although only one suspect objects to this, and potentially violently; also, the author’s identity & occupation is not always revealed to the interviewee, if at all. Throughout the investigation, Hawthorne is fairly unforthcoming to Horowitz with his theories, and he discourages the author from asking his own questions in interviews, for fear that his inexperience in these matters might prejudice the investigation. Nevertheless, Horowitz tries his best to arrive at a sensible solution to the conundrum, partly to spite Hawthorne for not trusting him further, although his theories change quite frequently as new information becomes available; he also has to contend with the ongoing tribulations of the Foyle’s War shoot, not least because his (presumably real) wife, Jill Green, was the producer of the series. The reader is kept guessing until very late in the book as to who the murderer was and, as is often the case, historical events prove to be crucial in unravelling why this murder occurred. Overall, and notwithstanding my scepticism about the veracity of the facts of the case as presented, I found this an enjoyable book, and can happily recommend it, especially if insights into the real world of television are enticing to the unconnected reader, and I would happily read the other two in the series, albeit with the first book I read being out of sequence, but that is a minor reservation.