He is best known as the author of the Alex Rider series, a young adult book series about a 14-year-old English spy. But Anthony Horowitz is a man who wears many a writing cap — from television series like Midsommer Murders to films like The Gathering, and other books like the Conan Doyle Estate-approved new Sherlock Holmes books, The House of Silk and Moriarty. t2 caught up with the 62-year-old author at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival 2018 in January and dug deep into the life of Alex Rider and a writer who still writes longhand.

Alex Rider is a lot of young boys’ and even some girls’ dreams come true…

You’d be surprised actually with the readership of Alex Rider. It can be split, I would say, almost 50-50 among boys and girls. I know he’s always thought of as being a hero for boys, you know getting boys to read, but I would say from the audiences that I meet and the letters that I get, he has a fairly strong girl following too.

But when it started it was fun, exciting adventure and became pretty dark, especially with Scorpia Rising. Was that how you saw the series developing?

That is a very interesting question. I don’t understand why it is that, well actually I think I do, why is it that these series all go dark. Look at Harry Potter, by the end it becomes very, very dark. I think the answer for me is, that as Alex went through all of his adventures, because I always thought of him as a real human being and not just a kid having adventures, these terrible things that kept happening had to have an effect. I mean it sort of got darker because, you know in book three he sees a man kill himself. In other books he is beaten up and people do horrible things. So inevitably he got darker. And I think I went with that. But the truth is that I was annoyed with myself by the time I got to the end of Scorpia Rising because I think it is the responsibility of  the writer for young people is to be optimistic and be forward looking and that’s the reason I came back to Alex Rider and wrote Never Say Die, because I wanted to make things happy again.

And you brought Jack back as well…

Well, it had always crossed my mind when I killed her in the earlier book that maybe she hadn’t died, and I did even think at the time of putting a clue that she was still alive. At the time I really was thinking I was going to stop, and so there was no point and I just left it as it was. It wasn’t difficult to write and make her alive again, I mean after all Doyle did it with Sherlock Holmes and Fleming did it with Bond, so I did it with Jack. And I am glad I did.

You know children shouldn’t have to face that sort of trauma. They have enough trauma in life. 

And Alex has been through a lot of trauma any way, losing his parents in childhood and then his uncle.

That’s right. In a way I think with Scorpia Rising I made a mistake, it was too dark. But then you see when I wrote it, I always knew what the ending was going to be. I always knew that this was a book where he would confront himself. In a funny way when Alex is killing the clone of himself, he is killing himself!
 
What made you decide to write a book on Yassen Gregorovich? 

I love Russian Roulette and I am very pleased that I did write that book. He was a good character. I was annoyed with myself again for killing him in Eagle Strike although again it was inevitable. I knew it would happen. It occurred to me that Yassen and Alex were very similar.

I think the message of the book… no, I don’t like messages, I hate messages… but, the thought (pauses) behind the book is this — when you are 14, you have all these choices to make, including whether you are going to be good or bad. Are people born bad? Are people inevitably going to be evil? Or is it a choice they make? And that is the sort of question I am asking in that book. You know Yassen in Stormbreaker and the other two books just comes across as this absolutely cold-blooded assassin, but he was a kid once and he had choices and I wanted to explore that. 

I do think as a society now we are very quick to judge people. People are heroes one minute and villains the next. And when they are villains they are out and out villains. There is nothing good to say about them. And if you are trying to defend them in anyway people will shout at you. I think it is a mistake. I think you’ve got to understand that bad people have humanity too. 

You are saying bad guys don’t necessarily always need to be bad… 

I was asking a question, is a bad person born bad? That’s all. And Yassen Gregorovich who was very bad person — he kills people and is paid to do it — was born as a child who was a good child and that’s what I am exploring.

But what made you write young adult books?

I don’t know. I have no idea. It was wet, it was raining, I was bored, I wrote a children’s book. I was 22 years old and that’s just where it began. Maybe my own childhood, unsatisfactory in some ways, you know I wasn’t a smart child, I wasn’t a good-looking child, I wasn’t a happy child, and maybe it was an attempt to try and claw something back.

You have said that Alex Rider was inspired by James Bond and then you went on to write a Bond story (Trigger Mortis)! Did you always want to write a James Bond novel?

Yes, it is an interesting thing that I have come full circle to write a James Bond novel. I did not want to write a James Bond novel ever, no. When Sebastian Faulks was invited to write Devil May Care, which I thought was very good incidentally, I did say why not me? Why haven’t you asked me? And that was where it began.

You’ve also written two Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty. Were you nervous about revisiting such classic characters? 

When I was asked to write Sherlock Holmes, the first thing I did was to write a chapter. Before I agreed to write the book, I wrote the first chapter and I gave it to the family and the publishers and the agent and I said, ‘Look, read this, and if you think it is good enough, then I’ll write the book’. So they all read it and said, ya it’s great, so I signed the contract and wrote it. 

But you asked if I was nervous. Well, I didn’t want to let people down. There are millions of people who admire Arthur Conan Doyle and love Sherlock Holmes. And I am not as good a writer as Conan Doyle, and I had to really raise my game, and I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to do that. But it worked out okay (smiles). 

And you kept the tone very similar to Conan Doyle, and a lot of people, fans like me, got a lot from it with the book going back to old cases…

Thank you! I wrote the book principally for fans like you. When I finished the book, the most important thing to me was that people who love Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t read this book and be angry.

But in Moriarty you didn’t even have the detective.

Moriarty was very different. Having written The House of Silk, which was very successful, I was asked to do another book, and I didn’t think I could do another book, because I wouldn’t have as much pleasure. I’d done all the tricks I knew to make Sherlock Holmes like Doyle. So then I had the idea, little bit like Yassen Gregorovich, let’s see if I can go to the other side of the coin and everybody knows Sherlock Holmes, let’s go to Moriarty. It’s not a Sherlock Holmes book in any way at all. And though Holmes and Watson don’t appear in the book, lots of characters from the books do. In some ways I enjoyed writing that book even more than The House of Silk because it was more tricksy and maybe in a way more my book. 

You have written horror, thriller, espionage, detective… which do you enjoy writing more?

I love all of them. You have to understand I love writing. I love writing more than you can begin to imagine. I love the feel of paper. I love the scratch of nib on paper. I love the ink. I love thinking of plots. I love drawing characters. I love being published. I love being interviewed by you. I love doing talks. I love being a writer. So if you ask me which do I enjoy most, there is no answer.

Do you still write with pen and paper? Do you write longhand?

Yes. I write with this (takes out a silver fountain pen from the inside pocket of his jacket and shows it). This is one of them. I have a fountain pen for every book. This is what I am using at the moment. This is my favourite. I love fountain pens. George Orwell would have used a fountain pen. Did Charles Dickens use a feather quill or pen? I wonder if he didn’t use a pen. Pens were around in the 19th century, weren’t they? It is an interesting question. I will find out. 

Is it difficult to shift mental gears to jump from genre to genre?

I need to change gear if I need to write a film or television as opposed to books. But actually, no. Whether I am writing a children’s book or a horror story or a short story or Alex Rider, it’s exactly the same. I think I can describe it in one word as immersion. I immerse myself in whatever I am writing. I forget everything that’s around me and everything else that’s happening and just enjoy what I am doing.

What can we expect from Alex Rider in the future? 

Well, there is a collection of short stories coming out this year. Some of which are quite long, and brand-new written for this collection, and really good fun. Then there is going to be Nightshade, which is the next Alex Rider novel and which I have in my head. It is quite a serious book. It is actually about something terribly serious, but I think it is going to be a really fun book to write and Alex is going to be very much in control and he is going to have lots of humour, gadgets.

What kind of a man do you think he would grow up to be?

You know I did always want to write a book about Alex Rider in his 20s, but no publishers are interested, and perhaps they are wise. Because I think Alex would be quite uncomfortable as a man, I think he would find it quite difficult to grow up and become an adult because he’s been forced to be an adult as a child. 

Which of your characters would you choose as your partner in crime?

Well, I would much rather be asked which character would you have investigate if I was murdered! And the answer is Nick Diamond (from the Diamond Brothers series) because he wouldn’t give a damn about it.

Which is your favourite Anthony Horowitz book? Tell t2@abp.in