ANTHONY HOROWITZ
Alex Rider’s creator indulges in a spot of hero worship with SFX.
Anthony Horowitz hands SFX a distressed copy of Dr No. Distressed may be underselling it – this 1962 paperback looks as though it’s endured an especially brutalising torture session by SMERSH. The cover clings to the spine with the kind of tenacity that defines 007. There, just above the photo of Sean Connery in his scowly, sharp-suited pomp, is Horowitz’s own signature, scrawled a long time ago.
“This is so sad. I was 14 years old when I wrote my name on that cover. And look, that’s my mother’s signature inside, giving me parental permission to read this book in school.”
Horowitz has always loved heroes. He trades in them, too. He began his career writing TV adventures of William Tell and Robin Hood. More recently he’s given new literary life to Sherlock Holmes and James Bond in faithful, officially endorsed continuation novels The House Of Silk and Trigger Mortis.
Now he’s reactivating his own reluctant teen hero Alex Rider, in his first full-length adventure for six years. “I missed him physically,” Horowitz admits. “As a person with whom I had spent 11 years writing, and whose adventures always made me smile. I wanted to know what had happened to him…”
In his spacious London lair, watched by a bookcase that, splendidly, swings open to reveal a bona fide secret chamber – “It’s where I keep magic tricks” – he reflects on the heroes that have shaped his life.
TINTIN
My first hero was Tintin. He was a writer, he travelled all over the world, he had adventures and he had wonderful friends. I wanted to be like Tintin. I wanted to be a writer too. He was a journalist, of course, rather than a fiction writer. I was in a pretty foul prep school, and was unhappy, and books were a lifeline to me. I invented characters who were always escaping, always running, always being chased. That was how I saw the world. I love secret passages. That’s a whole thing in my life. And Tintin is full of secret passages. I love the idea that there is this world that you and I inhabit, but if we look carefully enough there will be a panel in a bookcase that will take us somewhere else, or a secret staircase… Hergé, who created Tintin, is a wonderful draftsman. The world of Tintin is very brilliantly realised.
SHERLOCK HOLMES
The great figures of literature have a timeless quality about them. Look at someone like Sherlock Holmes. On the one hand he very much defines the time in which he was created. We understand the late 19th century largely because of our reading of Sherlock Holmes. The cobblestones, the gas lamps, the growlers, the fog. Our image of that period was given to us by Conan Doyle. But at the same time Sherlock Holmes himself is timeless. The qualities he brings, of ingenuity, of instinct, of crime solving, of aloofness, of being just bloody difficult and a drug addict, are timeless qualities, which is why the BBC can make
Sherlock and move him without any effort at all into the 21st century. Such characters define the time in which they were created and they are at the same time timeless. Part of the fun of being a writer is looking at the relationship between authors and their creations. Sherlock Holmes is quite disliked by Doyle. Doyle thinks that he is a bigger, better writer than this detective novelist. And what does he do when he’s created one of the greatest characters in fiction? He kills him. He throws him off the Reichenbach Falls. Then, of course, years later largely financial considerations persuade him to bring him back. It’s very, very hard to get rid of the characters people love.
JAMES BOND
Ian Fleming was a genius. So was Doyle. But their genius was to create characters that were bigger than them, and who were more fascinating than them, and more loveable than them, in many ways. Like Holmes, Bond is archetypal: he defines the period he was set in, the ’50s and ’60s in particular, the midst of the Cold War. The end, if you like, of British imperialism and greatness, the end of a time when we had a moral assurance about our identity. Right now our identity is fragmenting before our eyes. Who are we? Are we Nigel Farage or are we Winston Churchill? What does it now mean to be British, and is British even a dirty word? Bond answered those questions, with a certain assurance. When I started reading James Bond, in the ’60s, life was so grey in many ways, especially for someone like me. Things like foreign travel, women, sex and glamour were absent from my life, and he brought them. I admired Bond rather than Fleming because I wanted to be like Bond. I wanted to be like Fleming, too, but that came a little later.
CHARLES DICKENS
I was given Hard Times at school, which put me off Dickens for five or ten years. And then when I was in my early twenties, I went to stay with a friend of mine whose father was the consulate general in Istanbul. He asked me what I was reading, sniffed at whatever it was – a pulpy thing – and said I should read Dickens. And he gave me Great Expectations to read. So in the very gloomy corridors and bedrooms of the consulate in Istanbul I began to read Great Expectations and to my surprise found it to be the most wonderful book I’d ever read. And it was the beginning of a love affair with Dickens that continues to this day. I am a storyteller and I always respond to stories first of all. I love narrative. I’m not very good with books that don’t have a strong narrative and Dickens’ stories are wonderfully engaging. His characters are so memorable. I also love the way he can go from high comedy and really quite foolish knockabout scenes to scenes of pathos and seriousness and satire and social commentary within the space of one book.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
I greatly admire Chopin, Bach and Mozart. I have a piano and those are the people I play. I love to be in touch with their genius. When I’m playing a Chopin nocturne I don’t play it well – I’m not good enough – but nonetheless I’m still communicating with his genius. I find that really interesting about playing classical
My life was so grey when i read Bond in the ’60s, but he brought me things like foreign travel, women, sex and glamour
music, that sense of connection. I completely missed the explosion of popular music in the 1960s due to my bizarre childhood and the fact that my parents were incredibly middle-class, Jewish, inward-looking and old-fashioned. It was just a weird, slightly horrible upbringing. I always have to be careful because it’s wrong to complain about being born wealthy and privileged when most of the world’s population are not, but it was still emotionally damaging and it was not pleasant. One of the aspects of this was that popular music was very much frowned upon in my house so therefore I have no link to the explosion of the ’60s and everything that happened back then.
SUFFOLK
I go to Orford a lot. I have a tiny little stub of a house there. It’s where I wrote Moriarty. I wrote quite a bit of Alex Rider there too. There are incredible sea views and river views and 360 degree sky views. The light changes every 20 minutes. Suffolk inspires me and fills me with energy because of its emptiness, its wildness. It is where I am probably happiest. I also go to Crete now, in Greece. I spend the summer writing there, but that’s the same deal, in a way. The sea is great for writers because the sea pixellates. There’s something about the movement of the sea, the light constantly changing, that keeps your brain active.
RICHARD CARPENTER
Richard Carpenter was the creator of Robin
Of Sherwood. He was my first mentor. He took me on board when I was 26 or 27 and taught me how to write television. He and Paul Knight, who was a producer, gave a young writer a break, which was incredible. He was a classic storyteller. What he did with Robin Of
Sherwood that was so clever was to go for the archetype and invest it with paganism, and with magic and a wider significance. It’s almost like the Greek myths. He took Robin and elevated him to a mythic character. So when he did the death of [original Robin] Michael Praed, with Clannad singing their hearts out in the background and the light streaming through the trees, it becomes a moment almost of metamorphosis, of ascending into heaven. Richard had a wonderfully original view of the world, but he had total respect for the stories. Just the way he treated the Merry Men, and Maid Marian, who was feisty and modern but still remained absolutely true to the virtues of the character. He was also an incredibly generous man. He was fun to be with, he was never possessive of his characters or his world. Television is not as kind a place as it was then.
THE INVADERS
I’ve always thought I’d like to redo The
Invaders. It’s ripe for a remake. All Quinn Martin’s work was pretty fantastic. I used to love that style of television. I just remember
The Invaders as being a terribly clever, simple idea that tied in so well with the way I see the world – which is that there are these people who look ordinary but they’re aliens and they can kill you. It was just a very, very clever format. And there were other shows in that style which I liked: The Fugitive was another one, classic John Buchan for television, in a way. I’ve always liked – and I’ve frequently written about – the idea that the world is not what it looks like, and actually behind every shop window, behind every closed door, something weird is going on. I like that.
Characters like Sherlock holmes define the time in which they were created and are also timeless