“It all comes together when I sit down at the page”

Matthew Walters | 13 February 2009

“I’VE NEVER FOUND it difficult and I still don’t. Writing is writing. I love all my writing equally, and I do it with the same sort of pleasure. What’s rather good about the way my career has gone is that I can still do all of them, and mix and match.”

A warm smile, a polite handshake, and a tremendously animated enthusiasm: Anthony Horowitz has admitted himself that he’s never happier “than when I’m writing”. A published author at the age of 23, a highly successful screenwriter (he counts Midsummer Murders, Foyle’s War and even a few Poirot episodes amongst his work), and now an almost universally popular children’s writer, there are few creative peaks that he hasn’t yet reached in his career spanning thirty-three years. And don’t even think he’s finished yet.

Born in 1953 into an upper-class Middlesex family, Horowitz was educated first at Orley Farm preparatory school and then Rugby School, later completing a degree at the University of York. Much has been written about Horowitz’s father, a political fixer for Harold Wilson, a businessman, and – consciously or unconsciously – a hugely important figure in the 56-year-old writer’s life, even if he doesn’t care to admit it.

“I’ve forgotten about my father. I don’t think about him. I don’t wake up in the morning full of anxieties about my father who’s now been dead for nearly twenty years. That’s just how it was. I wouldn’t call him a ‘spark’ or anything. He’s just not really relevant to me.”

I ask Horowitz how his father influenced his reading and writing. “My father had a huge library. I still have a big library, but he had hundreds of books – nineteenth-century literature, eighteenth-century literature. He introduced me to Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope.

For some reason, he just couldn’t get it into his head that I was serious about writing. It is true that he did completely ridicule the whole notion of my becoming a writer. I don’t think he had a very high opinion of me. He thought my brother was lot cleverer than I am. To this day I don’t quite understand it. I just didn’t know him that well. He died so young that it’s difficult to tell really what was going on in his head.

I think it was because he was a businessman, and – you know – he thought I’d be the same as him. I still do remember him steaming into my bedroom and nicking one of my manuscripts, and then taking the piss out of it for the whole day when we were driving in the car.

Funnily enough, I can still see the moment – a complete flashback. I get upset with him, and I can still feel me getting angry with him. I can still recall him saying that it was ‘his house’, and that I didn’t have a privacy in ‘his house’. I make him sound like a complete bastard. He wasn’t. He was basically a good man, but he was strange.”

Despite their undoubted success – both in terms of critical and audience reception – by the time of that the first book of the Rider series – Stormbreaker – was released in 2000, Horowitz had actually been dreaming up a Rider-like character for nearly ten years. Why did he decide to delay the writing of the Rider novels for so long? “When Harry Potter happened in around 1999, I realised I had to throw away all of the toys in my basket, which is to say I couldn’t continue to write stories about boys who went to schools and did magic, as in Groosham Grange.

“It was a conscious decision to decide to do something different, if I was to continue writing children’s books at all. Then I remembered the idea I’d had a long time ago – to go in a different direction, to move away from funny kids’ books that read like kids’ books, and go on to do something a little more serious.

I remember the first draft of Stormbreaker was full of jokes, and I was going back to the old style of gags and jokes. I’ve tried to stop that – that’s why there are few jokes in the books, apart from the odd references to the humour of the Roger Moore James Bond films. As the series has progressed, I’ve even cut those out.” The character of Alex Rider has been described by some reviewers as being a “James Bond with Nike trainers”, a modern superhero with an aura rooted in the novels of Ian Fleming.

What similarities does Horowitz see in Fleming’s James Bond and his Alex Rider? “I will freely admit that the idea of the books was inspired by the James Bond movies, which I always loved as a kid. I only started doing Alex Rider because I got the impression that James Bond had got too old. Having decided to do that, I wanted to make Alex as different from Bond as possible. The most fun I have as a writer is thinking up new ideas, not nicking other people’s ideas.

“The differences between Alex and James Bond are legion. The main thing is that Alex doesn’t really want to do the job, whereas James Bond is a patriot and is happy to work for M. Alex is like any other teenager – he just wants to be left alone – and the people he works for are extremely untrustworthy. These are untrustworthy people, in the days of Iraq when the dossiers they dream up are all false and full of lies, and that’s what informs the Alex books.

I’m a huge admirer of Ian Fleming, I admit it, and there are obvious nods and references. I put little secret things in my books that make references to James Bond films.

Giving the most gleaming insight into the research processes behind his novels, Horowitz lays claim to the fact that he researches every situation – every country, every colour, even every character’s movements – before they eventually make their way into his books. For Snakehead, for example, he visited Australia; for Necropolis, Hong Kong: “It all comes together when I sit down at the page,” he states.

“My research is not done for derring-do or for fun. I wrote one chapter of Snakehead which features a shootout on an oil rig, and hadn’t visited an oil rig. I put the book in, and everybody liked it, but to me the oil rig was slightly distorted – it was like a badly developed photograph. I later went up to Scotland, visited an oil rig, and rewrote that section of the book. I didn’t change more than fifty words, but the difference was that it just came into focus. That’s why I do it.”

And what of writer’s block? “I’m a very fluent writer. I spend so much time thinking before I write, and structuring, and planning, and working out.

“Every book is worked out into its chapters, every chapter worked out into its constituent parts. Every character is in place. By the time I start writing, everything is in place. It’s then just a case of finding the words. The first draft is the most important one, and it’s the one I most enjoy. The second draft – going from paper to the computer – I reckon sees only a 20% change in what I write.”

Horowitz has written four adult fiction books, his most recent being The Killing Joke and 2006’s The Magpie Murders. How difficult was it for a writer now so comfortable with children’s fiction to move into adult fiction? “There are so few children’s writers that can write adult books, and so few adult writers that can write children’s books.

“It’s a difficult boundary to cross. It’s a different world. It’s a question of purity. Children’s books to me are very pure. You just follow the narrative thread, and don’t worry about details. In an adult book, you have to worry about a character’s relationships, philosophy and politics, even the clothes they’re wearing. I found that difficult.”

In 2007, Horowitz wrote an article for The Guardian in which he lamented the way that government legislation, and the culture of political correctness, was forcing him – and other writers – to be less daring in creating villains for their novels. He explains: “You have to be careful in the world of children’s books. It’s increasingly difficult to come up with characters that have a racial dimension to them without being deemed racist yourself.

“There is a certain danger in it. The villain of the next Alex Rider book is – as of this moment – a black man. He’s going to be from Kenya. I’m in two minds as to whether that’s a good thing or not.”

Horowitz, who later gave an address at the Durham Union Society, speaks at a time when the success of the Harry Potter novels – seven of J.K. Rowling’s novels now occupy the shelves of bookstores and book-lovers, and the Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy remains astonishingly popular – have refocused attention on children’s writers and the craft of children’s books. Horowitz himself has written that this is a “golden age” for children’s writing. “The biggest shift that’s happened in the last ten years is, and it’s largely down to J.K. Rowling, is that a generation of authors has grown up and the kids can choose for themselves – rather than reading what their parents read. Children’s writers are far more accessible than they use to be.

“Because J.K. Rowling made so much money, the publishers have wised up to the fact that children’s literature is an interesting area to be in. Most of the big events in publishing aren’t for adult books at all – they’re for children’s books. All the publicity is going into children’s books, hoping to find the next JK Rowling.

“There won’t be a next JK Rowling – nobody will have that success again at that level.”

Over 190,000 children bought Horowitz’s latest novel, Necropolis (the fourth in the Power of Five series) upon its release in October last year. In addition to his novel-writing, Horowitz is in the process of penning new episodes of his ITV television series Foyle’s War, and has created a new five-part series called Collision – again to be shown on ITV – which has been produced by his wife, Jill Green.

How does he cope with the pressure of writing books amid such a veritable flurry of activity? “If you let the pressure get to you, it does change your perspective. It makes you ask questions: is this going to be alright? Will kids buy this? I never used to have to ask these questions.

“It’s difficult to get past the expectation. When I write, however, I will go into a room, shut the door, and – in the same way as I have for the last thirty or so years – will write that book. I have no control over whether people will like or dislike a book, so why worry about it?”