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Who Was The Killer In Magpie Murders

Who Killed Alan Conway?

Everybody in his Suffolk village (and pretty much everybody who’d met him) had a motive to kill Alan Conway (Game of Thrones‘ Conleth Hill), the wealthy novelist behind the hit Atticus Pünd detective book series. He was widely disliked and took pleasure in causing other people pain. Was his killer the humiliated sister, the discarded lover, the disaffected son?

None of the above. Alan was pushed to his death by Charles Clover, the founder of the independent publishing house that put out the Atticus Pünd books. Clover did it to protect a profitable buy-out by a multinational publisher, and the ongoing reputation of the Pünd books. Conway had lofty literary ambitions and resented his commercial success, so had hidden a spiteful message in the name of his famous detective. He’d named the nine books in the Pünd series so the first letters of each title spelled out the clue “an anagram” and pointed to a secret.

The Atticus Pünd Anagram

If you rearrange the letters that form Atticus Pünd, you get Alan’s computer password “cat up nudist”, but you also get three words: “a stupid…” with the remaining letters “cnut”, which we’ll leave you to decipher. It was a nasty dig from Conway at his well-loved (but deeply resented on his part) star character. If the final book were to be published as Conway had intended, with the title “Magpie Murders” instead of Clover’s suggested “The Magpie Murders”, the anagram clue would have been intact and readers may have discovered Conway’s cruel hidden verdict on their favourite.

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To avoid that happening and causing a stink that could jeopardise his multi-million pound takeover, Clover hid the final chapter of the manuscript, pushed the dying-of-cancer Conway to his death, and faked the author’s suicide. Part of the book’s final chapter was a letter from the terminally ill Atticus Pünd explaining his decision to take his own life. Charles pretended Alan’s handwritten draft of that was his own suicide note, added it to the letter of apology Alan wrote him after his drunken outburst in the restaurant, and posted it to himself.

Who Killed Mary Blakiston and Sir Magnus Pye?

The book-within-a-book nature of Magpie Murders gives us not one but multiple murder solutions. After Susan has identified Charles as Alan’s killer and is in hospital recovering from his attack, she enters her imagination to ‘witness’ Atticus Pünd solving the Saxby-on-Avon murders in the local pub. First, Pünd explains that Pye Hall housekeeper Mary Blakiston was not killed but died by accident. Mary was vacuuming the stairway when she ran downstairs to answer the phone, tripped on the vacuum cable and fatally hit her head. Her son Robert, though suspected by the village, was innocent. Of that…

Robert Blakiston, the car mechanic who planned to marry Joy Sanderling, killed Sir Magnus Pye. It all went back to the death of Robert’s younger brother Sam, who drowned in the lake at Pye Hall 12 years earlier. The disturbed young Robert had first poisoned his brother Sam’s dog, and then drowned Sam in the lake. Their mother Mary had apparently witnessed the drowning from her work room with a lake view, but instead of alerting anybody, kept a close eye on Robert from that day forth. When he announced his engagement to Joy, Mary’s objection had nothing to do with racism at Joy’s heritage but with her fear that Robert would pass on his disturbed and murderous nature to any future children.

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