THE LITERARY VENTRILOQUIST
Anthony Horowitz is a world-renowned writer of many styles — and not all of them are his own
Magpie Murders Anthony Horowitz HarperCollins
When Anthony Horowitz was 13, his mother gave him a human skull for Christmas. And it’s been part of his life ever since.
It was at his side when he created two immensely popular television series, Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War. It was there at the fictional birth of Alex Rider, the intrepid 14-year-old hero of a bestselling series of spy novels for young people. It was an inspiration when the Conan Doyle estate invited him to write a couple of Sherlock Holmes novels and also when he entered the world of James Bond with a 007 thriller.
And it has definitely played a role in the birth of his latest novel, Magpie Murders, which evokes both the golden age of the classic whodunit and the world of contemporary crime fiction.
“I was given the skull when I was 13 years old, and I can never decide which is stranger — that I asked for it, or that my mother went out and got it for me.”
As he chats with Postmedia, Horowitz is letting his mind travel back half a century to a time when he was a schoolboy contemplating his own mortality.
“I was very interested in death, and also the soul. So I wanted a skull for that reason.
“I still have it, and it still sits beside my desk in my office. And I’ve always had a certain respect for it. It’s not a toy or something to play with. And now, it’s very much a reminder of the shortness of life, and it tells me to work harder and faster and to do well.”
One might imagine from such comments that this internationally renowned writer is burdened by a sombre view of life.
Not so.
At 62, Horowitz is outgoing and gregarious, a man who’s happy in his chosen profession, and who enjoys life’s simple pleasures — for example, walking with his dog through London streets to a book signing earlier in the day.
Classic crime fiction is another personal pleasure, and that has led him to make a truly unique contribution to the genre with Magpie Murders, now published in Canada by HarperCollins.
The new novel is both a classic whodunnit and also an absorbing meditation on crime fiction — which is why the London Sunday Times hailed it as “magnificent ... an ingenious novel within a novel” when it appeared in Britain last year. It begins in contemporary times when Susan Ryeland, a publisher’s editor, receives the manuscript of the latest novel by one of her company’s bestselling but most troublesome authors, Alan Conway, a specialist in classic crime fiction.
The new arrival — the latest to feature its author’s Poirot-like sleuth, Atticus Pund — has all the traditional ingredients — a mysterious manor house named Pye Hall, numerous corpses and a host of intriguing suspects — but as Ryeland continues reading it, she discovers disturbing hints of something more real and frightening lurking within its pages, and it drives her to look more closely at its author’s own life.
It took Horowitz 15 months to deal with the challenge of encasing, within the mould of a more contemporary thriller, a classic crime novel in the tradition of Agatha Christie.
“This book has multiple connections beginning with the book within the book and the book outside the book, and it was complex to come up with a structure that was simple, so it took me a long time to structure the book in a way that would work.”
The original idea for it came when he was working on an early script for Midsomer Murders, the long-running television series about dark doings in a fictional English county.
“That is when I had the idea of a murder mystery about a man who writes murder mysteries in order to examine the relationship between the writer, the detective and the reader. But I wouldn’t write it for another 20 years.”
Back then, Horowitz was pursuing two successful writing careers — one in television, the other in children’s fiction. He was cautious about entering the world of the adult novel.
“I was known only for children’s books, and I felt I had to be known for an adult book before I could embark on this project. I also felt I wasn’t good enough to write such a book. I needed to wait for it to mature, to let it sit with me for a while.”
In the interim, Horowitz’s career moved from strength to strength, enjoying a particularly striking success with Foyle’s War, the TV series he created about a dogged policeman fighting crime in an English seaside community during the Second World War.
Running parallel to Foyle’s War, a show that at its peak attracted 80 million viewers internationally, was his growing popularity with young readers as the creator of Alex Rider.
The series now boasts total sales internationally of 18 million, with the latest, Never Say Die, due to arrive in North America later this year.
Still there was a time when Horowitz wondered whether he could make a transition to adult fiction.
“The passage from children’s writer to adult writer is difficult to achieve, and a lot have writers have failed,” he says.
He says his first adult book, The Killing Joke, was not a success, but then came an approach by the Conan Doyle estate to write two Holmes novels, The House Of Silk and Moriarty.
“This came out of the blue, but Sherlock Holmes was one of the great loves of my life and I felt I couldn’t refuse.”
Then came Trigger Mortis, Horowitz’s successful contribution to the James Bond canon.
“I really enjoy literary ventriloquism,” says Horowitz, who has another 007 novel arriving soon. I find it a very interesting exercise to write in the style of somebody else.”
Horowitz likes trying new things — which is why he’s working on a projected new series featuring a resourceful detective named Daniel Hawthorne. It will have a 21st-century setting, but seeks to evoke the sensibility of crime fiction’s golden age.
“I find forensic crime and scientific investigation quite dull,” Horowitz says unrepentantly. So he’ll avoid such contemporary devices as much as he can. “I think I’m an old-fashioned person. After all, I still write with a fountain pen.”