“The Sentence is Death” - Anthony Horowitz

 (Hawthorne book 2)

🖌️ The real world Horowitz carries on with his plot device of inserting a fictionalized version of an eponymous true crime writer/reluctant biographer charged with teaming up with the infuriating Detective Hawthorne to write up his past cases. Lo and behold, they stumble upon another mystery. You might think such an inventive plot device might get old; it doesn’t!

🖌️ While the prior book provided interesting background into a crime fiction writer’s process, this one gave us insights into possible filming and production issues that can arise when filming on location - particularly when that location is a London street. The breakdown of costs even for the merest seconds of action, is eye-watering!

🖌️ Ever the pugnacious bulldog, Hawthorne, makes connections between incidents old and new. I never suspected the actual killer, but I did suspect just about everyone else. Poor faux-Horowitz is about as hapless as Hastings, albeit not nearly as good natured.

🖌️ Hooray for word play! I must admit, this was a doozy, and I had to return to the first part not once, but several times, to unpack Anno’s meaning. She’s flipping the expected roles (“I am not sentencing him…”) but this could reflect marriage, justice, authorship. Horowitz doesn’t specify. Add to the complexity, the double entendre Anno refers to of “sentence” - the legal, and the actual unit of language (which itself reframes the title). But then, she flips it again with her final line delivered almost smugly - more fool Hawthorne. If she has the power to narrate this sentence into existence, perhaps she survives. The possibilities are many and complex, fitting for the *highly* stylized Akira Anno character.

🖌️ Real world Horowitz, with his multiple layers, metaphors, and occasions where faux-Horowitz seems to step outside the story to wink at the reader, is adept at manipulating seemingly ordinary statements to take on a sudden ironic or humorous twist. I didn’t realize there was a term for this, and now that I know it, I realize that real Horowitz employs it frequently with narrator/faux-Horowitz to build up the dry, British humor of our put-upon sidekick.

🖌️ Whew! That was quite the detour! Back to paraprosdokian. For those curious, here is  a far simpler example of this literary device.