Review: The Twyford Code - Janice Hallett *****

By Brian Clegg

Hugely impressed by Janice Hallett’s The Appeal, I had to buy her second novel, The Twyford Code and was equally pleased, though for slightly different reasons.

Once again, what we have here is an ingenious mystery novel, constructed in an unusual fashion – where The Appeal was primarily made up of emails, the bulk of The Twyford Code comprises 200 voice notes, left by one-time career criminal Steve Smith. Transcriptions of these (supposedly made by software, and so containing a series of transcription errors) have been sent by a police inspector to a professor to ask if he can throw any light on them.

At the heart of the story are a series of books by a variant of Enid Blyton called Edith Twyford. The equivalent to the Famous Five is the Secret Six, and a Secret Six book that Smith encounters while at school seems to both contain mysterious coded messages and to be linked to the disappearance of his school teacher, an event that still haunts him from many years in the past. Smith ends up meeting up with some old school friends who act as sort of anti-Secret Six in trying to work out the mystery.

Incidentally, I have no idea why the tagline says ‘It’s time to solve the murder of the century’ – there is a murder in the story, but it isn’t really what the story is about at all… and it certainly isn’t the murder of the century in any identifiable sense.

As was the case with The Appeal, what makes this book work so well is the multi-layered mechanism of the the medium – in this case those voice messages, with occasional recorded conversations. Hallett incorporates all kinds of deception, some of which you might be able to predict if you’ve read the previous novel, but most of which take the reader by surprise. In the final section of the book, the professor uncovers what really happened – it’s all there to see, but pretty well impossible to predict.

One of the quotes on the back says this is ‘even better than The Appeal‘ – I don’t think this is true. Because the storytelling here is mostly a monologue, rather than a series of interactions between different characters, it didn’t engage me as much as The Appeal did (though it was certainly still un-put-down-able). However, it makes up for that by setting a far more complex puzzle, with a wonderfully convoluted relationship between what you read and what it’s actually about. It’s rather like one of those beautiful, jewel-like Japanese puzzle boxes: it’s so intricate and beautifully constructed. Even though I did spot one of the coded messages that eventually would give everything away, I didn’t interpret what it meant correctly at the time. The plot is, admittedly, far-fetched – but this genuinely doesn’t matter.

Overall another brilliant triumph for Hallett. Can’t wait to read book number three.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.