Anthony Horowitz. Photo: James Eckersley
He’s viewed as the contemporary answer to Agatha Christie whodunnits, and he’s also been entrusted with giving fresh life to the legacy of Ian Fleming and Arthur Conan Doyle. The pressure of such great expectations must be considerable. But author Anthony Horowitz is breezing through them with an ease that is likely to be annoying to many of his fellow authors.
I’m having a lovely chat with Anthony ahead of his participation at this year’s edition of the Malta Book Festival. For teenagers worldwide, his name is tied to that of Alex Rider, the 14-year-old spy who has already starred in multiple books, a film and a TV series.
Adults, on the other hand, know Anthony best for his Detective Hawthorne and Susan Ryland creations, alongside the new novels featuring the iconic characters of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. And if you’re more of a TV series hound than a reader, Susan Ryland is also on TV – not to mention Foyle’s War and the Midsomer Murders scripts.
Anthony is extremely prolific across a diversity of genres. And the characters he creates or works on are also very different from one another. So which one’s the ‘real Horowitz’. Is it the author who created the highly un-PC, extremely annoying Detective Hawthorne, or the one who wrote the cosmopolitan character of Susan Ryder?
“They’re all the real Horowitz. I view writing as an adventure, so I’m always looking for new things that surprise both me and my readers. Even within the genre itself, I try to extend it, turn things upside down. The different characters are all ‘me’. They sit in my head and, if they don’t go away, I have to write them,” he replies.
But how does he switch genres and register so easily? It’s not about shifting, he tells me, but about immersion.
“Immersion is extremely important for me. There are two ways to approach writing a book. The first is to focus on the market, the language, how many copies to sell… You can be cynical and decide to include more violence in a plot, because it will sell more. This is not my way. I don’t think of the book as a ‘book’, but as a world I’m exploring. When I write the characters, I actually see them. When Alex [Rider] is in trouble, I feel his emotion and I’m totally immersed.”
He adds that his creative process is the same, whether writing for children or for adults, explaining how he doesn’t auto-censor even when writing YA.
“I don’t use different words, I write what I believe in. Later, during the editing stage, I might go – ok, that’s too violent for teenagers. And I’ll change it,” he explains.
Celebrating Alex Rider’s 25th
The fact remains – Anthony’s detectives/spies are all very different from each other. Does he have a favourite? After the obligatory “I love them all”, he capitulates. The answer, unsurprisingly, is Alex Rider. Given that 2025 marks the young spy’s 25th anniversary, it’s not difficult to understand why.
“It also brings me happiness that, maybe by accident, he’s also done a lot for young people in their journey as readers.”
He acknowledges that, from a writer’s perspective, he prefers to work on his own original characters.
“The greatest thing about being a writer is creating something new. Working with someone else’s book is a privilege, but of course it doesn’t carry the same magic as writing my own characters. That said, Bond and Holmes have both been with me all my life, so maybe there isn’t such a huge difference. However, when I’m writing these characters I try to make myself invisible, to a certain extent. My job is to serve Fleming’s and Doyle’s voices,” he explains.
But there’s still a bit of Horowitz in there, regardless. He reflects that Moriarty is not anything Doyle would have written, and neither is House of Silk.
“So I do push the envelope. There’s no point writing a book if you don’t insert your own personality, as long as I don’t damage the way people see these characters. I wouldn’t do something with the characters that the original authors would never have envisaged. For House of Silk, for instance, I toyed with the idea of introducing a romantic interest for Holmes. But then I remembered that, in Bohemia, Doyle had written that there would never be anyone but Irene Adler for Holmes. So I couldn’t go against that, it would have been a breaking of faith.”
Speaking of the way people view characters like Holmes and Bond brings me to the elephant in the room. Neither of them are posterboys for the #metoo generation. How does Anthony deal with the iconic, but potentially problematic, character traits?
“This is never an issue. The books are set in the 1950s and 1960s, so it’s possible to air these views and reactions to the world in a way that is true to the character. Of course, I myself don’t subscribe to views that are racist, sexist, homophobic… and neither does the modern reader. But it’s critical in fiction that we don’t feel ashamed with books written 50 years ago. We can disapprove of them, but I don’t believe censoring them is the answer. Such books show us how far we’ve evolved compared to those days,” he says.
Anthony is also known for using very clever plot devices. In the Susan Ryland series, he writes a story within a story, effortlessly jumping across timelines. But perhaps the most unique ‘trick’ is inserting himself into the plots of the Hawthorne novels. For those who are yet to read them, Anthony is the Watson to his Hawthorne. In the process he gets to reveal quite a bit of his own personal life. How much of it is real?
“Most of it is 100% accurate. There’s my wife in it, my children, aspects of my everyday life , references to Foyle’s War… But it’s not an autobiography in disguise. It’s me, looking for new ways to create a mystery book. I ask myself what can I do that hasn’t been done? Usually the author is the cleverest person in the room because he already knows whodunnit. Instead, I turn myself into the foolish sidekick,” he says.
He believes that mystery books should not simply be about finding the killer, but should give us something more. The Hawthorne series, for instance, makes us ask important questions about writing, and even about why we enjoy murder.
“Murder is horrible, destructive. Why does it become entertaining in a book? What is the attraction? The greatest writers cannot escape murder. I have a theory that any story ever told can be a murder story if you look at it in a certain way.
So what’s next for Anthony? 2025 is already shaping up to be busy, with a 25th-anniversary edition of Stormbreaker that will include a new Alex Rider short story. Hawthorne number six will be written early next year- it’s still in its “early idea stages”, Horowitz tells me. However, this much he reveals: it will return to the earlier style of the series, after the drastic departure of Close To Death.
Following that, he will finally get around to writing a book that’s been whirling in his head for ages, he tells me.
“A while ago I had a very bad biking accident. I had amnesia, I suffered a fractured spine… strange things happened to me. After my recovery I started seeing a story in it, and it’s been shouting at me for a while. I can’t put it off any longer because it’s become too loud,” he says.
So, will this be autobiographical? Far from it. As fans already know, Anthony never chooses the obvious route. Instead, the novel will be what he jokingly calls “his Stephen King”, an author he very much admires.
It’s starting to look like an excellent year for Anthony Horowitz fans.
Anthony Horowitz is one of the international authors taking part in this year’s Malta Book Festival, taking place between November 6 and 10 at the MFCC in Ta’ Qali. The author will be holding a masterclass in fiction writing in November 7 at 7.30pm. He will also give a talk to school-children on November 8 at 11.45am. On November 9 at 8pm he will be taking part in a discussion titled Cracking the Case.