It’s 10am in Crete, where Anthony Horowitz is enjoying his version of holidays. The extraordinarily prolific English author has already been up long enough to draft the first chapter of his fifth book featuring private eye Daniel Hawthorne. A novelist, screenwriter and producer, Horowitz writes adult and young-adult books as well as TV series and movies, typically juggling a variety of projects and routinely working every day.
“I’m not good at turning off,” he explains. “Here, I get a tan and swim and see friends, but I’m also working six or seven hours a day, which is less than I work in England.” While a recent bout of COVID slowed him down for a couple of weeks, his customary energy has returned and is now palpable from the other side of the world.
His latest TV production is the playful six-part mystery, Magpie Murders (Britbox), which he adapted from his novel, although he doesn’t always take on the TV version of his own books. When his popular teen spy hero, Alex Rider, moved to the screen, Horowitz and his wife, producer Jill Green, commissioned Guy Burt (The Bletchley Circle) to choreograph the transition, with Horowitz noting appreciatively that “Guy’s brought originality and a new vision to Alex Rider”.
Magpie Murders is the first book to feature literary editor Susan Ryeland and Horowitz and Green agreed that he needed to do the adaptation himself. “It’s a long and complicated book, and it’s like a nesting series of Russian dolls,” he says. “We didn’t think that there was anybody else who would be able to do the job. But it was an enormous amount of work to shape it and to make it intelligible to an audience, to have them mystified and puzzled, but not lost or confused. It took me almost two years to write the scripts.”
Part of the challenge was the book’s structure. One story strand has Susan (Lesley Manville) searching for the missing final chapter of the new novel by best-selling crime-fiction author Alan Conway (Conleth Hill). A second, parallel strand features Conway’s tale of 1950s detective hero, Atticus Pund (Tim McMullan), investigating a murder in the village of Saxby-on-Avon. Gradually, the stories intertwine, with Pund becoming like an imaginary friend and mentor to Susan, and Horowitz says he had to work hard on getting the right balance between the two tales.
As well, he observes, “TV adaptation demands an awful lot of luck. It’s like trusting a coin toss and every time you win that’s another decision that’s gone right and makes it better. I cannot remember another show where every single toss of the coin was in my favour. From the casting, to having Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty) as our director, to the weather, to managing to get through COVID. It was a very happy shoot.”
Among the pleasures for Horowitz was seeing his first female protagonist on screen. Previously he’d created, or helped to develop, male heroes. He worked on the first season of Midsomer Murders, with its dogged DCI Tom Barnaby (John Nettles), and then created DCS Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen) in the Second World War drama, Foyle’s War. He’s also written two Sherlock Holmes novels, two James Bond books and adapted nine Agatha Christie novels for TV’s Poirot series. As well, he’s initiated a number of dramas featuring male lawyers and crime fighters (Crime Traveller, Collision, Injustice, New Blood).
“I adored writing Susan,” he says. “I’m surrounded by strong, clever women and it’s lovely to see a woman of a certain age as the central character. And she’s such a positive, fulfilled, serious woman, full of vitality.”
A memorable impression of Susan as a woman comfortable with herself and her life comes in the first episode when the editor, enacting a clearly cherished ritual, settles down to read Conway’s just-delivered manuscript. She puts on some music (Ann Peebles’ I Take What I Want), mixes a generous gin and tonic, has a shower, dons a robe and slippers, refreshes the drink, grabs some crisps and sinks into a copious and covetable armchair.
When she heads off in search of the missing chapter, she zips around Sussex in a red convertible, Horowitz noting that English villages are ideal locations for crime stories. That view informed his valuable early contribution to Midsomer Murders. “It was called ‘Barnaby’ when it came to me,” he recalls. “All detective shows were named after the detective. I remember saying to the producers, ‘This show is not about the detective. It’s about the place where the murders happen. Call it Midsomer Murders,’ and they did and the rest is history. I did only seven episodes and I had a wonderful time, but I’d killed enough people by then and I was thinking about Foyle’s War, so I moved on.”
The idea for Foyle’s War came from him wondering “if I couldn’t use the form to give added value, so that it wouldn’t just be ‘the butler did it’, but there would be something else in the journey”. He recalls, “I did Foyle’s War with Jill for 16 years and it was about murders, but what mattered more were the stories about life in Britain on the home front.”
He credits the durability of Midsomer Murders to a number of things. “It was pitched to me as ‘Agatha Christie on acid’, and that’s a wonderful description. I think it’s the combination of those very traditional villages where the sun is always shining, the slightly peculiar sort of murders and the sordid backstories. The idea that behind every net curtain there’s a terrible secret lurking is irresistible. And the standard has been kept very high, the writing and the production values.”
Horowitz and Green found a comparable setting for Magpie Murders: “Saxby-on-Avon is classic Midsomer territory. We shot it in a beautiful village, Kersey, in Suffolk, which has that perfect quality, not chocolate-box but poisoned chocolate-box.”
While enamoured with the possibilities of dark doings in pretty English villages, Horowitz also says that, after spending a seminal year in northern Australia long ago, he had been thinking about setting a story there. “I’d like to write a murder mystery set on a cattle station. I worked on one near Mt Isa in my gap year and it was the happiest year of my life. I still have memories of ringing in the horses at 5am, then steak for breakfast at 6.30am, and going out 40 miles a day on horseback to do the fencing. I loved it.”
Before that, though, there are projects requiring more immediate attention, including the scripts based on the second Susan Ryeland novel, Moonflower Murders, which Horowitz hopes to start adapting for a TV series by the end of the year. He’s also contemplating a third Ryeland novel and another adventure for Alex Rider. Then there’s a six-part series, set in a Mexican rainforest, to be produced by his wife.
His rule is to work on only one thing each day, so, for this day, he’ll be plunging back into the world of Daniel Hawthorne. Even with the sun shining and sea beckoning, it’s back to the desk.
