Why I’ve quit social media for Chopin...
As he publishes his brilliant new whodunnit, Alex Rider and Foyle’s War creator Anthony Horowitz examines the dark roots of his writing, reveals he’s swapped Twitter for playing the piano and declares his love of family. Just don’t call him grandpa!
LOOKING back over the 45 years since his first book was published, Anthony Horowitz likens himself to the perennial Looney Tunes fall-guy, Wile E Coyote. “I often feel my life has been like that character,” the bestselling author smiles. “The one running across the bridge – and the bridge is burning behind him. If I stop and look around, that’s when I’ll fall.” Unlikely as that might seem, it’s doubtful it would slow him down for a moment. In fact, Horowitz might more accurately be compared to the Road Runner itself… an unstoppable force in the face of apparently insurmountable obstacles.
His drive, determination and sheer work rate across children’s and adult fiction, scriptwriting, playwriting and as creator of hundreds of hours of hit television – Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders among others – are legendary in an industry littered with failure.
Today the author has just come from signing 200 hardback copies of his latest adult whodunnit, of which more shortly, having earlier (he’s generally up and writing by 7am) completed the first 100,000 words of his next novel – which will be his 60th when it comes out next year. Another incredible milestone. Having created teen spy Alex Rider in 2000, he describes himself as “battle-hardened”, and there’s indeed something of the Terminator about Horowitz, who turned 69 earlier this month but radiates the energy and enthusiasm of a man half his age.
So what can he recall about his first published book, a children’s adventure titled The Sinister Secret of Frederick K Bower, now probably worth a pretty penny on eBay?
“Obviously you never forget being published for the first time,” he says. “But that said, every time a new book turns up, I enjoy that same visceral excitement to have it in my hands. That’s never left me.
“Frederick K Bower was written long before children’s books became fashionable and it was the experience of every new writer; the excitement replaced by hope: ‘Is anybody actually going to buy it?’ Followed by despair? ‘No, they haven’t’. Followed by, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do next?’”
In fact, there was a little more to it, he admits. The debut was optioned for the big screen by Disney, and he was whisked off to Hollywood aged 25 or 26 to adapt it.
“It never happened, of course – so many books don’t make it – but it was a really thrilling time,” Horowitz continues. “It set the template for a life in writing. I realised at a very early age I was only a writer. There was nothing else I could do and nothing else I wanted to do.And that’s all I have done for 45 years, more really, because I actually wrote my first book when I was 10.
“I was writing books throughout my teens, at university, until the day I got published. I’ve never stopped.” He sighs: “There are times when I wonder if I couldn’t have had a happier life doing something else. But there really wasn’t much choice.”
AN AMATEUR psychologist might point to his miserable north London childhood, the early death of his father (Horowitz was just 21 at the time) and the shock when it emerged he owed millions of pounds to creditors, having transferred a fortune to a mysterious Swiss bank account, from whence it was never traced nor recovered.
Horowitz, who also spent five years at a brutal, bullying prep school, has just finished reading A Very Private School, Earl Spencer’s best-selling account of boarding school abuse. He admits: “If ever a book should have a trigger warning – at least for me – it was that one, because his experiences were so eerily similar to my own, with the one exception that no matron ever got into bed with me. “Even more upsetting, his number at school was 64 – and so was mine. I felt such an affinity with him.
“My school was as bad as his, although I was blithely unaware of some of the malpractices going on. It was a very painful read.” Horowitz pauses for a moment, then continues: “I have come to feel my whole life has been a fight against those five years and their unhappiness.”
Which is, perhaps, the crux of his drive. “The question I sometimes ask myself is, ‘Would I swap?’ If that’s the fuel that’s still burning and still providing locomotion for my novels, inspiring me and forcing me to write, would I have wanted a happier childhood? That’s the question.”
It isn’t one he’s easily able to answer. Happily, however, he’s clearly broken the mould in his own life. Married to TV producer Jill Green since 1988, the couple have two grown-up sons, Cass and Nicholas.
“My wife is entirely the reason I came through somewhere close to sane and healthy, because she saved me from myself and from my past,” he says.
“Our marriage has lasted 36 years and we work together and we’ve created shows together. And yet we can often be apart without worrying too much. I can’t express how much I owe her for my salvation.”
A “huge believer” in the importance of family, Horowitz fears technology has undermined our most important relationships – and risks our humanity.
“Because we’re all so busy, because of social media, because we’re all glued to screens of one sort or another,” he says. “I’m a great supporter of the idea of children being separated from their iPhones, particularly at school. That seems a no-brainer.”
The author recently quit social media sites X, formerly Twitter, and Facebook, because he found himself wasting so much time getting riled about clickbait.
“You can’t write for 10 hours solid. You have to punctuate it with something else,” he explains. “I used to smoke, but that was more harmful than social media. Then it was chocolate biscuits and tea. Then it became Twitter – five or 10 minutes of browsing, which somehow becomes 20 or 30 minutes.
“Now I don’t understand why anybody would wish to row with people they’ve never met, having arguments you can never possibly win. Social media is digital. It starts with a technology that is zero or one, it has digital
rules: ‘Yes or no’, ‘good or bad’, ‘evil or kind’. There’s nothing in between and no irony, no humanity, no shade of feeling.
“So that’s why I feel so much better. I’ll talk to you about anything because I have the opportunity to explain myself, however inarticulately, but not online.”
He’s swapped social media breaks for reading poetry, playing the piano (Chopin, “badly”, he chuckles) and teaching himself Greek (“Many people feel it’s useless given we’re probably only years away from being able to wear an earpiece that will provide simultaneous translation – but the joy of learning a language, the way you get your brain cells bubbling, is wonderful”). He also drinks industrial quantities of green tea.
Until recently when he moved to Richmond, south-west London, Horowitz and his wife shared a central London home – albeit in a four-storey block – with their sons.
“It was a wonderful experience; 14 years of being so close to each other as a family,” he says. “Now they’ve both married, separation was inevitable. Once one of them said they were thinking about moving, it was time for us all to go.” Despite the wrench, he’s clearly embedded himself firmly in his new community. It’s not been without its creative advantages either, which brings us to his brilliant new whodunnit, Close To Death, and his fifth adult mystery featuring detective Daniel Hawthorne, published this week.
SET in a gated community in Richmond, it features neighbours at war, some dastardly killings and the most ingenious locked room mystery this side of the golden age of Agatha Christie. Actually, a locked car, inside a locked garage, beat that, Miss Marple! When an obnoxious hedge fund manager is murdered with a crossbow, his neighbours – including a celebrity dentist, a chess grandmaster, two retired nuns, an ex-barrister and a GP with a drink problem – come under scrutiny.
“I’ve always wanted to write a proper locked room mystery… this is a dead man inside a locked car, the only key is in his pocket, and he’s been asphyxiated,” he smiles. “My first draft involved a Dyson and someone pointed out I’d got the technology wrong, it didn’t work! So I had to think of a different way of achieving the same end.”
Close To Death is not based on his own neighbours, he points out.
“But we live in a cauldron in London, all the time rubbing shoulders with complete strangers. Neighbourhood disputes are one part of it, but what if you live next door to someone you really dislike? That’s what the book is exploring, people living together happily, until the wrong person moves in. So then what do you do?”
Plan a murder, apparently! Dubbed the “master puppeteer” by one critic, that in fact underplays the skill with which Horowitz – whose fictional alter-ego appears again as a hapless character – manages the plot, throwing in red herrings and sending readers (and himself) up literal and figurative cul-de-sacs, while having great fun.
“Pushing the envelope,” he calls it, adding: “The excitement is trying new things, stepping outside my comfort zone. What I’m proudest to say is, ‘This has never been done before’.” He plans to write 12 Hawthorn novels in all – “a random number I chose but it feels about right” – and, for now, won’t be returning to children’s fiction following publication last year of his 13th Alex Rider novel, Nightshade Revenge. The hit series returned last week to Amazon for its third TV adaptation, starring Otto Farrant.
But Horowitz admits: “I’m unsure about whether I’ll do any more children’s books.
“The adult books are doing very well and, with every year that passes, I’m more distant from a children’s audience. I worry about that distance becoming too great. How can I really understand what eight and nine-year olds growing up now think?”
HE DOES have a newish connection to youth though: his eight-monthold grandson Leander, and is clearly a doting grandparent, with one exception.
“I’m nervous about being called a grandfather,” he admits. “It’s not a word I’ve ever used. I don’t want to be called ‘grandpa’, ‘gramps’, ‘gaga’, ‘goo-gar’ or whatever. There are words that define us, which we want to avoid. To me, ‘grandpa’ suggests age and I don’t wish to be defined by my age.
“Maybe it’s because I had such awful grandparents when I was growing up – uncaring, selfish, self-obsessed, unnecessary people. There are many grandparents who are totally happy. I just think there’s more to my life than being, you know, the old guy.”
His next book will be another adult mystery, the third in his Magpie Murders series, filmed for the BBC, starring Lesley Manville as book editor-turned-sleuth Susan Ryeland. The second adaptation, Moonflower Murders, is due on TV later this year.
Horowitz, an admirer of Rishi Sunak, worries about the “race to the gutter” in terms of the anger and antagonism around politics at the moment – especially in the language used by and about our MPs.
“We’ve got to start believing in the best of each other,” he adds. “Let’s hope Labour has the vision to tackle the NHS, to look at education, redress the tax situation.
“But I do worry the landslide will be so huge we’ll end up with a bizarrely undemocratic Parliament in which the opposition comes from within the ruling party.”
As for his own career, he’s still got plenty to do, and clearly has no intention of slowing down or compromising. One thing I think it’s safe to say, at least where Horovitz is concerned: “That’s not all, folks! Meep, meep!”
●●Close To Death by Anthony Horowitz (Century, £22) is out now.Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25