This interview was originally published through .
Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.
Holly Newson: I'm Holly Newson, welcome to Audible Sessions, a place where we delve into the books, careers and lives of authors and creators. Anthony Horowitz is known to lots of us for his Alex Rider books. Then, of course, there's the Sherlock books and the James Bond books, and now there's his own murder mysteries. The latest in his Hawthorne and Horowitz series is called . Anthony told me how he decides if something is a good idea, what doors being an author has opened for him, and listen to the end for one of Anthony's secrets to life. But first, he introduces us to Close to Death.
Anthony Horowitz: Well, it's the fifth book in the series, and once again it tells the adventures of Daniel Hawthorne, a rather difficult and unpleasant detective in many ways, although one I'm coming to like a lot, and this time he is investigating a murder in a private close in Richmond, on the edge of London. And normally I am the sidekick, but in this book I'm not. I am writing the story of a cold case that he has already solved, although, irritatingly, he doesn't give me the solution.
HN: Was it weird to start writing this one in third person when the series is usually all in first person?
AH: Well, I think because this is number five, I wanted to vary it a little bit. I'm always quite nervous about formula, about books being too much the same. I'm planning 12 of these books and I couldn't just do it that I'm always following five steps behind Hawthorne, always giving away clues, always ending up in hospital or stabbed or in some sort of harm's way. And so I just wanted to vary things a little bit, so I had this idea that he'd have a different assistant, an assistant who is much smarter and more able than I am, which makes me rather dislike him. I have to say, I'm a little bit jealous of him. His name is James, or is it John Dudley, and I am, this time, really just the author arguing with Hawthorne about the contents of the book. So, it's the same but different.
HN: How many scars and bruises and general wounds do you have so far as Anthony in the book series? [laughs]
AH: I am still in therapy, is the short answer to that question. It has not been an easy experience, working with Hawthorne.
HN: You say there are 12 novels, do you have them all planned out or do you leave them to a bit of surprise?
AH: I have the next three in my head, I think, or at least, you know, I start just with motives – why does somebody want to kill somebody else? That's always the beginning of a book, and I did come up with that for the next book. And then also you start thinking about what's the landscape of the book? Where's it going to be set? Like, a private close or an island with a festival, which is one of the earlier books. I do have some ideas about locations and sort of settings for the books, but I haven't got more than that, but that's enough to get me started.
HN: This one is on a private close, there is a neighbourly dispute. I wondered what the biggest argument or dispute with neighbours you've been a part of or maybe witnessed?
AH: Oh, goodness, that's a very difficult question to answer because I don't want to start a war with my current neighbours. I think that once we did do a redecoration of our house and it very nearly led to murder, the murder in question being mine, because my neighbours got more and more upset with the number of vans and painters and decorators and builders and plumbers and electricians who just never stopped coming. It was meant to last five weeks and I think it lasted five years. No, not quite as bad as that, but it was terrible and it was all my fault. So, it's lucky, in a way, that I'm still alive to be talking to you today because by the end of this process, daggers really were drawn.
HN: Was the decoration worth it?
AH: Oh, it had to be done, the house was derelict.
HN: Fair enough. So, you've put together a cast of very different but from maybe a similar background, we think, most of them, in terms of the people who live in this close. How did you come up with your different characters for this? Because there are quite a few.
AH: Well, it's a very good question, because that's what took me longer than almost anything else, because what I wanted was a sort of a realistic London close, so it couldn't just be people by sort of Agatha Christie stereotypes, you know, the vicar, the actress, the writer and the lord of the manor, et cetera. It had to be people that you recognised, but at the same time they had to be quite fun and sort of sparky. So, it was a mixture of sort of the same but different. For example, one of the characters is a dentist, but he's a celebrity dentist with a lot of sort of famous clients. And then there's a jewelry designer but she only designs jewelry in the shape of poisonous animals, which gives her a sort of a slightly strange twist.
One of my favourite characters is a man called Adam Strauss, who is a chess grandmaster, not a character you often find in a book, and I like the fact that he, some years ago, had a quiz on television, a sort of chess-based game show called It's Your Move. Just knowing that title knows I never wanted to see it somehow. And then there's a Black barrister, a very good friend of mine happens to be a Black barrister and had such an interesting story to tell about the difficulties of progressing his career through this century and the end of the last one. And that's sort of the mix of it, a doctor – I'm fascinated by what's happening in the National Health Service at the moment, so that gave me an opportunity to write about that a little bit. You know, with your characters, whenever you invent a character in a book, you're also inventing a world, and the more interesting the world, the more fun I get writing it.
HN: Definitely. And then once you've got those cast of characters, how do you name them?
AH: Oh, that's interesting. Well, I often use names of friends and people who come and get books signed. If it's an interesting name, I often pop it into a box and I'll pull it out later. Sometimes it's just people who I've heard of in the newspapers or such and I borrow maybe the surname of one and the Christian name of another. It's, again, something that quite fascinates me, how names are so important to characters. I'm a great lover of Charles Dickens, and Dickens knew this, that if you are being taught by a character called Gradgrind, you sort of somehow knew that you weren't in for a good time. Ebeneezer Scrooge, you know, that's not someone you really want to meet on a bright summer's day.
So, names do somehow inform the character before you meet them. It's the first thing you know about them and it's what you will sort of react against straightaway. So, I take a lot of time making sure that the names work for me, and often I'll change the name three or four times in the course of a book if I feel it isn't quite informing the character.
HN: Does that make it quite hard to keep track, if you change someone's name?
AH: Well, with these things on computers now, you just press one button and it changes throughout the whole thing. It's not as difficult as it used to be, but I do occasionally get my editor saying, "Anthony, this character was James on page 17 and he's Peter on page 28, what's going on?" But the character name is part of their clothing and they change clothes, they change names.
HN: Yeah, that makes sense. When you're writing something like this, who is presumably going to be a murderer, do you then have to keep track and make sure that you haven't put a friend's name down as the murderer?
AH: Well, the murderer – the person who is murdered. God, I was about to give away the solution to the book. Thank goodness I didn't. The person who is murdered in Close to Death is called Giles Kenworthy and he began life as Charles Kenworthy and then I realised that Charles had been murdered in another book, so I had to change that first name sort of halfway through. And something about that name, Giles Kenworthy, he's a hedge fund manager, an old Etonian, he's a nightmare neighbour, which is really what this whole book is about. And coming up with that name, somehow, you know, it just seemed right when I got it. It's not too silly a name, it's not something that sort of screams out at you that this is somebody who is obnoxious, and yet somehow, and apologies to anybody called Kenworthy who is listening to this book and in particular anyone called Giles Kenworthy, somehow you feel he sort of deserves to get it before you even know too much about him.
HN: So, this is a Detective Hawthorne book. How would you describe Detective Daniel Hawthorne? What are the hallmarks of his character?
AH: How I would describe him is very carefully because he is extremely difficult to work with, reads everything I write and gets very upset if I say anything wrong. But between you and me, Hawthorne is a difficult man, he is somebody who obviously has had a serious issue in his childhood, which has coloured his entire life. He is very solitary. He's strange; things don't actually sort of quite add up about him. He lives in a very handsome apartment in London, I mean a very elegant and expensive apartment, but it's empty, it has no furniture in it. And he has his strange hobby of making model toys, model airplanes, model tanks, model this, model that. He doesn't seem to have very many friends. He's married, but he never sees his wife. It’s not quite a divorce because they haven't actually separated, but they live apart. There is a son who is going to turn up in one of the later books, who I suspect is going to be very strange too.
I suppose the main characteristic of [Hawthorne] is that he really doesn't very much trust me. He's always arguing with me and he's always telling me I can't write the books and such. But he's also, and this of course is the most important thing, is he's a brilliant detective. He always spots the clues and he gets it right.
HN: When you came up with the idea of putting yourself in the novel, why did you decide that you were going to be the sidekick?
AH: Well, when my publisher first asked me to do a long-running series of murder mysteries, my first thought was, "How can I do something that's different? Something that hasn't been done before." It's not just a case of making the detective sort of particular, like sort of a robot or a vampire or a ghost – incidentally, all those exist in books, so they actually have been done. But it was also a case of looking at the whole nature of whodunits and how they work. I became fascinated by the relationship between the author, who is the cleverest person and who knows everything and who knows who the murderer is even before the murder is committed, because they are the author – so the Conan Doyle or the Agatha Christie – and then the detective, who is sort of the mouthpiece, if you like, for the author, who solves everything, gets everything right.
And then this curious character, the sidekick, Watson in Sherlock Holmes or Hastings in Poirot, who, though not stupid, Watson, it's always a mistake to think of Dr. Watson as being a stupid man, but he is a little bit, well, he never gets it right. I mean, he never actually solves anything or, for example, Hastings, who is pretty stupid, in the Agatha Christie novels. This character, who is very useful to the writer because he is this person who knows the detective best and who asks the questions that the reader wants to know. And so I had this thought to do something completely different. Why don't I take the author and make the author the sidekick, from the cleverest person to the most stupid person, from the one who knows everything to the one who knows nothing. And that meant putting myself inside the book, but it then turned the whodunit on its head, if you like, everything was different and it allowed me to write a little bit about the nature of writing, the nature of whodunits, the nature of the world of murder mystery.
I remember that when I pitched this idea to my publisher, she got quite nervous about it. "Anthony, you're not going to be writing about how clever you are, how many books you've sold, or what a lovely life you have." And I said to her, "Look, don't worry, this is not about me, I'm just the narrator." I mean, I'm the narrator anyway because I'm the author, but now I'm the narrator inside the book. And as the books have developed and as we've got to number five, my editor likes the relationship more and more and now she keeps saying, "Anthony, can't we have a little bit more about you?" But to anybody reading the book, I will say that everything I do say about myself in the books, about my life that is, is true. So, my wife, Jill, turns up occasionally in the books and is always cruel to me, that is absolutely true to life, for example. And my world, mainly the world of writing and publishing and agents – Hilda Starke, the world's worst agent and all that sort of thing – they all come out of my life.
HN: But Hilda presumably is not a named person in your life?
AH: No, it's what we might call an amalgam.
HN: Mm-hmm [laughs]. And has it got easier to write yourself into it as you go? Or has it become somehow more complicated to tie up all these ends?
AH: The great joy of a series, both reading it and writing it, is that the more of it there is, the more pleasurable it becomes. You get to know more about the characters, you spend more time with them, you have expectations which will either be fulfilled or you'll be surprised by something. There is a sort of a growing process. I mean, one of the big things about these books is trying to find out what it is that has made Hawthorne such a difficult human being. What happened in this village called Reeth in Yorkshire? And as the books progress, I'm finding out more and more about him. In Close to Death we meet an old sidekick of his, John Dudley, we meet Fenchurch International, which is a very strange company and organisation for which it now turns out he works, and gradually we're sort of filling in the gaps in his life. I think there's a sort of a real pleasure in that, sort of a growing knowledge of this world of Hawthorne. And so it becomes more than just who did it and who are the latest suspects, it becomes more about the characters that are closest to us and the ones we want to know more about.
HN: Are those the sort of things, the old sidekick that we want to learn more about and the Fenchurch International, are they the sort of things that you know when in the series you're going to drop?
AH: I sort of have a good idea. I mean, I had the idea for Close to Death quite a while ago, and I knew that there would have to be another assistant. I was thinking about him three or four years ago, and gradually he came to shape. I always knew, from the very start, that Hawthorne worked for a slightly sinister organisation, I only named it and sort of located it and gave it a boss and offices in this book, and I know that they will recur. I think I've already mentioned that Hawthorne has a wife, and I know that there'll be one book in which she is the main character rather than Hawthorne. I have a book, one of the three that are already planned, in which he disappears and the wife and myself have to find him and solve the case he was working on before something horrible happens to him, which gives me a smile. And also, once again, there is a formula a little bit. I'm so nervous of formula, I always try to do things differently. So, yes, I know about 80 percent of what happened to Hawthorne at the beginning and what made him the man he is. But part of the fun of it is not to have it all written down and certain, but to discover it as I go.
HN: Definitely. And this one is set in a close in Richmond. Why Richmond?
AH: Well, I moved to Richmond last year. I was living in the centre of town, only five minutes away from where you and I are sitting now, in fact, in Farringdon, but we moved to be close to the river. I walk my dogs around Richmond all the time and came upon a close that absolutely matched what I was imagining and gave me sort of a geographical physicality, if you like. I could walk into the close and say, "Yes, he'll live there, the two old ladies will live over there, and the dentist is going to be in that house." I just turned this close, which is, as I say, it's 10 minutes from my new house, into Riverview Close in the book. I was actually helped by the writer Michael Frayn, who is the noted author and playwright who lives not far away from me, who first pointed me in the right direction, so he gets an acknowledgement in the back.
HN: So, did he suggest that that close was—
AH: I had found one close but the houses in it were just a little bit too luxurious, too extravagant, too extraordinary. I mean, it was an amazing close, it is open once a year and you can go in and see it, the houses are architecturally insane. But the trouble with that is, it goes back to your earlier question about who lives in this close, is that only a certain sort of person could live in these very expensive houses, whereas Riverview Close, you can get a little bit more of a tapestry of modern life.
HN: Yeah, completely. Book-you says in this book that writing children's books opens doors, so I wondered what doors children's books have opened for you?
AH: Oh, well, writing the Alex Rider books has taken me all over the world. It opened many doors. I've met fascinating people, including the astronaut who spent longer in space than any other human being on or off this planet. I climbed a crane outside the Houses of Parliament and went up something like 200 metres above London and operated the controls and had that sort of fun. I've travelled all over the world to different places.
For my most recent book, no, the one before last, , I got an incredible tour of St. Paul's Cathedral. Talk about opening doors, I had invented a door with a staircase that went up to a secret gallery inside the dome. This is one of those examples where fiction somehow mirrors life without you even knowing it. I was taken into St. Paul's Cathedral, shown the door, taken up a staircase I'd imagined into a secret compartment, which I did know about inside the dome, and went actually up into the very, very top of that cupola with all the views over London. It was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life, and it was all down to dear Alex Rider.
HN: Yeah, and those books, I mean, I remember from my late primary school years, they were hot property. And the success, though, that you've had now, from that first Alex Rider book, I don't think anyone could have known they would've been as big as they were. So, what was it like when they first became massively successful?
AH: Well, you know, it's a funny thing. I mean, I'm hugely grateful to Alex because he launched my career. I had written 10 books which had had limited sales until in, I think it was 2000, 2001, came out, and suddenly my career sort of took off and my name became known and I was selling sensible copies of books. What difference it made to my life was not, curiously, as huge as you would think, because I was still sitting in a room by myself for 10 hours a day, although the room was now a little bit bigger and had some slightly more comfortable furniture.
So, that was sort of how it felt, but at the same time, now that we're 25 years later and Alex Rider is still out there – I mean, came out I think only last year and it's number 14 in the series, the same number of books written by Ian Fleming, incidentally, about the adventures of James Bond, so that might be quite a good time stop, I haven't decided yet. But it sort of makes me feel that's a very nice symmetry. But what I do get now is people like yourself, who are having successful careers, often in the media world and in a similar world to me, who have a molecule of Alex Rider in their blood because they read them, because you read Alex Rider when you were maybe 9, 10, 11, and that's a wonderful feeling.
I am a vocal and sort of rather irritating supporter of books and libraries and I'm always going on about the fact that reading has a value which I think we underestimate. Reading, of course, listening to books, reading books, but encountering books in any way you can, to me is so valuable to just being human, to enjoying life, to being complete. And so I am always going on about that and it is a source of pride to me and pleasure that the Alex Rider books most certainly contributed in getting a generation of young people, not just boys, you know, into books. When my time is finally up, that's what I hope I'll be remembered for, doing just that.
HN: Yeah, definitely, I remember kids in my class picking up books who I'd never seen read before, and everyone wanted one of the series. We had the little bookshelf of them and, I mean, it was pretty much empty most of the time, as soon as one went back on, it came off and someone else read it.
AH: No, it is lovely to hear that, I mean, I do sometimes meet sort of 30-year-olds in television studios and they might be sort of just doing the makeup or behind the camera or directing me or something, and when they meet me for the first time, I just see that little moment when the 8-year-old is standing in front of me and saying, "Wow, this is the guy who wrote Alex Rider," and disappointment inevitably follows.
HN: [Laughs]
AH: But, nonetheless, I mean, it's almost proof of what I'm saying with the value of books, because so many people in the media that I meet have read and have gone into careers that are sort of basically in the humanities. And I think that's sort of a rather wonderful thing.
HN: Yeah, definitely. And so you had that big success and obviously that continues with the Alex Rider series, but what was it like to go into adults' books after you'd seen those children's ones do so well?
AH: Aha, that's a lovely question, and thank you for asking it, because it was a sort of, it's a difficult bridge to cross, in a way, and not many writers who have written 20-odd or even 30 children's books can actually make it into the adult world and succeed with a second career. I came to the decision some years ago that being a children's author had a problem, which was that with every year that passed, the audience was a little further away from me. And I began to think, "Do I really have any right to be writing now for 9, 10, 11-year-olds when I have really no knowledge of what is going on inside their heads, how they see the world and all the rest of it?" Added to which I think that the market for young fiction has changed so radically since those rather wonderful days when it was me and Philip Pullman and Darren Shan and Jacqueline Wilson and Malorie Blackman and so many others who were all coasting on the success of J. K. Rowling, and children's books were so happening, so exciting.
So, I began to think that it was time to consider at least having sort of a secondary career, and I'd always wanted to write adult books, indeed, I did write an adult book quite early on in my career. But making the move, as I have done now, has been, thank heavens, not as difficult as I imagined, mainly because the Sherlock Holmes books did very well for me, the James Bond continuation novels had a built-in audience, and Hawthorne now has found, I think, sort of a group of readers who enjoy looking forward to the next one and reading it, and so I think I have transitioned, if I may use that word, without too much difficulty.
HN: Yeah, is it different in the writing itself?
AH: No, not really. I think that when I was writing children's books, anything went. I've always said that if you're going to be a writer, there are two ways of looking at a book. You can look at it from the outside as a book that has a market, that's going to have a cover, that is an object that sits on a shelf and it will sell so many copies and win so many awards, or not, depending. And you can see it as something distant from yourself. Or you can be inside the book when you are writing the book, you can immerse yourself in it and not think about the book that you are creating but merely the characters you're seeing, the sights around you, the smells, the light, the speed of the action and all that. You are inside the book. Now, that is how I have always been, whether it's writing for children or writing for adult, there is no difference.
Now, it's only in the second part of the writing process, when you come to editing, discussions with your publishers and all the rest of it, that they may say, if it's a children book, "Anthony, are you sure this isn't a little bit too violent?" Or maybe, you know, "It's a little bit too slow at the start, can we rethink it? And perhaps this word, which has got five syllables, you could perhaps think of a second..." I'll normally think about these things anyway by myself in my office after the book is finished and I'm doing the second draft.
With an adult book, there is also an editing process to go through, it's very different, though. In that case it's just a case normally of making sure, particularly in a murder mystery, that everything works, that all the clues are fair and that all the connections have been made and that the reader can, but hopefully won't, guess who did it. So, there are different things to consider, but as I say, in the course of the writing itself, the two processes are pretty much identical.
HN: You mentioned notes and edits there, so how are you with getting notes and edits? I mean, obviously good because you've had a lengthy, full career, but how are you in your head when you get notes and edits?
AH: Well, I get notes all the time, I'm married to a producer who, after all, looks at every television script I do. I can be in the bath and she'll come bursting in with a script note to give me. I can get hot under the collar. I mean, a note can offend me, it can sometimes make me think, "Oh, really?" I mean, you know, "Are you being serious?" But at the end of the day, writing is a collaborative art, I think. Writers forget that sometimes, because we spend so much time, particularly novelists, on our own in the room that we were discussing a few moments ago, you can think that you are the only person producing this book. It is not true, there is a whole army at Penguin Random House, for example, who have supported and helped Close to Death.
I am very fortunate to have a wonderful editor, Selina Walker, who always spots the mistakes I've made and the areas of the book that aren't quite working, the characters that need rethinking. We were talking about Fenchurch International, my American editor gave me a very interesting note on that where, in the first version of it, they had a quite sci-fi, James Bond sort of offices, and he said, "No, no, this is completely wrong for the type of book, rethink it, rechange it." I think it is a mistake for any writer to think that they can manage without their editors, and, indeed, without the designers and the sales reps and the PR, the marketing, all the sort of different people who help to make a book success. We are not alone.
HN: And so you've got all of these books out there, but when you start, everything starts with an idea, how do you decide if it's a good idea?
AH: I have about 20 ideas a day, and I can honestly say that on an average day, all 20 of them will be no good. But ideas just come to me, and I never write them down, but an idea will stay in my head and it won't go away, and that tells me that that idea wants to be written. So, for example, , a book which we've now filmed for the BBC and there are going to be three in the series by the end of this year, written anyway, and another TV series still to come. But it's been very important in my life's work, it's taken a lot of time and I've enjoyed doing it very much. That idea came something like six years before I actually wrote the first one in that series, Magpie Murders. I had the idea and I loved the idea but I didn't think, first of all, that I was a good enough writer to do it, and secondly, I needed to think about it to make sure that it would work and everything. So, six years later, I'm still thinking about Magpie Murders and that's when I know, “Look, for heaven's sake, you've got to write this.”
Now, there's an idea I have in my head which I've had for something like 30 years and it's a huge book, it's not a murder mystery book, it's more like a historical novel, and that one just won't go away. It's extremely difficult to write and I keep putting it off but I know that one day I'm going to have to sit down and do it.
HN: Amazing. I'm really fascinated by the fact that you don't write the ideas that you have down until you're ready to turn it into a book. Do you not worry that there might be something good that you miss? Or because you have so many, it doesn't matter?
AH: I think the test of a good idea is that you remember it. It won't go away, and so writing it down, I suppose I could, but somehow that one idea you have that just – you know, when I have an idea, the moment I commit to writing it as a book, I'm talking about something like two years of my life. I mean, it could be seven months is about the average, but Magpie Murders, for example, was nearer 18 months to write. And then you've got the editing process and all the discussion with the publisher about the cover and the look of the book and everything else. And then you've got the actual launch of the book and the interviews and you're on the road with the book, and that's just the hardcover, because then there's the paperback one as well. If you're lucky, you might end up adapting your book for television. So, it's a big chunk of your life the moment you say, "Yes, this is the idea I'm going to write." And the one thing I have never, ever done is to start writing a book and to then decide, no, the idea is not a good one, because life is too short and I just can't imagine writing 20,000 or 30,000 words and then saying, "Nah, this isn't working," and start again. I can't do it.
HN: Oh, wow. It's so interesting because a lot of people will say they've got a manuscript that's half-finished that's in the attic from years ago, but that's not you.
AH: I've never, ever started and not finished a book. Books change as you write them, that's a different thing altogether. You may get new ideas, new thoughts, but I also spend an awful lot of time structuring books, so before I write a single word, which is particularly true of a murder mystery like Close to Death, which has got three different timeframes and quite a lot of characters, a lot of clues and everything has to be in the right place and such. I say this in the back, in the acknowledgements, what a difficult book it was to write and how much I need my copy editor to sort out all the sort of different timings of it because the most important thing about a murder mystery is that it should be deliciously complicated but super easy to read, and that's what I'm always aiming for. So, again, a lot of the writing of a book is not the writing at all, for me. There are writers I know who just begin writing and see where it goes. I'm not like that. By the time I start a book, 80 percent of it is in my head, at least. And although I may change things as I go, the ending and the beginning and the characters, they're the tent poles on which everything hangs.
HN: And given you are a character in this series, were you ever tempted to narrate the audiobook?
AH: No, because I'm not very good at reciting or reading books. I mean, Rory Kinnear, who does these books, is astonishing. I listen to his work and it's rather interesting to hear my words, my voice, me, coming out of Rory's mouth, him. And they're saying he's even better at me than I am. I couldn't do it, it's an incredible skill and I'm so lucky that we've done five books together, and hopefully I can twist his arm to do seven more, because, as I say, I hope it's a series of 12.
I did once record one chapter for Penguin Random House, which they thought would be funny if I recited one chapter, and I knew I didn't do a good job. Everybody smiled at me as I left the studio and said, "How wonderful that was, Anthony" and "You are amazing," and I said, "Are you sure?" "Yeah, yeah, it was great." And then, wouldn't you believe it, there was some kind of technical error and the whole thing got erased. Quite rightly, too. So, I know my place.
HN: [Laughs] Amazing. What is it that you like about listening back to the audiobooks, apart from obviously Rory Kinnear's amazing one?
AH: Well, I listen to books all the time, especially when I'm on holiday, because one of the strange things about books is they've been specially built to dissolve in sunshine. So, it's very, very difficult to read a book by the pool and I've discovered that it's much more pleasant and easy to listen to one, so that's the time I most, when I'm in Crete, in the summer, I'm always listening to books rather than reading them.
But I do love listening to someone like Rory doing my books. And Lesley Manville, incidentally, was one of the narrators on the Magpie Murders book, even though she ended up playing the main character on television, which was really quite an amazing sort of development, because it's difficult to describe, really. It's just so comforting, in a strange way. That sense of immersion that I've already mentioned to you, which is so important in my writing, I think I get that same immersion as well when I am listening. But I have to be honest and say that because I spend so much of my time at a computer screen, I am reading and reading and reading pretty much from morning until night, there comes a time when my poor eyes just won't take anymore and it is lovely to enjoy a book with my eyes closed.
HN: Yeah, closing your eyes and listening, sometimes it's just what you need.
AH: Indeed.
HN: There was something that I read, that you have a human skull that was a present from your mum. Is that still something you have and is that still something that's present when you're writing, making sure you finish a book?
AH: It sits there all the time, on the shelf just behind me in my new office in Richmond. When I asked for it, I was quite young, I was 13 years old when I wanted the skull, and the reason I wanted it is rather weird. I mean, what's weirder, to ask your mum for a skull or for your mum to go out and get you one, a proper, real human skull? But that's sort of my origins and my family, sort of all weird. But the reason I wanted it was that I was very interested in this idea, which I still have, in a way, that we, that is to say, our personality, our loves, our responses to questions, the way we talk, how we see the world, us, our identity, is sort of a creature that is the brain, that sits in this spaceship which is the skull. And that's how I've always seen the body, and I wanted to look at what the rocket was like. If I could take the lid off, what would it look like inside?
So, that was why I originally wanted the skull, it wasn't sort of macabre or grotesque, and I've never used it in a way that is disrespectful. I always remember that this was once a human being and is now, you know, this remains sitting in my office. And its use has now changed, the reason to have it, which is that as I have got older, it reminds me of how little time I have left, and so it does encourage me to get on with the next book, to stop faffing around watching YouTube or doing a crossword and to get back into the book, because one day all too soon, that's what I'm going to be.
HN: You've also said multiple times that you wanted to be a professional writer right from the start, but now you're older and as the years have gone on, can you see any other profession out there that might have suited you?
AH: Well, I never saw writing, incidentally, as a profession, exactly. But you're quite right in the question, but I wouldn't use that word because I've always thought of writing as being sort of my life. It's a bit like, to me, it is really the water that the fish swims in or the air that we all breathe, writing is everything to me, and I cannot really imagine my life without it. There are, however, things I would like to have done. I always wanted to work in theatre, I'd have loved to have directed plays. There was a time even when I would've liked to act in plays or that sort of world. I have enormous respect for teachers and I think to myself that actually I could've been very happy perhaps as a teacher, sharing my love of English literature and language with young people in a different way.
But the honest truth is that I wasn't good enough to be anything except the writer that I am. I mean, I am a one-trick pony. I knew at the age of 10 that I only had one talent and it was impressed upon me fairly forcibly by my teachers at that time that I wasn't going to amount to anything much at all, actually, not even a writer. And so it is my great belief that every person on this planet has a talent, has a future, has a gift, a spark, and that if you can find that spark when you are young, if you know what you want to do, and these days, many, many young people seem to have more difficulty trying to find out what it is they can do, and I suspect more difficulty in being enabled to do it, because life is so much more difficult than it was for me. But I do think that one of the secrets of life is to try and find what you love doing and never let anybody stop you doing it.
HN: Amazing. Well, Anthony, thank you so much for this chat, it's been an absolute joy. Loved Close to Death, what a little treat. Thank you so much.
AH: I've loved talking to you, thank you.
HN: Thanks for listening to Audible Sessions. If you enjoyed this and you want to hear more, search Audible Sessions on the Audible website or on the app. Close to Death, written by Anthony Horowitz, published by Penguin, is available to listen to on Audible now.