The Word is Murder

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death by suicide.

This theme permeates the text due to the metafictional element: Anthony struggles with boundaries throughout the work, as the Hawthorne project challenges his writing and authorial identity as well as his overall sense of his own agency and value in the world. This is paralleled by the nature of the Cowper investigation, due to the importance of theater and performance in the victims’ lives and also that of the killer. Anthony, at first, tries to maintain the boundary between fiction and reality. He tells Hawthorne, “I like to know what I’m writing about. Creating the crimes and the clues and all the rest of it is half the fun” (20). He doubts his choice, however, intrigued by the prospect and instinctively wary of losing a possible income source. This is brought to a head during the literary festival, where the woman he doesn’t yet know is Hawthorne’s wife plays on his doubts. She says, “I’m sure you do use true stories, but what I’m trying to say is, the crimes aren’t real” (24). Anthony himself later admits to this distinction, finding things in Diana Cowper’s home that are noticeably poignant but that he cannot categorize, as he does not yet know her killer’s identity or motive.