Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
HOROWITZ’S MOST RIVETING STORY? HIS OWN
NOVELIST AND SCREENWRITER ANTHONY HOROWITZ HAS A HISTORY THAT’S MORE TWISTING THAN THE THRILLERS HE WRITES. HERE HE TELLS REBECCA HARDY HOW THE MYSTERY OF HIS FATHER’S MISSING MILLIONS HAS DRIVEN HIS BESTSELLING CAREER
Anthony Horowitz was just 21 years old when the phone rang at his parents’ swanky house in a leafy north London suburb at 3am and his world was turned on its head.
The call was from St Thomas’ Hospital where his supposedly filthy rich father, Mark, had died after a lengthy battle with colon cancer. His dad was buried as quickly as possible, in accordance with his Jewish faith, but his body was barely in the ground when letters began arriving from banks – demanding repayment of astronomical loans. Within a week, there were dozens, running into millions of pounds. Shockingly, the family, which included Anthony’s brother Philip and sister Caroline, discovered there was nothing to pay the creditors, for the family’s money had disappeared. His mother Joyce went grey in a matter of months.
‘I remember very clearly when the first letter came. It was from a bank,’ says Anthony. ‘It said, “We’re very sorry to hear about your husband’s death but we must advise you that he owes us £100,000.” The next day another letter came wanting £50,000 and the next day another letter until, finally, they just piled up – all these letters and everything was gone. I just remember my mother in shock, total shock.’
That trauma has followed Anthony, now 66, to this day, and has been the driving force behind his success. One of the most prolific novelists and screenwriters of his generation, he has given us ITV drama Foyle’s War, two James Bond novels (to date) and the hit Alex Rider books about a teenage spy – to name just a few. His latest work of fiction is A Line To Kill, the third in his Hawthorne and Horowitz series, in which a fictional version of himself is the sidekick of private investigator Daniel Hawthorne.
He could have done with Hawthorne’s help decades ago when his family were trying to solve the mystery of the missing millions. It seems that Anthony’s father, a solicitor and ‘sort of fixer’ who worked on the fringes of Harold Wilson’s government, transferred a vast sum to a bank account in Switzerland, but they have never managed to find it.
‘He’d sold everything [stocks, shares, insurance policies] and borrowed enormous amounts of money,’ says Anthony. ‘He had effectively taken all of this money out of the bank in a suitcase, walked into another bank, opened an account with a code name, then died. He left a coded notebook. I’ll never forget my mother looking for the “Archduke” account because she believed that was the codename for the missing millions. She was desperate.
‘She went to Switzerland a few times trying to track the money down but it was never found. It disappeared – all of it. So we went from being very rich, with a Rolls-royce with a chauffeur and servants, to being very poor. I can still remember my mother selling the silver and jewellery and fur coats. She died ten years later [of pancreatic cancer], partly because of the shock, I think. Her hair went grey in a very, very short time.
‘The funny thing is, when it was over and she’d moved into this little house and got a job as a secretary, she told me she was happier than she’d ever been. I don’t think she did love my father.’
We are sitting on the terrace at his enchanting clapboard house on the Suffolk coast. His Labrador Chase, bought during lockdown, is
‘He took the moneyoutof thebankin a suitcase’
under the table as we dig into the fresh crab salad Anthony has prepared for lunch. He puts his fork down for a moment and looks out across the water. That morning 45 years ago is as vivid today. In fact, he wrote about it in the opening chapter of Stormbreaker, the first of his series of 13 novels about the teenage spy Alex Rider. With the publication of that book, in 2000, Anthony’s life was turned on its head again as a generation of boys were lured from their computer games into his stories and his career ‘exploded’.
He recites the opening line: ‘When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it’s never good news.’ The book was made into a film in 2006 and, more recently, a TV series called Alex Rider. The second series is currently in production, overseen by Anthony’s wife and ‘best friend’, producer Jill Green.
‘Those words changed my life,’ he says. When I was writing that I was seeing myself in bed [on the day his father died] and I can still see it now. I can still see the moon. I can see the window and the curtains and the drive out the front. It wasn’t the doorbell that rang, it was the phone, but I knew what it was because nobody would ring you at three in the morning with good news. I remember thinking, “Why are you not crying? Why are you not sad?” It was awful. I didn’t feel grief. I didn’t feel particularly sad or shocked.
‘My father was a very strange man. There’s so much I don’t know about him. I don’t know quite what he was up to but I have memories of delivering £150,000 in bearer bonds [a bond with no record of ownership] to an office in London, having cycled there pretending to be a security guard. Why he asked me to do it I just don’t know. He was involved with corrupt people. There was a man called Eric Miller he used to see.’
Sir Eric Miller was a wealthy property developer who contributed huge sums to the running of Harold Wilson’s private office. He committed suicide a year after Anthony’s father’s death, while under investigation for fraud. The story is as compelling as the meticulously planned plots in Anthony’s books.
‘It’s impossible to escape the influences of your childhood. I’ve made it my business that there’ll be no mysteries in my children’s lives. No secrets,’ he says.
Anthony’s sons, Nicholas, 32, and Cassian, 30, are close to their parents. Cassian, or Cass, is a social media guru who works as a special adviser to Chancellor Rishi Sunak, and has been credited with creating his ‘Dishy Rishi’ brand. He and his brother co-founded The Clerkenwell Brothers creative agency. Anthony
is hugely proud of them both.
‘My sons matter so much to me. It must be difficult having a dad like me who is so driven. Jill works as hard asi do but we are av ery happy family,’ says Anthony, who met his wife as a 29-year-ol d when they both worked in advertising.
‘I was a copywriter and she was the account director. I think it’s true to say we were at each other’s throats within a minute of meeting. I had no doubt from the moment I saw her we would get married because she was clever and so unafraid of me and so, just so, attractive. That was 37 years ago now. I was very lucky to meet Jill. She helped me find myself. She’s changed how I think and how I look, dressing decently – although not today because of the heat.’
Anthony is, as he says, in ‘slouchy mode’ in a faded T-shirt and shorts. His skin is browned by daily swims and shoreline walks with Chase. He’s been here, instead of their London home, for months, working on his next novel, a third Bond story. Meanwhile, A Line To Kill was published this week. The book is part of his series that pushes the boundaries in novel writing by featuring himself as a character. ‘I’m only a small part of it, but the idea was that it should be truthful about the life of the writer. The bits in the books that you come across about me true – my relationship with my publisher, my wife and my children.’
This story is set on the tiny island of Alderney. Private detective Daniel Hawthorne is going to a literary festival there to talk about his new book and the writer Anthony Horowitz accompanies him. They soon discover that the island is in upheaval over planned construction works and its inhabitants are harbouring secrets. Then there’s a brutal murder and the pair are on the spot to search for the killer.
‘When I pitched the idea for the series to Selina Walker, who is my editor, she was nervous this was going to turn into an ego trip – “aren’t I successful”, “aren’t I clever”.’
Yet Anthony does not actually write himself up as particularly clever or successful. In fact I think he rather does himself down. He tells me the author in his books is ‘an honest way of how I sort of see myself’.
‘I think of myself as that cartoon character in Road Riot [the arcade racing game] who’s running across a bridge and hasn’t noticed the bridge is burning behind him,’ he says. ‘I always think the moment he turns around and sees the bridge is burnt beneath his feet, that’s when he’ll fall. That’s how I feel in my writing and in my life – I’ve got to keep on. I’ve got to get onto the next book before the fire catches up with me. What that fire is, is anyone’s guess, but that’s how I feel.’
Anthony’s ‘strange’ father was always opposed to the idea of his son becoming a novelist, which was his ambition from the age of around eight. ‘He always thought I was stupid and wouldn’t succeed. He sort of always sneered at me, whereas my mother was terribly excited by the idea of me writing.’
It’s clear that Anthony remembers a miserable childhood.
‘It was very old-fashioned,’ he says. ‘A gong at 7pm called you to the dining room, and if you didn’t converse at the table you were sent out of the room. I do believe writing comes from tension largely and I have a lot of tension, which probably is why I wrote so much. I was a podgy child and sort of a failure as a kid. I was sent to a prep school where there was corporal punishment all the time. It was awful.’
Books, he says, completely absorbed him. ‘I found the one thing I was good at, which was writing and telling stories. Until then I wasn’t very good at anything. I remember starting to tell stories to the other kids in the dormitory and becoming the school storyteller and finding that I had a purpose. I was going to be a writer.’
We’ve been walking Chase by the water and are almost back at his house, where soon he will return to his desk and immerse himself in the thing he truly loves: writing. ‘It’s very strange when I look at where I am now and I compare it to where I was
then,’ he says. ‘There’s no connection between the two. I look at this child and this school and these parents and that bad life and I can’t actually believe that is me.’
A Line To Kill by Anthony Horowitz is published by Century, £20. To order a copy for £18 go to mailshop. co.uk/books or call 020 3308 9193. Free UK delivery on orders over £20. Offer valid until 04/09/21.