Anthony Horowitz
About Author
Anthony's first novel was published in 1979 when Anthony was just 23. He has since written many more and is also a prolific writer for television, film and theatre. He created the popular television series Foyle's War and the popular series Midsomer Murders.
Anthony's phenomenally successful series of books about teen superspy Alex Rider have delighted children all over the world.
In 2003, Anthony was delighted to win the Red House Children's Book Award for Skeleton Key as it was voted for entirely by children. Anthony's supernatural series, The Power of Five, which begins with Raven's Gate, was inspired by a simple thought. 'Isn't it more exciting to imagine these great battles with all their magic and mystery happening in the very high street where you live, just out of the corner of your eye?'
Anthony lives in north London with his wife Jill Green, a TV producer, and their sons Nicholas and Cassian. His whole family gets involved in his writing. Jill has produced several of Anthony's scripts, including the drama serial Foyle's War, which won the Lew Grade Audience Award in 2003.
His son Cassian is already a seasoned actor, having appeared in three of his shows, and Nicholas, his oldest son, has helped Anthony to research the Alex Rider books by trying his hand at everything from scuba-diving to snowboarding and surfing!
Author link
Interview
ALEX RIDER: NEVER SAY DIE
WALKER BOOKS
JUNE 2017
ALEX RIDER is back in NEVER SAY DIE (Walker Books) with a gripping adventure that takes the young spy across the world in his search for a long lost friend. Look out for new enemies and death-defying peril!
We asked ANTHONY HOROWITZ to tell us more about his return to Alex Rider!
Q: What's been keeping you busy since you wrote the last Alex Rider book, Scopria Rising, in 2011?
A: Well, there's my adult novel, Magpie Murders, which was a huge piece of work, my new crime series New Blood for the BBC, and I wrote a play Dinner With Saddam. I have a lot of ideas in my head at any one time - right now I have five books that I want to write....
Q: You have said that you didn't plan to write another Alex Rider adventure, so what drew you to writing a new book?
A: It happened by accident, really. Walker Books wanted me to polish up some stories for a new Alex Rider collection. The stories were written a long time ago and they needed sharpening and lengthening and I found myself writing two more Alex Rider stories, one of which, Alex Rider in Afghanistan, was one of the best I had ever written and I realised that there was a lot more to come from the character.
I also thought that I had left Alex in a bad place and that maybe that was the wrong thing to have done. Childhood is about looking forward and I wanted to bring Alex Rider back to somewhere better.
Q: The end of Scorpia Rising was very harsh with the death of an important character, Jack Starbright. Why had you made the ending so bleak?
A: I wanted to kill off Alex Rider's world and to bring the series to an end. I felt it was necessary for Alex to begin again and so I decided to send him to the US to stay with another family where he could be 'reborn' with new parents. Jack was collatoral damage within that decision. But I also know that when I wrote those final chapters, which are set in Egypt, a voice whispered to me to leave some wiggle room....
Q: How did writing this Alex Rider book compare with others you have written?
A: It was extraordinary, between deciding to write a new Alex Rider novel and finishing the first chapter was less than a week. I normally spend a month planning a new Alex Rider adventure but what was going to happen in this book just seemed obvious. I knew that an email would arrive, that Alex would run away to Egypt and meet the head of Egyptian intelligence and that he would be intercepted.
I didn't know who were the bad guys but then found that even that was built into the last book. One of the things I really like about the book is that the evil scheme that lies at its heart is, by Alex Rider standards, quite small. The bad guys aren't planning to blow up a whole country, or to take over the world, and it makes the story much more manageable. It meant I could focus on Alex Rider and make the book about him.
Q: The bad guys turn out to be twins - have we met them before?
A: Yes we have. I wanted to move slightly away from Scorpia and this is Scorpia's last bow. Giovanni and Eduardo do actually appear in an earlier Alex Rider novel. We see them around the table with the other bad guys and pretty much all of those characters have since died.
I liked the idea of having twins and giving them a vague mafia background. When I write a James Bond novel, the title and the villains are the hardest to make up. The villains have to be very believeable and you have to be careful to avoid stereotypes and there must be a fun element to them, there has to be a smile connected with them. The book might reflect the real world, that dark things happen, but there has to be an element of fantasy to the villains - they are evil but with a smile.
Q: What about the settings in this book - Wales, Egypt and the US. Have you travelled to all these places?
A: I do travel to every location in my books but not into outer space as Alex does in Ark Angel. And nor have I been to the abandoned coke works in North Wales that are in this book, it just wasn't possible to access them, so I used lots of images online to create the setting in the book.
The plot demanded somewhere that would be hidden, secret and that could be protected but I didn't want to go in with a high tech James Bond villain-style lair. This was a more ordinary crime.
I remembered reading about the closing of the old coke works in north Wales and did some online research. It reminded me of a mine setting in an old Dirty Harry film and the images of the old conveyor belts and rubble and old industry buildings popped into my head, so that also helped develop the setting.
Q: Are you planning more Alex Rider adventures?
A: There is a collection of short stories to come and an inbuilt sequel to Never Say Die, called Nightshade; I have the plot already, it's in my head and I could start writing that tomorrow.
The book's focus will be Mrs Jones, the deputy head of MI6, and the fact that it's an adult character has been partly inspired by the television series of Alex Rider that's being developed for ITV. They have made the adult characters as interesting as the child characters, that's what they are trying to do with the series, and I thought I could do something like that with the next Alex Rider book and open up the world to adult characters.
Q: Will you write any more books for children?
A: I'm thinking of writing a trilogy for children which could be my last gasp in the children's book world. I'm in my 60s now and I feel like I'm getting ever further away from my audience so there was some trepidation in returning to it - but you can't work in the world of young adult fiction and then just turn your back on it when it suits you.
Q: Do you feel there are now more restrictions in writing for children, given recent newspaper reports that said you were 'warned off' introducing black characters, for example?
A: I didn't quite say that but we do live in a time where sensitivities are very much raised and we need to be more alert to people's sensitivities and arguments around every aspect of public life, that's where we are, but I think that is part of a much wider discussion about making books for children.
I am simply trying to be a classic writer for all children and what I've been saying for 20 plus years is that when we talk about literacy and reading and its importance, we have to cross all the boxes, whether that's illiteracy, gender, income and social wealth. Reading has to stretch to encompass all those things.
Q: How does your writing day go?
A: I started writing this morning at 7.30am, now I have a lunch appointment and then I'll take the dog for a walk and then I'm going to the theatre. But I'm at a desk pretty much every day and I write on a laptop. But for me writing isn't working hard, it's just my life.
My favourite place to write is probably at a tiny house we have in Suffolk on the edge of a river which has a view you wouldn't believe. I've written at least one Alex Rider book there.
RUSSIAN ROULETTE
PUBLISHED BY WALKER BOOKS
SEPTEMBER 2013
International assassin Yassen Gregorovich has been given his latest orders: Kill Alex Rider. But how did Yassen become the feared killer he is now?
ANTHONY HOROWITZ talks to us about his latest novel, Russian Roulette, and tells us what inspired him to revisit this elusive character from the Alex Rider series.
Q: Why did you want to give Yassen, an assassin from the Alex Rider series, his own book?
A: I wanted to write about him because he was bad! If you look at all children's books, without exception, the focus is on a character who is, by and large, good. There is a 'hero template' for all children's books whereby, no matter how many bad things happen to your character, whether they are thrown out of home or isolated, whatever it is, they somehow always become a hero.
I started to wonder why Alex Rider, Harry Potter, Young Bond etc always turn out to be heroes and what would happen if one of them goes wrong, if they choose the 'other' side? That's where it became an interesting idea to write about.
Yassen was an interesting character for me because he appears on and off throughout the Alex Rider books; first in Stormbreaker, then in Skeleton Key and Eagle Strike, where he becomes more linked with Alex Rider, in Scorpia and then a brief appearance in Crocodile Tears.
He became a bigger character as the series progressed. I began to notice that there was some sort of parallel between him and Alex, some sort of shared history and back story, so I always thought I would write about him at some point, and started thinking about actually doing so five or six years ago.
Q: Alex and Yassen are about the same age, 14 years, when the key events happen in Yassen's life. Do you feel this is a key age for teenagers?
A: Yes, I think it's an exciting time and I write about 14 year olds especially because that is when you make your most important choices about what you will become, what sort of life you will have; you're leaving your childhood and that protected world and making decisions for yourself.
Yassen doesn't choose to become a killer. When he was 13 he wanted to be a helicopter pilot and fly search and rescue missions, but events in his story force him into becoming what he doesn't want to be, what he spends the whole book trying not to be; an assassin. He is trying to do the opposite of what a hero does, he is trying to not do evil.
Q: As he's a 'bad guy', how hard was it to make him a character we'd care about?
A: It is an emotive story but he is not an emotive character, so a key issue was how to bring emotion into the story and how to make people care about him? What you find is that people who are vile and unrelentingly evil are not characters you'd want to spend time with, they are not interesting. Spending time with someone who is a cold-blooded killer is a challenge, so the question of the book is to try to understand him and in that way, to get sympathy with him about why he became what he became.
Every child has that possibility, to make that choice, to become a Yassen Gregorovic. Every child of 12 years or younger has the possibility to go one way or the other. Yassen begins life as a sweet little boy growing up in a Russian forest but what made it exciting for me is that what finally ends that for him is his relationship with Alex and his father.
The John Rider incident towards the end of the story is what made the book worth writing for me, this meeting point when you have Alex the hero, the hero's father and the hero's nemesis, the three points of a triangle, which is very interesting.
Q: Did you have a clear idea of where the book was headed?
A: Sometimes when I am writing I need to explore a book as I go along but with this one I always knew what direction it would take.
What turns people evil is not suffering and it's not hardship and cruelty, but betrayal and love that turn sour are very destructive forces and you have to understand what this guy went through to appreciate the outcomes.
One of the things I like about this book is that it is more ambiguous, more deeply felt and not such a black and white adventure. I am very aware that I am a writer who writes to entertain but this book isn't just about chases and gunfights, there is also something poetic and profound going on here which is why I enjoyed writing it.
Q: You also revisit a number of questions that you had previously left open in the series, such as why Yassen killed Herod Sayle.
A: Yes, one of the great pleasures was to knit in earlier incidents from books that make up ten to 15 years of my life. For Alex Rider fans, one of the pleasures of reading the books is to pick up earlier incidents. When I set out to write Stormbreaker, I didn't know the world as much as I do now - so I can go back now and look and find and explain things I did so long ago.
There's a moment in the book Eagle Strike when Yassen nearly discovers Alex Rider hiding on a beach, but then he's distracted by a guard dropping a box of vials containing deadly poison. If you want to know where Russian Roulette began, it's in that chapter.
Q: Why did you choose this period of Yassen's life to explore and why set it at the time you specify, 1995 to 2000?
A: Alex Rider goes from the age of 14 to 15 over the course of the series but in real time it was 12 or 13 years for me, so it's hard to think about it historically and also I am very loose about the aspect of time in the books. In this book I had to be more specific and decided that it would be good to set it after the Wall had come down in Eastern Europe.
I visited Russia before the Wall came down and thought it was just too alien and grim for contemporary children, so I went for a period when everything is changing. It was an extraordinary period of change for Russia during those five years and it means that we the reader and Yassen are on the same page because no one understood the changes happening then.
In most of my books I travel and research the settings very carefully but I just couldn't do that for this period because it no longer exists. It was also a time when you had oligarchs like Sharkovsky emerging in Russia, which was useful for my plotting.
Q: Will there be more Alex Rider books?
A: I think I'm done with Alex Rider although there is one little book I have in mind that will form part of a collection of novels and novellas that I am planning. It involves Mrs Jones (an MI6 operative). At one point we find out that she had lost her children and I want to tell the story of how that happened.
The idea for this collection is that it will contain six stories, all of which have been published in different places at different times, as well as a new Alex Rider novella which will have five chapters and which will be set in Iraq. It will also include the story about Mrs Jones' children, and maybe one or two other bits and pieces. I won't start writing that until March next year so it will be published probably in spring 2015.
I am currently writing a sequel to The House of Silk.
Q: How different is Russian Roulette from your other Alex Rider books?
A: I sometimes feel as a writer that I am pigeon holed as someone who writes entertainment and adventure stories. It's true, I do do that, and it means that I have got some kids to read because my books are easy to read, but in Russian Roulette I have done something more.
In this book I am exploring a character whose motivation had to be worked out and who I wanted readers to be sympathetic towards, even though he does terrible things. I think by a long margin it's the best book I have written.
Q: Will you continue to write for young people?
A: I wouldn't say I won't write for young people because it is they and their parents who have supported my work for so long; I wouldn't just walk away from them, although I do feel it's time for some new writers to come onto the scene.
But I have a trilogy in my head which I would like to write. I liked the structure of Hunger Games where you have three very separate novels that interlink but each is complete in itself. I have an idea that would work with that kind of structure and which I will probably start writing next.
OBLIVION
PUBLISHED BY WALKER BOOKS
OCTOBER 2012
Anthony Horowitz's Oblivion concludes the Power of Five series that he began writing more than 30 years ago. The series actually started life as The Devil's Doorbell but Horowitz never wrote the final book.
A few years ago, he re-read the original books and decided they were worth revisiting. He began writing the new Power of Five series, borrowing very little from the earlier books and giving the plotline of five gifted children battling the evil 'Old Ones' a fresh and bigger dimension. In so doing, Horowitz says he has come to appreciate why he could not finish the series before. "The final book was going to be a bigger book than I could write then. I started it, but couldn't finish it."
The fifth book, Oblivion, finally completes the Power of Five series although the book can also be read on its own. Horowitz explains, "Oblivion begins with a boy tumbling through a door, which is a time portal, into a village and arriving in a world of the near future that is coming to a disastrous ending. In the first chapter, we find out that life as we know it has changed and nothing can be taken for granted."
While Oblivion has the zeitgeist of an Alex Rider book with that same sense of adventure, action and pace, Horowitz says it is also "more personal and political than anything I have written".
Oblivion is a powerful book that takes in a sweep of history, global cultures and politics. It is an adventure story, yes, but also a critique of our modern society and an unflinching look at the mess we are leaving behind for the next generation, says Horowitz. He describes this as his best work to date given its epic scope and its philosophical and moral core. "Alex Rider is entertainment. Oblivion I hope is thrilling too and entertaining, so I am proud I am keeping the pace of the story while giving something more."
Horowitz explains, "I think I was able to write the final book now because there is a very strong sense of humanity being at the edge of a cliff and we are all waiting to see what happens next. People in Western societies are already running out of basics like fuel and food look at what's happening in Greece while in this country the government has spent the equivalent of 350 for every person on quantitative easing, and we have no idea where this will take us. Who will still be in the Euro on ten years time? I am not a doomsayer, but against this background I found it easy to imagine a world where nothing we take for granted is still there."
He adds, "As I have got older I have questioned more and more of the things I used to take for granted, things like wealth and privilege and my own political views. Why have so many young people got so little opportunity? Why do we have a tiny minority of people who have disgusting levels of wealth and why is that imbalance becoming more and more pronounced?"
Readers may spot some real life characters in the story, particularly one or two of the wealth barons, drumming home his point that those who do the worst things in Oblivion are actually the rich and powerful humans, not the Old Ones. "The premise of the story is Lord of the Rings in the real world but it's important to me that the evil is recognisable, it's all being done by the humans - the Old Ones just encourage us to behave badly. This story is about humans and their capacity for good and evil and the seesaw that goes on between them in every facet of human life. In the last few years, that seesaw has swung rather heavily towards evil but as a children's writer, you have to believe in the supremacy of good."
The climax of Oblivion, the battle between good and evil that the series has been leading up to, takes place in Antarctica and Horowitz says that visiting the region prior to writing the battle scene was vital. "The battle scene takes place on the ice, you have two enormous armies, nuclear missiles, destroyers and the ice and sky and cold and wind, but to make it real I had to go there. I was blown away by the beauty of Antarctica, the absence of people, the desolation, and it made me realise how beautiful the world is and how important it is that it survives."
Of the five teen characters who have led the action, who are the power of five, Horowitz says they have all "taken a great step forward" through the novel, Pedro especially. "He was the least interesting character in some ways and the hardest to capture. What do I, from London, know about a street child from Peru, a child healer? Yet he has developed into the character I am closest to."
Although Horowitz has been quoted saying that he plans to stop writing for teenagers, instead focusing on screen writing and writing for adults (he is now writing new Sherlock Holmes novels), he still has plans to write for this age group. One of these stories is based on a character called Yassen, an assassin from the Alex Rider books, and Horowitz is exploring what turns a 14 year old into a killer. He also has a trilogy at the back of his mind, a thriller featuring a boy and his family. Horowitz adds, "This is for an Alex Rider audience, it's fun and violent and fast-paced. I am very excited about it."
He remains happy, too, with his decision to stop writing Alex Rider books. "The more Alex Rider books I wrote, the more I enjoyed him, but I am still glad I quite after nine books," he says. "I have new things to write about."
For budding writers, his advice is, "Read. The more you read the better you write. And write. The more you write, the better you write. Get out and have experiences and adventures, enjoy what you're doing, and most importantly of all, believe in yourself."
