Once upon a life: Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz was 21 when his father died. A man of wealth, culture, and a shady business background, Mark Horowitz had been a mystery to his son – and the days after his funeral brought a dramatic revelation “When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it’s never good news.” Those are the words that quite literally changed my life. I vividly remember writing them. I had published about 15 children’s books, but with only a limited amount of success, and was seriously thinking of giving them up altogether. My television career, working on shows such as Robin of Sherwood and Poirot , was in much better shape. Who needed children’s books anyway? (This was before Harry Potter .) But there had always been this one idea about a teenage spy that had been nudging at my consciousness, and one afternoon I sat down and wrote the first sentence of what was to be Stormbreaker , the opening novel in the Alex Rider series. Since then the books have sold about 12m copies in more than 30 languages, and the truth is that as I looked at that sentence, sitting in my studio in Crouch End, I knew that I had somehow unlocked something and that this would finally be the breakthrough I had been looking for. But actually the sentence is based on a far earlier memory, and it wasn’t a doorbell that rang at three o’clock, it was a telephone. I was 21 years old and living in the north London suburb of Stanmore. I knew at once what the phone call meant. It was the hospital ringing to tell us my father had died. He had been ill a few years before with a virulent and disabling form of cancer that had necessitated his first serious operation. My father, a fastidious and private man, never really came to terms with the medication, the medical apparatus and the dietary rules that now confronted him. And when the cancer returned, he never acknowledged it. The rule in our family was that you ignored illness, or at least downplayed it, and I often wonder if he might not have survived if he had only recognised what was wrong with him and gone back to the doctor sooner. Anyway, he’d had a second, major operation that had brought a spark of hope which had quickly faded and we all – which is to say my mother, brother, sister and I – knew that the end wasn’t far away. The phone rang. I woke up and as I

Posted by on April 2, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.