Anthony Horowitz has had a busy 2020. The new Alex Rider novel, Nightshade , where the teenage spy battles a secret cult of young assassins, was out. Also the excellent BBC production, Alex Rider , starring Otto Farrant, is out and streaming on Sony LIV. Moonflower Murders (Penguin Random House ₹699), the sequel to Magpie Murders (2016) featuring Susan Ryeland is also out. While admitting the year was bad for him personally and world in general thanks to COVID-19 and Sean Connery’s passing among other things, the 65-year-old author looks at the pandemic as a time to take stock and evaluate. Speaking on phone from London, Horowitz spoke of detective fiction, the decision to continue writing Alex Rider books and the reason to put himself into the Daniel Hawthorne novels. Excerpts.
Did you always conceive of the Susan Ryeland novels as a series?
Magpie Murders is probably the most successful novel I had written. I planned to write only one. When we sold the television rights, the producer immediately wanted to know if there would be a sequel. Also my publisher said to me, ‘we love Susan Ryeland, Magpie Murders has been a big success, why don’t you write another one? So I began to think whether I can play the same trick twice. I thought for about six months and then had an idea. I realized I could do it again in a way that could completely trick an audience. That was how Moonflower Murders began.
How similar or different are Atticus Pünd and Hercule Poirot?
Well Atticus does have some similarities to Poirot in the sense that they are both outsiders. The detective is always an outsider. In a whodunit, you have a community, and then there is a murder and into that community comes the outsider, the detective. He is in the community only till the crime is solved. Atticus has some similarities to Poirot, but he also is different. The most important one is Atticus is a darker character. He has been a victim of the Nazis. He has seen evil in its purest form, which colours everything that he does. He is Jewish and Greek, lived in Germany, been in a labour camp, and his whole family is dead.
Could you comment on the structure of Moonflower Murders , which like Magpie Murders uses the book-within-a-book format?
These books are very complex to write. It involves a lot of thinking, notes and time to make it easy to read. They are a little bit like a Swiss watch. Inside the watch is complex mechanism with cogs, wheels, diamonds and batteries. When, however, you look at it to tell the time, it takes one second. That is what I am trying to do with the books. What you have in Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders is a book inside a book. In both the books you have novelist Alan Conway, hiding the solution to a modern mystery in his novel set in the 1950s. Susan, Conway’s editor, has to find the solution using clues from Conway’s novel. The reader gets two books for the price of one. In Moonflower Murders you can enjoy Atticus Pünd Takes the Case , the novel inside the novel, on its own. What is fun is to work out how it connects with the modern murder mystery.
Alex Rider - Season 1 - Episode 108
Why did you choose to set the Atticus novels in the 1950s?
Because of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen and so many wonderful writers of the Golden Age. The book within the book is written as homage to their work. The world of the 40s and 50s detective novel was more elegant, slower and cerebral. There were no mobile phones or computers. You couldn’t get instant information. You had to think about things and work them out for yourself. There was not so much forensic science, with blood splatter and pathology reports.
What do you think constitutes the golden age of detective fiction?
The golden age of detective fiction begins with my hero, Sherlock Holmes. It begins with a man, who is a thinker who is alone apart from his sidekick, who sits in his armchair and solves the crime by the power of thought.
Why do we have this continued fascination for crime fiction?
Crime fiction is not about crime. It is about character. If somebody murders somebody, you are immediately interested. It is a quick way to start asking questions. Why did this man kill this woman? What was she afraid of? What did she know? Also the world of crime fiction is a world of secrets and it offers a way to tear down the net curtains and gaze into people's lives. This is a very human quality. We are interested in other people. No other genre allows you to ask these questions more urgently than crime fiction.
Should crime fiction be dismissed as genre fiction?
This is Alan Conway’s quandary—he is a successful crime writer, but sees it as somehow second rate because it is crime fiction, not Dostoevsky or Charles Dickens. There is however, some very great crime fiction. Conan Doyle’s works are masterpieces. Agatha Christie’s writing is occasionally a little bit workman-like but her ideas are fantastic. And if you sell a million copies around the world, you must be doing something right. I do not accept that crime fiction is a poor cousin of other genres. It is a genre like romance or horror or science fiction, which can be done well or badly. I refuse to accept that just because a book is about a murder, it is somehow second rate. If you accept that, where do you put Crime and Punishment ?
How does one account for the timelessness and popularity of Agatha Christie?
Her stories have a classical quality about them. They look back on a world that is more refined, and more easily understood than the world we live in, a world where everybody knew their place. In this world of 24 hour news and fake news, where no one knows what truth is, a crime novel provides answers. At the end of any crime novel everything about everyone is known, every i is dotted, every T is crossed. And with that comes a huge sense of comfort.
Why did you choose to insert yourself in the Daniel Hawthorne novels?
In my books, I try to do things that nobody has done before. When I came to write the Daniel Hawthorne novels, The Word is Murder , The Sentence is Death and a third novel that is coming out in 2021, I had an idea to turn things on its head. I will make myself, Anthony Horowitz, the narrator. I did this not as some kind of ego trip but because it amused me. Instead of being the writer, who knows everything, the beginning, the middle and the end, all the suspects, the clues and everything, I will become the one person in the book who knows nothing. I will be the sidekick, the poor guy who hopes the detective solves the crime because otherwise he doesn’t have a book! These are whodunits turned on their heads. These books are not about me. I don’t talk about my life, my family or career. I am just the narrator—Dr Watson or Captain Hastings, someone who is trying to make sense of what the detective is doing.
You are adapting the Magpie Murders for television— will Kenneth Branagh be playing Atticus as mentioned in the book?
No that is just a meta joke, because he plays Poirot!
What are the pros and cons writing for television?
Writing for television is my joy, pleasure and happiness. There aren’t many cons. Obviously you have to work out the budget. You have to be prepared to get lots of notes from the director, the actors, the producer, the executive producers, husbands and wives, from everybody — that could be a con. I love working in that field. I love collaborating as I spend a lot of time by myself. I wrote Foyle’s War 16 years ago. I produced the show with my wife, Jill Green, and it was a pleasure working with her. Also television reaches a wider audience and that is great too. I'm very proud of the work I did on Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders and Agatha Christie’s Poirot .
Why did you choose to continue the Alex Rider series?
The one fear I have is writing a book that is not as good as the one before it. I worried that if I went on writing Alex Rider novels, they would become boring. So I decided to stop writing them. My publishers were unhappy, and also a lot of teachers and librarians wrote to me saying children wanted to read more of Alex.
I also realized Alex was also quite sad at the end of Scorpia Rising . I thought I should return to Alex’s world and make him happy again. I am glad I did, because I still have lots of ideas and the two Alex Rider books I have written since — Never Say Die and Nightshade are quite good.
What do you think of the television show?
I am very lucky that I had a brilliant adapter in Guy Burt. My wife and her company produced it. We were very lucky with the casting. Otto Farrant is absolutely 100% perfect as Alex so is Brenock O'Connor as Alex’s friend, Tom; in fact all the cast was good. We had a wonderful director; it was one of those lucky things where everything went right.
You were commissioned to do continuation novels for Holmes and James Bond by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate and the Ian Fleming estate. Is there any follow up to The House of Silk and Moriarty (Holmes) and Trigger Mortis and Forever and A Day (Bond)?
I have just finished a three-part 10,000-word Sherlock Holmes novella for the newspapers for Christmas. It is a fun story. It is called The Adventure of Seven Christmas Cards. As for Bond I cannot say anything but watch this space!
