These stories satisfy our natural curiosity for solvable mysteries, allowing us to slip into the shoes of competent detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Benoit Blanc. There’s a sense of satisfaction to following a trail of clues, identifying red herrings, and theorizing before the answers are revealed. Good detective stories use grounded settings to heighten anxiety and embrace some amount of chaos before bringing about a neat resolution.
Detective stories can take many forms, but here are five books that are engrossing page-turners from start to finish. Metanarratives, or a “story-within-a-story” formula, can be tricky to pull off. That said, Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders juggles its dual narratives with ease.
The first plotline is about a mystery novel written by fictional author Alan Conway, where the housekeeper at Pye Hall is found dead in the year 1955. Famed detective Atticus Pünd and his assistant James Fraser arrive at the scene to solve this crime, while aspects of Pünd’s personal life are revealed towards the end. The second story in Magpie Murders is about Susan Ryeland, an editor who finds that the last chapter in Conway’s novel is missing.
This means a whodunit with no solution, leading to yet another mystery worth resolving. Horowitz’s novel is a page-turner for many reasons. It cushions an intriguing period-piece mystery inside its modern narrative, letting readers get engrossed by these parallel cases.
These metanarratives are inevitably connected, which adds to the fun of hunting for clues and connecting any possible dots. The novel is a brilliant homage to classic Golden Age whodunits by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, which often dwell on the nostalgia of a complicated suburban mystery. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd opens with Dr.
James Sheppard, the story's narrator, talking about the death of a wealthy widow who took her own life a year after her abusive husband’s death. Sheppard is soon contacted by a widower named Roger Ackroyd, who urgently invites our narrator over to speak on a pressing matter. The grisly murder takes place after this visit, prompting the appearance of retired detective Hercule Poirot, who must rely on his “little gray cells” to get to the bottom of this mystery.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
