Hawthorne & Horowitz

What is the Hawthorne & Horowitz series about?

The central joke — and it is a serious joke — is that Anthony Horowitz has written himself into his own detective series. Not as the detective, but as the sidekick. Horowitz-the-character is commissioned to follow ex-Metropolitan Police detective Daniel Hawthorne around, document his cases, and turn them into books. The books you are reading, in fact. Hawthorne is brilliant, rude, opaque, and probably hiding something significant about his own past. Horowitz is observant, professionally skilled at narrative, and perpetually one step behind the solution.

The meta-layer sounds like a gimmick, but Horowitz handles it with genuine intelligence. The self-referential conceit allows for real jokes at his own expense, genuine moments of authorial anxiety, and a Watson narrator who is credibly unreliable — not because he lies, but because he is, like the reader, working from incomplete information.

Should I read the Hawthorne & Horowitz books in order?

Yes, and emphatically so. The series builds Hawthorne’s mysterious backstory across all five books. Details planted in The Word is Murder become significant by The Twist of a Knife. The relationship between the two central characters evolves in ways that depend on what has come before. This is not a series where any entry point will do. Start at book one and follow the sequence.

Who will enjoy the Hawthorne & Horowitz series?

Readers who love the Holmes and Watson dynamic but want it refreshed. Readers who enjoy mysteries that are also about the act of writing mysteries. Anyone who has spent time thinking about how detective fiction works — its conventions, its obligations to the reader, its pleasures — will find Horowitz playing knowingly with all of that. Fans of Richard Osman who want something slightly more self-aware, and readers of Janice Hallett who want formal cleverness with more traditional plotting, will both find this series rewarding.

What makes the Hawthorne & Horowitz series worth reading?

The fair-play plotting is genuinely rigorous. Horowitz — who has spent decades writing mystery television and authorised Holmes continuations — knows exactly how a puzzle should work. Every book delivers a properly clued solution that rewards attentive reading. The meta-narration adds a layer of wit, but it never substitutes for craft. Beneath the cleverness is a series that simply delivers excellent mysteries, constructed by someone who has thought harder than most about what makes them work.