Magpie Murders tells a crime story within a crime story. A murder mystery contained in a manuscript and sent to an editor at a publishing house is fiction and the story about sending that manuscript to the editor is reality, right? Or if they’re both fictions, one pretends to be more real than the other. Playing with planes of reality is one of the great pleasures of fiction, one that crime fiction rarely provides.
In Magpie Murders Anthony Horowitz sets up two story lines, a 1950s mystery about the murders of Sir Magnus Pye of Pye Hall in Saxby-on-Avon and his housekeeper Mary Blakiston, and the mystery of the murder of the author of that novel, Alan Conway, and its investigation by his editor Susan Ryeland. Ryeland’s search for Conway’s murderer and for the missing last chapter of his manuscript is the ‘real’ story. The 1950s murders are a confection of the imagination that exists only in the manuscript Ryeland has in hand except for that missing denouement. Except the two worlds begin to mingle …
Fiction is a complex form of lying capable of using many tricks to pretend to be real or to laugh at itself for failing to fake it. Early British novels had to face a Puritan belief that fiction is a form of lying and lying is sinful. One way they avoided religious condemnation was by using a framing device where an opening describes a manuscript found in a chest among the wreckage of a shipwreck or purchased at a flea market or left in the belongings of a deceased relative. Then the novel tells the story contained in the found manuscript, often missing pages. At the conclusion we return to the manuscript-finder, meaning we step back out of the fictional narrative into supposed reality. The author escapes responsibility for the fiction.
Magpie Murders updates the found manuscript device by making it a crime fiction manuscript. The missing final chapter and the death of the author launch a second murder mystery in the more real plane outside the manuscript. These two story lines don’t stay separate, complicating their reality status and making it harder to simply say that the frame narrative is the real world and the story contained in the manuscript is the fictional one.
Metafiction – literary devices that break with a story’s pretense of truth and point out its textuality – has been around since the novel became a thing. Don Quixote (1605-15) loves reading chivalric romances (knights riding around seeking adventures) so much that he ends up merging his identity with these stories as he enacts his own knight errant tale where he can make things turn out the way he wants. His author, Miguel de Cervantes, appears in the story as a character.
Tristam Shandy (nine volumes published from 1759-67), the supposed biography of an English gentleman, is not a biography at all and the gentleman is a fiction. The ‘author,’ meaning the one in the narrative who constantly digresses and cracks witticisms, doesn’t narrate the birth of Mr. Shandy until chapter three. In the fortieth chapter of volume six this author announces that he now has a handle on his material and will be able to narrate in a more or less straight line. This fake author is not Laurence Stern, the clever cleric and author who said he wrote the novel to be famous!
Metafictional narration, with authors stepping in and out of their stories and talking to readers like they were chatting together before a fireplace with a cup of ale in hand, has been around longer than realism, which became popular in the 19th century. Poe’s love of the occult and dark psychology placed him in the camp of romanticism, so realistic crime fiction as it developed into the 20th century acted like a child rebelling against daddy’s drunken excesses.
As crime fiction hardened into gritty realism, metafiction migrated into genres like sci-fi and fantasy, as any reader of Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K Dick and Samuel R Delaney knows. That has continued. In Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, characters realize they exist in King’s literary universe, meet Stephen King there and supposedly alter events in his life outside his books.
How about metafiction in 20th century detective fiction? Agatha Christie offers a few efforts. In The Clocks Hercule Poirot discusses detective writers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ariadne Oliver as if they were real. Well, one is! But Ariadne Oliver is another of Agatha Christie’s fictional creations, the prolific if slightly batty mystery writer. Poirot speaks of the two authors as equally real, a clever trick that says two things at once: I, like them, am real and I, like them, am fictional.
Christie’s sleuth couple Tommy and Tuppence Beresford appear in a series of linked short stories entitled Partners in Crime. In each story they imitate a different detective such as Sherlock Holmes and GK Chesterton’s Father Brown. One of the detectives they imitate is Christie’s own Hercule Poirot. The New York Times Book Review in 1929 said of this book that it was either a collection of hilarious parodies of detective fiction or a serious attempt to imitate masters of the genre. So metafiction’s play with claims to realism can blow up as parody.
Murder by Death, the 1976 movie based on a Neil Simon screenplay, has famous detectives , like versions of Miss Marple, Poirot, Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, invited to a mansion for dinner and a murder game. The parodied realities multiply and mix. Peter Falk, a ‘real’ TV and movie detective in his own right, portrays the quirks and traits of Humphrey Bogart playing Sam Spade, so a real actor playing another real actor playing a fictional PI. After the detectives present their explanations of the murder, the host lambasts them for employing cheap conventions of the genre like hiding crucial clues. The film is called parody, not metafiction.
In Moonlighting, the 80s comedy PI show with Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis as partners in Blue Moon Detective Agency, characters frequently break the fourth wall, a theatrical method of drawing audience attention to the reality outside the play. Willis as David Addison comments that the network won’t let them include certain scenes. Episodes often began with the two PI’s talking directly to the audience about the production. And in the final episode of season five, the two stars find out on screen that the series is being canceled and people start to dismantle the set around them.
Metafiction occurs in crime fiction, but maybe not enough. What do you think?
Sort of related is the show Hjerson which takes a character vaguely mentioned in an Agatha Christie and fleshes him out. I enjoyed it a lot.
Really interesting post as usual! In my reading, I've found that the metafictional devices aren't really to my taste, though they are (usually) clever. It's just personal preference for wanting a story that I can "trust" to tell me the "truth" (as fiction) with a reliable narrator. And some I do enjoy. I definitely see the appeal of metafiction to writers and avid readers/watchers!