Anthony Horowitz not worried about SilverFin Anthony Horowitz had been writing for 25 years - and then a bolshie teenager made him famous, says Sarah Crompton Anthony Horowitz became a literary superstar the day he invented Alex Rider, teenage spy. He had written loads of children's books; he had found success on television as the creator of Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders. But it took an apparently invincible and rather bolshie 14-year-old - "the nearest thing the Brits have to a lethal weapon" - to push him into the firmament. Alex is loved by teenagers because he is cool, lonely and clever. He is loved by parents because he persuades their recalcitrant offspring to read. He is loved by his creator because he brought him the fame that had eluded him for 25 years. Anthony Horowitz is an engaging man, attractively casual in a brown leather jacket, anxious both to please and to answer questions honestly. On the day we meet, he is about to go on a well-earned holiday, but he gives every impression of being happy to sit and talk about writing all day. It is something he adores. "I write both the television and the children's books with the same enthusiasm because I believe there's no point in writing without total passion," he says. But he knew Alex was special from the minute he first hit the page in Stormbreaker, six books and five years ago. "I'm a long-distance writer. I've been writing children's books for years. But once I started writing the first Alex Rider, I knew in my heart I'd got it right. There was a sense of energy, a sense of this being a real boy. "Where my earlier heroes had belonged in the world of children's literature, Alex doesn't. He's stumbled into the wrong world. If there's a single reason why the books have done so well I think it's down to his unwillingness to deal with these adventures, the fact that he is so manipulated, lied to, cheated." Basically what this means is that Alex has teenage angst. Writ very large. He's a spy and he doesn't want to be. MI6 provides him with fabulous gadgets - exploding chewing gum, a missile- launching bike, an iPod that listens through walls - but it is always his courage and ingenuity that save the day. And does anyone thank him? You bet they don't. "He's saved the world five times in a few months and all he's got for it is a bad school report," jokes Horowitz. Alex's new adventure, Ark Angel, which is out this week, is characterised, as its predecessors have been, by a vigorous plot, great action sequences, a fantastic storyline - and firm roots in the everyday. Horowitz is a meticulous researcher, using about three months out of the seven it takes him to produce a novel, to do the groundwork. And he has a gift for picking up items in the news and turning them into the fibre of his plots. Previous books have used video games, nanotechnology and the decline of the Soviet empire. Ark Angel explores new developments in space technology, and the megalomaniac baddie is a Russian billionaire called Nikolei Drevin, who owns an expensively purchased football club. He is carefully and wittily distinguished from any other Russian billionaires you might be able to think of by the fact that his team, Stratford East, plays Roman Abramovich's Chelsea in a match at Stamford Bridge. Horowitz laughs when I ask whether this was for legal reasons. "There are several Russian millionaires around, so one has to be careful," he says. "But I always think that where the Bond films went wrong in recent years was their inability to find credible villains. The Russian oligarchs, Abramovich excepted, are a very strange bunch of people - the fact that they have made so much money and some of it in ways that are questionable. All the villains in the books are inspired by people in the news." That mention of Bond is significant, since Charlie Higson's just-published Silverfin is, in many people's eyes, an attempt to ride on the back of the popularity of the Rider books, by recounting the exploits of a teenage James Bond. Horowitz, who was originally approached by the Fleming estate as a possible author, has read it and is unworried. "Children's writers are not in competition with each other, because we all want children to read 10 books, not one. And, in any case, his book is not really a spy thriller at all - it is more in the tradition of Enid Blyton or John Buchan, curiously, than of Ian Fleming." What does worry him, however, is a sudden rash of thrillers for children, some average, some abysmal. "A writer like myself doesn't gain anything by bad children's books coming out," he says. Horowitz is currently worried that he might become over-exposed himself, thanks partly to his phenomenal work rate. There's an Alex Rider film on the horizon, and the first of a new series of fantasy books with the collective title The Power of Five, due in September. Also in the pipeline is a second novel for adults - "a murder mystery about murder mysteries", plus new episodes of Foyle's War and another "lighter" murder mystery in development with his TV producer wife, Jill Green. That workload indicates a more driven and intense character than is immediately obvious in the man sitting in front of me. Although the vehicles are light - children's books and popular television - the themes are often dark and troubling. I wonder whether this springs from Horowitz's background, which has a mystery at its heart as extraordinary as anything he has dreamt up as fiction. He grew up in north London, fat, unhappy and starved of affection - but surrounded by great wealth. In the past, he has variously described his father as a millionaire businessman and a fixer in the Labour government of the 1960s. But pushed on the point, he admits he doesn't know exactly what he did. "All I know is that I was 18 years old and had a motorbike and I rode across London carrying bearer bonds worth a quarter of a million pounds that my father wanted me to pay to someone in an office. To this day I have no idea who the people were who received this money or how my father got the money in the first place or why I was carrying it. "He was a solicitor by and large, but inhabited a world as mysterious as the ones I create, of codes and strange meetings and money on motorbikes. And when he died, when I was 22, he left behind books filled with codenames and notes and strange things." The notes were clues to where his father had secreted a fortune, but his family never found it. Instead, after his death, his widow was suddenly bombarded with requests for huge amounts of money which she did not have. "My father was not a dishonest man," he says. "I don't think he was a crook. But though it's a sad thing to say, he betrayed my mother. There is a mystery there." His own family life could not be more different. Fifty this month, he clearly adores his wife and his two teenage sons, talking about them with animation and love. Perhaps it is thanks to the stability and happiness they offer that Horowitz seems unruffled both by the fame he has so unexpectedly found - and the possibility of losing it. "Someone's going to wake up some day and say there's a bit too much of this guy's stuff around," he predicts. And what will happen then? "Oh, I quite look forward to starting again. What I would love to do next is write another book under another name, to reinvent myself as a 25-year-old. No one will know. That will be a real adventure." |
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