62 pages • 2 hours read
Anthony HorowitzThe Word is Murder
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Dead Man’s Shoes”
Anthony recovers and begins to speculate on possible motives for Damian’s murder. Hawthorne agrees that the Godwin tragedy seems less relevant. While Hawthorne investigates the premises, Anthony hears noises coming from the body and yells in fright. Hawthorne assures him this is typical, and Anthony privately reflects, “Not for the first time, I wished that I’d never agreed to write this bloody book” (144).
Hawthorne briefly blames Anthony for his failure to anticipate the danger, claiming that Anthony distracts him, then softens and explains. He noticed Diana kept all her key sets together, with one obviously absent. They were obviously the same set used to murder Damian, since he had mentioned her visiting his apartment when he was away. After the official investigators arrive, Hawthorne takes Anthony out onto Damian’s back terrace and explains what the evidence shows. This was clearly where the killer concealed himself, hoping Damian would be unaccompanied when he fled from the music at the funeral. Hawthorne points out that the terrace was also the only suitable means of escape for a person who had just committed an act of gory violence.
Anthony watches the investigators work, slightly disturbed by their detachment from a dead body. Meadows arrives and asks how Hawthorne knew to rush there, and he explains that it was obvious Damian knew something given his reaction at the funeral. Anthony notes that Hawthorne does not confess any omissions on his part that might have prevented the death—but that he will have to record the fact in his own work.
They exit the apartment, eager to speak to Robert Cornwallis about the funeral disruption. Anthony, to his discomfiture, is wearing a pair of Damian’s shoes, as his have been confiscated by the investigators. Grace Lovell arrives in a taxi, and Hawthorne informs her of Damian’s murder. He urges her to return to her parents, as the crime scene is too disturbing for her and her daughter, and she quickly agrees. Anthony is struck by her lack of emotion, and Hawthorne agrees, saying, “I’ve seen more grief at a Turkish wedding. I’d say there’s a lot of things she’s not telling us” (151).
Chapter 14 Summary: “Willesden Green”
Anthony takes in the Cornwallis’s home and the undertaker’s cheerful, disheveled wife, clearly preoccupied with laundry and other domestic tasks and somewhat overwhelmed by life with young children. Anthony “wonder[s] what it [is] like to come home to this cosy, domestic normality after a day stitching up bodies in the morgue” (155).
Robert Cornwallis apologizes for being absent from the funeral, and his wife praises their son’s performance in the school play, saying that “acting runs in his blood” (157). Cornwallis insists he should have known, because of his disconcertment about Diana’s death coinciding with the day she made her funeral plan. His wife, Barbara, points out that her husband is a devoted viewer of all Damian Cowper’s works. The couple are stunned when Hawthorne reports that Damian is the latest victim.
Anthony notices that Hawthorne is especially tense as he asks Cornwallis how the music box could have been planted in Diana Cowper’s coffin. Cornwallis admits that the coffin was in a parked car, unattended, for a few moments, and that Diana’s choice of a light coffin material likely made the whole prank easier to carry off. The Cornwallises’ older son, Andrew, comes in, and his father prevents him from talking more about his acting ambitions. Anthony asks why Cornwallis chose his profession, and he explains, vaguely, that he spent some years avoiding following his family’s traditions before embracing them. As he walks them out, Cornwallis explains that a strange man called to ask about the location of the funeral. Cornwallis produces the number, and Hawthorne is unsurprised to see that it is Alan Godwin’s.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Lunch with Hilda”
Anthony is disconcerted to find himself concealing the origins of his “new” shoes when his wife, Jill, asks about them, as she knows nothing of Hawthorne or the case. He prepares for lunch with his ambitious literary agent, Hilda, who is obsessed with the profitability of his work. In contrast to her zeal, he dislikes the mercenary aspects of his job. He discovers that Hilda also works with Diana Cowper’s friend Raymond Clunes, who is now under criminal investigation. She is deeply skeptical of the Hawthorne project, echoing Anthony’s private doubts about whether the case will ever be solved and why a reader would take interest in Hawthorne. She is particularly upset about the fifty-fifty financial split of the profits and reminds Anthony his publisher still wants a sequel to The House of Silk.
Anthony joins Hawthorne for a visit to Alan Godwin’s office, in a part of the city Anthony dislikes. Alan Godwin denies harboring any anger at Damian but remains full of rage at Diana Cowper, blaming her for his failed business and the loss of his home, since she refused to help him financially. He admits to sending the blackmail letter in vengeance but denies any real plans to cause harm, including to Diana’s cat.
Hawthorne announces that their next visits will be to Canterbury, to meet Nigel Weston, the judge in Diana’s case, and to see the scene of the Godwin accident in Deal. Anthony agrees, though he is slightly disconcerted to be leaving London. He has a brief epiphany when he remembers something Godwin said that appears to conflict with the Raymond Clunes interview. He is eager to bring this up with Hawthorne, as “for once, [he has] the upper hand” (176).
Chapter 16 Summary: “Detective Inspector Meadows”
That same day, before their trip, Anthony arranges a meeting with Meadows, paying him for his time. He hopes that Hawthorne’s enemy will somehow provide information about him. Meadows tells him where Hawthorne lives but that he has no knowledge of Hawthorne’s family. He says that Hawthorne was always antisocial and was particularly unpopular for solving cases without using standard methods or even indicating how he knew where to investigate. His comment about Hawthorne and stairs was a reference to a previous case. Hawthorne was left alone briefly with a known pedophile, and the man ended up seriously injured after a fall while handcuffed. Hawthorne was fired for the incident, and Meadows says that while his former boss still supports Hawthorne, the man will not be a useful source for Anthony.
Anthony is disconcerted when Meadows asks if Hawthorne has interviewed Alan Godwin, realizing that he can make his collaborator into a target or become one himself, as Meadows seems suddenly menacing. Invoking second-rate detectives from popular series, Anthony reflects, ruefully: “I had been casting him as a Japp, a Lestrade, a Burden: the man who never solves the crime. Now I saw that I had underestimated him. He could be dangerous too” (182). Meadows subsides when Anthony tells him to ask Hawthorne directly, then asks for an autograph for his son, a devotee of Anthony’s Alex Rider novels. Anthony regrets the outing, as Meadows required extensive payment for his time and his drinks.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
Damian’s murder brings out a rare relative harmony within the unlikely investigative team. Hawthorne is solicitous of Anthony, acknowledging the unusual brutality of the scene. Anthony leaves the crime in Damian’s shoes, which loosely echoes Hawthorne helping himself to the contents of Diana’s refrigerator at the initial crime scene. Anthony is also disturbed to find himself lying to his wife about the origins of Damian’s shoes: knowing Hawthorne has introduced some dysfunction into his home life. Damian’s death brings Anthony deeper into Hawthorne’s world, to the point of following one of his habits. Both men also recognize that Grace is not particularly horrified or upset by Damian’s death and is more focused on her daughter, underlining that both have their insights into human nature, for all that Hawthorne is frequently dismissive of Anthony.
Anthony’s meetings with his agent and with Meadows underline that the relationship between literature and life is not straightforward. Hilda reminds Anthony that his obligations are to the world of fiction, echoing his earlier doubts that Hawthorne could be a viable and three-dimensional protagonist. Horowitz as author seems to suggest that a compelling, mysterious detective is sufficient, as is any reader’s sense of curiosity, since Anthony the character is happy to continue investigating in the face of his agent’s disapproval.
Horowitz as author inserts clues that Cornwallis may have his own agenda, for all that Anthony the character is sucked into the domestic chaos, contrasting the family with the tragic, silent Godwins. Cornwallis’s vagueness about his past and reactions to any mention of acting leave clues to the reader that he is, in fact, the killer, though his personal ties to Damian and Diana have yet to be discovered on the page. Read with this in mind, the Cornwallis home takes on its own sinister cast—the bonhomie conceals a simmering rage and resentment.
The meeting with Meadows highlights the metafictional element, while adding an air of menace to Hawthorne. Anthony begins the meeting comfortably, certain he is in charge of the agenda, only to be taken aback when Meadows turns the tables and interrogates him. He explicitly mentions the bumbling detectives of other fictional universes: Japp is the Scotland Yard detective whom Poirot regularly supports and who cannot match his genius. Lestrade serves a similar function for Holmes, while Burden is the incurious assistant of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford. His reliance on fiction in this moment indicates that his knowledge of the mystery genre makes Anthony the character too confident that he is playing a game with clear rules, in a world he understands. His error here has no lasting consequences, but it underlines that Anthony the character is naive and inexperienced in the universe of detection. Horowitz as author, then, is clearly willing to make himself flawed and impulsive, as a kind of admission that the world of literature is preparation for new kinds of writing, not an automatic qualification for an entirely new professional landscape.
Related Titles
By Anthony Horowitz
