Who Alan Conway is
Alan Conway writes the bestselling Atticus Pünd mysteries edited by Susan Ryeland. He is successful, demanding and gifted at turning the people around him into material. His books look like traditional puzzles, but their characters can contain private jokes and insults directed at acquaintances who are unlikely to appreciate the compliment.
The difference between Conway and his creation is one of the series’ pleasures. Pünd listens with patience and sympathy; Alan is often dismissive. Loving the detective does not require liking the man who invented him. Susan’s professional task is to improve the books while dealing with the difficult personality behind them.
Role in Magpie and Moonflower Murders
In Magpie Murders, Alan delivers a manuscript whose missing conclusion creates a publishing crisis. His death turns Susan’s attempt to recover the ending into something much more dangerous. People in his life have good reasons to resent him, and Susan gradually discovers the forms those resentments took.
Alan’s work remains central in Moonflower Murders. Susan rereads an earlier Pünd novel inspired by events at Branlow Hall. The contemporary investigation is therefore also an investigation of Alan’s choices: whom he noticed, whom he mocked, what he understood and what he decided to hide inside a story rather than say openly.
The dramatised writing scenes make his authorship unusually visible. Names, descriptions and revisions are not neutral ornaments around the case. They show a writer exercising control over people who cannot answer back from inside his fiction. Susan’s job is partly to recognise that control without accepting every caricature as an accurate portrait.
Key relationships
Susan Ryeland is his editor, with enough experience of his habits to know when a manuscript detail feels deliberate. James Taylor is his partner; Claire Jenkins is his sister and former assistant. Both can recognise themselves in the unflattering figures he writes.
Charles Clover depends on the commercial value of the Pünd series, while Andreas Patakis knows Alan from a much earlier profession. His son Freddy Conway adds another view of the gap between Alan’s public achievement and private conduct. None of these relationships can be understood simply by consulting his book sales.
Played by Conleth Hill
Conleth Hill plays Alan Conway. Hill also supplies the authorial presence as the embedded stories unfold, keeping Alan influential even when Susan is investigating events after his death.
Their story and fate — spoilers
Charles Clover kills Alan in Magpie. The missing ending conceals the explanation of an obscene anagram built from the Pünd book titles, a joke that would threaten the author’s reputation and the financial value of the publishing business. Susan eventually follows the manuscript’s handling back to Charles.
Moonflower does not resurrect Alan. It revisits his earlier actions and dramatises a novel he wrote before his death. Susan learns that he recognised the truth behind Frank Parris’s murder and embedded pointers in Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. The recurring lion imagery leads towards Leo, the name connected with Aiden’s concealed past. Alan’s cleverness is therefore morally troubling: understanding a crime and turning it into an ingenious book are not the same as helping its victims.
Books and television — book spoilers
Conway is a fictional author created by Anthony Horowitz, not an autobiographical account of Horowitz under another name. The series deliberately invites questions about how writers borrow from life, but Alan’s conduct belongs to the story.
Television makes the borrowing explicit through dual casting. James Taylor and James Fraser, for example, share Matthew Beard’s face while displaying very different levels of confidence and independence. That visual joke allows the audience to see the editorial violence of Alan’s method: a person becomes a simplified type. The novels create these connections through names, descriptions and Susan’s reading; the screen can present the original and the distortion in adjacent scenes.
Read or listen to the book
Magpie Murders (2016)
Anthony Horowitz’s novel behind the first television mystery.
Waterstones · print Audible · audiobookMoonflower Murders (2020)
Anthony Horowitz’s novel behind the second television mystery.
Waterstones · print Audible · audiobookPaid links may earn commission, at no extra cost.