The Daniel Hawthorne novels are a series of metafiction murder mysteries written by Anthony Horowitz, who also stars as The Watson to his own Sherlock Holmes: Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant but troubled ex-police officer who involves Horowitz in the murder mysteries in reward for him writing about them.
There are five books in the series so far:
- The Word Is Murder (2017)
- The Sentence Is Death (2018)
- A Line to Kill (2021)
- A Twist of the Knife (2022)
- Close To Death (2024)
For tropes from A Twist of the Knife or A Line to Kill, see the work pages. For other tropes in the Hawthorne series, see below.
Tropes include:
- 20 Minutes into the Past: "The Word is Murder" is set around 2011. "The Sentence Is Death" is set around 2012. "A Line to Kill" features a Time Skip to around 2017, though still a full four years pre-publication.
- Asshole Victim:
- Subverted by Diana in "The Word is Murder". She is believed to be this due to running a young boy over, but actually, it wasn't her fault. He was running towards his father and she never would have been able to stop in time.
- Played straight by her son, Damian. He infected Dan deliberately just to get Hamlet, via his girlfriend Amanda, and then he ditched them all without thinking twice. He also used his mother's accident to his own gain.
- Richard in "The Sentence Is Death". He only ever paid for anything for Davina to feel better about her husband's death, which he caused, and he refused to pay for his old friend's surgery that would have saved him from a slow and painful death.
- Author Avatar: Anthony Horowitz appears in the series as narrator and as a main character—The Watson to Hawthorne.
- Auto-Incorrect: Played for Drama In "The Word Is Murder" and related to Not Quite the Right Thing. Diana sends her son Damian a final text that says "I have seen the boy who was lacerated and I'm afraid". When Horowitz and Hawthorne see the description that Diana ran down a boy and left him with severe brain lacerations, they assume she's referring to him. She isn't. She meant to type "the boy who was Laertes", which identified both the murder and his motive for murder. Her phone autocorrected it to "lacerated".
- Chekhov's Gunman: Derek Abbott, the possible pedophile that Hawthorne pushed down the stairs, is mentioned in The Sentence Is Death then appears in person in A Line To Kill.
- Cliffhanger: A Line To Kill ends with Derek Abbott giving Horowitz a postcard that reads "Ask Hawthorne about Reeth."
- Convenient Photograph: Apparently subverted before being played straight in The Word Is Murder. Horowitz is suspicious of Amanda Leigh from RADA and Grace Lovell's father and goes there to track down the photographs of the final performance of Hamlet (where both were in attendance). He's surprised to identify the funeral director as Dan, one of the other students, which is how he figures out the murderer.
- Family Theme Naming: Cornwallis's children are called Toby, Sebastian, and Andrew. They're all named after characters in Twelfth Night, which was Cornwallis's proudest moment as an actor.
- "Friends" Rent Control: Hawthorne (a Private Investigator who was fired from the police force before qualifying for a pension and has an ex-wife and son to support) lives in a surprisingly expensive flat. At the end of the first book, he explains that his half-brother is an estate agent who hires him to stay at unoccupied luxury flats as a caretaker (although later books hint that this story may be telling in disingenuous Exact Words).
- Last-Name Basis: Anthony always calls Hawthorne by his last name and is occasionally startled when someone else calls the detective "Daniel".
- The Lestrade: Both discussed and defied in the second book. Horowitz arrives at the crime scene hoping that the Detective Inspector assigned to the case will be the same one from the first book for reasons of this trope. However, it is a completely different DI, as there are so many of them (especially in modern-day London) and the chances of the same one being assigned to this case were just about zero.
- Leave Behind a Pistol: It is strongly implied that Hawthorne does this with Derek Abbott at the end of A Line To Kill, although he doesn't leave a pistol. Unlike other versions of this trope, this action is *not* done out of respect for the man or consideration for his family.
- Mysterious Past: Anthony is consumed with curiosity about Hawthorne, who is very tight-lipped about his past.
- Narrative Profanity Filter:
- In the first book, Horowitz notes that he doesn't give everything Hawthorne says word-for-word, because every other line would have a Precision F-Strike.
- Crosses over with Symbol Swearing in "A Line to Kill":
"I won't talk to you because you're a ***." Swear words bore me. I don't like using them. And he had used one that was unprintable. - Noble Bigot with a Badge: Hawthorne isn't technically a police officer anymore, but he is allowed to consult on cases, and he is deeply homophobic. He is a genius detective, though.
- Not the First Victim: While Robert Cornwallis, aka Dan Roberts killed both Diana and Damian Cowper, he reveals in his Evil Gloating to Horowitz that he also killed Amanda Leigh, who disappeared years previously, torturing her to death and then dismembering her body across seven graves.
- Pedo Hunt: Hawthorne maybe pushed a pedophile down the stairs at his police station after arresting him for dealing in child pornography.
- Self-Deprecation: Horowitz's version of himself continually fails to guess who the murderer is, and in fact has a Running Gag of screwing up Hawthorne's investigations by saying the wrong thing during cross-examinations and getting himself stabbed at the climax by doing something stupid. Taken to new heights in A Line to Kill when he attends a literary festival in Alderney and finds that almost no-one has heard of him or thinks his books are any good.
- Sequel Hook: A Line To Kill ends with Anthony suspecting that Hawthorne has been lying to him about parts of his past and getting a cryptic postcard from Derek Abbot that says, "Ask Hawthorne about Reeth."
- Sherlock Scan: Hawthorne is a master. It is a Running Gag that every time Horowitz doubts what Hawthorne is doing, he assesses him (or occasionally somebody else) and reveals something about what they're doing.
- Suicide, Not Murder:
- Played with in The Word Is Murder. This turns out to be the key answer to how Diana was able to plan her funeral shortly before her murder. She was planning to commit suicide. But Robert didn't know that and he got there first.
- In The Sentence Is Death, Greg's death has nothing to do with Richard's murder. He committed suicide rather than die of a terminal disease.
- The Teetotaler: Hawthorne does not drink, and in A Line to Kill says that in fact he drinks nothing but water.
- Troubled Sympathetic Bigot: Anthony speculates that Hawthorne's homophobia and All Gays Are Pedophiles suspicions stem from an incident where he investigated a nasty pedophile ring while he was still a cop.
- A True Story in My Universe: In-universe, all the Daniel Hawthorne novels are actually true crime stories written by Anthony Horowitz, Hawthorne's Watson.
- Two Aliases, One Character: In The Word Is Murder, Funeral director Robert Cornwallis is also Dan Roberts, Damian's contemporary at RADA.
- Villainous Parental Instinct: Doubly subverted in The Word is Murder. The villain seems like a doting Family Man, but, during his Motive Rant, claims to feel no true affection for his wife and children. However, barely a sentence later, he says that he'll do anything he can to protect his eldest son from experiencing the same kind of disillusionment and heartbreak that he experienced when he tried to be an actor.
