The Word Is Murder

The Word Is Murder is a mystery novel by the British author Anthony Horowitz, published in 2017. It is the first novel in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series.

The story opens with a woman arranging her own funeral and being found dead six hours later, and it also involves a hit-and-run accident she was caught up in ten years earlier. Hawthorne, an ex-Detective Inspector turned out of the Metropolitan Police, needs cash, and he proposes to Horowitz that the writer produce a book about him and one of his current cases in exchange for an even split of the advance and royalties. Horowitz, who is busy writing for television and working on a Sherlock Holmes novel, is reluctant to get involved with a man he finds difficult, and he agrees anyway, following Hawthorne through the investigation as the case is solved. The narrator of the book is a fictionalised version of the author, and the two of them are presented as a detective and the person who writes him up.

Horowitz had written for television and for other people's characters before this, and the Hawthorne books put him into his own story as the narrator. Further novels about the pair followed.