Close to Death

In the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, Horowitz uses a literary device known as metafiction, which points to the falsity of literature. He places himself into the narrative to explore his own writing process while observing the investigations and drafting the novels. He follows this strategy in Close to Death, but with one crucial difference: Rather than following, observing, and writing about Hawthorne’s investigation as it is taking place, he writes about one of Hawthorne’s cases that occurred several years earlier. This approach requires a shift in perspective and results in a new strategy and a different relationship with his detective, Daniel Hawthorne.

With this new case, Horowitz is forced to adopt a different point of view than in the previous novels, a shift that affects everything about the narrative. Undertaking to write about a crime that has already been solved five years in the past, Horowitz realizes, “As every writer knows, this would completely change the way the story was presented. It would have a universality, a sense of disconnection. It would not be my story, my arrival on the scene, my first impressions” (83). Although he is still in the present narrative timeline, he cannot write himself into the past timeline, in which the crime and investigation take place, because he wasn’t actually there. This requires shifting the narrative from the first-person point of view, in which everything is filtered through his perspective, to the third-person point of view, which floats from character to character. However, as he and Hawthorne discover, this changed approach is more problematic than they’d anticipated: “Perhaps neither of us had quite understood the power of the third person. I was describing what people were saying, thinking, where they had come from, how other people saw them—even though, unlike Hawthorne, I had never met them” (183). This realization leads to another shift in approach—this time, to how Horowitz and Hawthorne work together.

In Close to Death, Horowitz is forced to give Hawthorne greater access and say in what he writes. Because Horowitz is not experiencing the investigation firsthand, he depends on Hawthorne more than he did in earlier novels. This leads him to a conclusion that he is not quite comfortable with: “Everything would have to be channelled through Hawthorne and he was right to say that it would be, to some extent, a collaboration” (83). As a writer, Horowitz doesn’t like the idea of giving more control to Hawthorne but recognizes that it is necessary.

Even this idea of collaboration has its pitfalls. As the project continues, he has to develop the characters without meeting their real-life counterparts. As Horowitz reflects, “So which one of us was actually in control? We were beginning to see that neither of us was. It was as if the characters themselves had taken control” (184). This alludes to what many authors have said about their writing process—how, in spite of their efforts to machinate their characters’ motives and actions, the characters often emerge as if autonomous, with minds of their own.

As Hawthorne and Horowitz navigate their writing, Horowitz experiences the sense that the characters are directing the story, leaving them both as bystanders. Horowitz finds, as he drafts Close to Death, that just the smallest change to the system he and Hawthorne have set up in the previous four books resonates in ways that neither of them could’ve anticipated. Even their working relationship has shifted, as well as their relationships with the investigation.