The Word is Murder

Anthony’s investigative partner, Hawthorne is egotistical, brusque, and rude, often dismissive of others. Anthony notes “he [has] a sort of myopia whereby the world would arrange itself to his vision of how things should be” (12). He excoriates Anthony’s first chapter for its literary conventions and lack of detail and the idea of an audience. Anthony says he “lingered on the first syllable of ‘readers,’ making it sound like a dirty word” (29). He is obsessed with his work and strictly safeguards his own privacy, resenting Anthony’s every effort to understand more about his personality or private life. For much of the work, he does not regard Anthony as his equal or even respect his time: He barges in on Anthony’s business meeting, demanding he attend Diana Cowper’s funeral. He cannot comprehend Anthony’s distaste for his anti-gay bias, and Anthony says “he looked like an abandoned child” when Anthony walks away after learning of his prejudices (69). In both instances, Hawthorne cannot accept the idea that anything matters more than the truth of the killer’s identity. He is, in many ways, devoted to honesty: He is particularly scathing about Alan Godwin’s extramarital affair and decision to conceal his own role in his son’s death.

Hawthorne is unpopular with his former colleagues, especially Detective Inspector Meadows, for his lack of attention to social graces and inability to explain his preternatural skill at getting results. Anthony is similarly unnerved by Hawthorne’s skills, saying, “You said I’d been in the country and you said I’d got a puppy. Who told you that?” (21-22). Hawthorne reluctantly explains the clues in Anthony’s appearance and behavior that revealed his recent activities. This reliance on evidence and observation links Hawthorne to other eccentric private detectives, including Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Unlike either of these predecessors, however, it seems, briefly, that Hawthorne has changed in the course of the investigation. He speaks optimistically about Anthony’s book and reluctantly shows him his model kits when Anthony visits his home, opening up his emotional life. Anthony later learns, however, that Hawthorne used his ex-wife to convince Anthony to take on the project, refusing to accept his initial refusal. This changes the reader’s understanding of Hawthorne, painting him as so single-minded he is willing to manipulate, and implies that the strained relationship between author and detective will be a theme throughout the series.

The death of Diana, a middle-aged woman of considerable wealth, attracts police attention because of the unusual coincidence that she arranged her funeral mere hours before she was murdered. Hawthorne is called in because “she didn’t have an enemy in the world,” making him note that “none of it makes any sense” (21). Diana, it emerges, did have a troubled past, one that paints her in a less than appealing light. She struck two young children with her car while not wearing her glasses, killing one and wounding the other. A criminal case found that it was not illegal for her to be driving without glasses and that it would have been difficult for her to avoid injuring the children given the layout of the road and that they had run into traffic. Beyond this, however, Diana delayed going to the police, fearful of hurting her son Damian’s career prospects as a famous actor. Judith Godwin, the boys’ mother, says, “If that’s true, the two of them are as bad as each other” (83).

Hawthorne, to Anthony’s bafflement, insists that Diana “knew she was going to die” (56). He later explains this was because the loss of her cat, combined with her loneliness and financial troubles, convinced her to die by suicide and plan her funeral. This brought her, by chance, into contact with the killer, a former classmate of Damian’s who murdered her hoping to murder him as well during her funeral. Diana’s life of loneliness has some parallels with Hawthorne’s own—he, too, is a solitary figure, but he seeks solace in work, rather than human connection.

Diana Cowper’s son, Damian is given the biography of several notable English actors, including roles belonging to Damian Lewis and Simon Pegg, in Star Trek and Homeland, respectively. This device allows Horowitz to establish the level of fame he has achieved without imbuing a real person with Damian’s more unpleasant attributes. Anthony notes, for example, that his partner, actress Grace Lovell, is “probably afraid of him” (102). Damian arrives in London a week after his mother’s death, and his eulogy for her concentrates on his own career, as he says, “I think she’d be proud of what I was doing and I think she’d have enjoyed my new show […] it should be on Showtime later this year” (121).

Later at the funeral, Diana’s service is interrupted by music coming from a device someone smuggled into her coffin. Damian clearly recognizes the song, “The Wheels on the Bus,” as directed at him and leaves immediately. He is then brutally murdered, which Hawthorne soon realizes he should have prevented, because Diana’s keys to Damian’s apartment were missing from the crime scene, indicating someone planned to break in to his apartment.

Both men eventually realize that Damian was the killer’s true target, as his trickery to secure the role of Hamlet while in drama school led the killer, his former classmate Dan Roberts—now using his real name of Robert Cornwallis—to seek revenge. Damian’s main function in the plot, besides providing the killer a motive, is to reinforce the importance of the relationship between art and life as a theme, since it is his drive for success that proves fatal.

An undertaker and the owner of Cornwallis and Sons funeral parlor, Cornwallis is the killer of both Damian and Diana Cowper. Hawthorne and Anthony originally interview him as a witness, since he met Diana on the day of her death and helped her plan her funeral. Anthony says that he seemed like “someone you’d be happy to chat to if you met him at a party. It would just be better not to ask him what he did” (53). Later, he is intentionally vague about his early adulthood, saying only that he “sowed a few wild oats” (161).

Cornwallis reveals himself as a resentful person stuck in the past when he gives a bitter monologue about the life of stardom he would have had if Damian had not thwarted his ambitions by staging an encounter to give him mononucleosis to ensure he lost the role of Hamlet. For Cornwallis, the connection between art and life is worth killing for. Anthony calls his enraged monologue a “performance for an audience of one” (249). Cornwallis describes his entire professional and personal life as a family man and undertaker as a lie, underlining the thematic importance of deception and performance in the narrative.

When Hawthorne arrives to rescue his partner, Cornwallis dies by suicide rather than be apprehended. His full name offers both the clue Hawthorne needs to apprehend him and a link between them: Cornwallis’s middle name is the same as Hawthorne’s first name, implying, perhaps, that to catch a killer one must have traits in common with him.

A former colleague of Hawthorne’s, Meadows is the detective officially assigned to the Cowper case. Hawthorne is contemptuous of him. When Meadows says staging the crime scene for Hawthorne’s perusal was a “complete waste of time of time if you ask me,” Hawthorne says, “I don’t, Jack. No-one ever does” (41). He insists, until Damian is murdered, that Diana’s death was merely the outcome of a robbery. His function is partly archetypal, establishing the traditional animosity between the official police and a private detective. Meadows cryptically tells Anthony, “[W]atch out for yourself when you’re around this one, particularly if you go near any stairs” (43).

Later, Anthony decides to use Meadows a source of information about Hawthorne, and he explains that Hawthorne was fired for pushing a suspect down a flight of stairs, severely injuring him. The man was a known pedophile, so the episode emphasizes Hawthorne’s moral code and desire to protect children, while Meadows’s insistence on bringing it up emphasizes his intention to discredit a potential rival. Meadows himself briefly interrogates Anthony, reminding him that it was a mistake to equate the man with his bumbling literary counterparts. Meadows, then, underscores the theme of the challenges of collaboration—his dislike of Hawthorne is not unlike Anthony’s own frustration with him, though Anthony has more respect for his collaborator.

Damian Cowper’s partner, Grace is also an actress, and Anthony is immediately struck by her beauty. Hawthorne suggests immediately that she resents motherhood for damaging her career ambitions, which she denies. She was not close to Diana, which leads Hawthorne and Anthony to consider her a possible suspect. Anthony suspects she is more bound to Damian out of obligation than love, which is borne out when she immediately leaves the scene of his death and seems far from aggrieved. He says, “[T]here was a part of me that said it was all just a performance” (151).

Later, Grace tells Hawthorne and Anthony about her time at RADA with Damian, providing them with the evidence that will lead both men to confront the killer. She admits that acting with Damian is her fondest memory of him, that it was “the actor I loved more than the man” (224), as he was emotionally neglectful and often absent once they moved to Los Angeles, effectively “eaten up by success” (228). Grace’s unhappy partnership with Damian is another example of dysfunctional relationships in the narrative, and her focus on Hamlet highlights the centrality of fiction and life to the Cowper case.

The father of the twin boys Diana Cowper killed and injured, Alan Godwin sent her threatening letters and came to her home prior to her death, leading Anthony and Damian to suspect him of killing her. Godwin’s business is failing, as is his marriage, and he is angry at Diana’s refusal to provide him with money. Later, Hawthorne realizes that Alan was having an affair with the family’s nanny and was in Deal to have a romantic rendezvous. He came out of a shop just as his sons were walking back to their hotel, so they crossed the road hoping to see him. The accident, then, was as much his fault as Diana’s. He castigates Hawthorne for criticizing him, telling him, “You have no feelings” (217). He insists his only hope is that his former wife never finds out what happened. His role in the Godwin tragedy offers yet another relationship in the narrative marred by deception and failure to recognize a fractured partnership.