BY PANCHALI ILLANKOON ANTHONY HOROWITZ & AMANDA JAYATISSA WITH CHHIMMI TENDUF-LA: THE ANATOMY OF A THRILLER

Two masters of the thriller genre, Anthony Horowitz (Alex Rider series, the Diamond Brothers series) and Amanda Jayatissa (My Sweet Girl, Island Witch) joined author Chhimmi Tenduf-la on a discussion about writing thrillers and making it great.

Can murder mysteries do more? questioned Horowitz, “I’m tired of the ‘butler did it’ trope. Its boring and hacked. If you are writing thriller, it’s important to make sure that every story is really different from each other.” He added that making up unique story lines are getting harder and harder every day because

“even the most absurd things have taken place already!”. “Every single Alex Rider book has happened in some sort of way because I would get all sorts of newspaper clippings from all over the world saying ‘hey – isn’t this your story?’” Do they ever think then that someone might copy their stories in real life?

Jayatissa, whose debut novel My Sweet Girl won the International Thriller Writer’s Award for Best

First Novel laughs as she tells the audience “she sincerely hopes not”. After her debut novel, Jayatissa published You’re Invited and is expected to publish her third novel Island Witch in February. When asked whether she writes with her reader in mind, she shared that in the genre of thrillers, ‘there is no audience inside the book’. “I write more for me than for the audience. In thrillers, whether you want the ending to be happy or not is a conscious choice you have to make. I write what I feel is right.”

Wonderfully moderated by Tenduf-la, both Horowitz and Jayatissa had an engaging session that gave the audience an insight to the workings of a good thriller.