Love Clever Mysteries? Start With These 6 Anthony Horowitz Books. 

Londoner Horowitz was best known as a writer for young adults (the best-selling Alex Rider spy stories among them) and of TV dramas, including the excellent Foyle’s War.

Then, in 2009, he received a letter from the Conan Doyle Estate offering him the chance to write the first Sherlock Holmes sequel ever approved by his creator’s family. A lifelong fan of the great consulting detective, Horowitz leaped at the chance. 

It offers all the pleasures of the originals—a fiendish plot, brilliant fireside deductions, the rattle of hansom cabs—while touching on subjects—the sex trade, child abuse—that would have been off limits when Sir Arthur was at his peak.

The House of Silk perfectly captures the Holmesian world of foggy Victorian London. 

Set during the time when Holmes is missing, presumed dead, Horowitz’s follow-up to The House of Silk shines the spotlight on Detective Inspector Athelney Jones. Jones is one of the Scotland Yard detectives who sometimes aids the genius of Baker Street and the only one the great man seems to respect. 

In this 2014 novel, he teams up with that other Conan Doyle staple, the visiting Pinkerton Agent, to track down and destroy the international master criminal who is trying to fill the void left by Professor Moriarty’s death at the Reichenbach Falls. 

Jones proves a worthy and complex substitute for Holmes, and Horowitz delivers a memorable final twist.

The first in a series featuring book editor-turned-amateur sleuth Susan Ryleland came out in 2016. Against her better judgment, Ryeland is drawn into investigating the suspicious death of her publishing house’s best-selling crime writer, Alan Conway, inventor of the hugely popular private eye Atticus Pund. 

A cantankerous loner, Conway lives in the sort of English village beloved by Agatha Christie and dies after being pushed from the roof. The biggest clue to finding his killer is the manuscript of his latest and final Pund novel. 

Unfortunately, the last chapter—in which the fictional murderer is revealed—has gone missing. Uncovering the writer’s killer thus involves Ryeland solving the fictional crime alongside the brilliant Pund. 

The result is a tightly woven mystery- within-a-mystery that’s as baffling as it is brilliant.

Susan Ryeland has quit publishing in London and moved to Greece to run a small, struggling hotel with her boyfriend, Andreas. 

She’s contacted by the owners of an English hotel, site of a real-life murder that formed the basis of one of Alan Conway’s best-loved novels, Atticus Pund Takes the Case. 

The owner’s daughter believes the novel demonstrates that the man convicted of the crime is innocent. Soon afterward, the daughter disappears. 

Ryeland is quickly on her trail, using Atticus Pund as her guide. The Moonflower Murders is another supremely clever work of crime fiction that brilliantly weaves one conventional whodunnit with another.

There’s a tradition in classic mysteries of having a character telling us about the cases of a brilliant sleuth. Examples include Dr. Watson, Captain Hastings, and Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin. 

Anthony Horowitz adopts this approach in The Word is Murder, introducing us to the sour-tempered but brilliant former Scotland Yard detective Daniel Hawthorne via his bumbling sidekick, a writer named…Anthony Horowitz. 

The novel’s Anthony Horowitz is a slightly fictionalised version of the author and there’s plenty of fun in the blending of real life events with the plot of the novel—at one point, for instance, the foul-mouthed Hawthorne interrupts Horowitz’s meeting with Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg (they really did meet, to discuss a possible Tintin sequel) and proceeds to offer his extremely candid opinions on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Aside from that, there’s a wonderfully plotted murder mystery (Horowitz wrote several episodes of the acclaimed ITV series Poirot, and he really understands structure) involving a highly successful British actor, Damian Cowper, his doting mother, Diana, a barrel full of red herrings, and a cast of grotesquely believable suspects.

Having taken time off to pen an officially sanctioned James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, Horowitz returned to classic crime with this, the sixth book in the hugely entertaining Horovitz and Hawthorne series. 

A Deadly Episode takes us even further into “meta” territory. The Word is Murder is being adapted into a film; the fictional Horowitz’s version of the screenplay (featuring the fictional Horowitz) has been kicked to one side, and he’s locked in a bitter dispute with the new writer. 

Filming has begun in the seaside town of Hastings, but when Horowitz and Hawthorne visit the set, they find things are far from happy. 

The director presents himself as the next Ingmar Bergman, and the two leads hate each other’s guts. Soon, things take a bloody turn when the actor who plays Hawthorne is killed, and Hawthorne feels compelled to start an investigation. 

Filled with sly and very funny characterizations of real-life film people and built around a typically well-crafted plot, A Deadly Episode is a genuine delight.