Anthony Horowitz teases Detective Hawthorne TV series and reveals biggest fear about 12-book plan

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Anthony Horowitz has a problem. In fact, both Anthony Horowitzes have a problem. That is to say, the real 71-year-old Anthony Horowitz whom I have just interrupted while he was writing down dialogue in a notebook that may or may not now appear in book seven of his acclaimed Detective Hawthorne series of crime novels, has a problem.

And so does the fictitious Anthony Horowitz who inhabits the pages of said series of novels as Hawthorne’s sidekick. Everyone still with me? Well hold on, the meta is about to get real. But, then again, not real either.

The former’s latest book, A Deadly Episode, revolves around the murder of the actor playing Hawthorne on the set of the feature film adaptation of The Word Is Murder, the first of the real Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorne novels.

Hawthorne is then called upon to help solve the murder with the help of fictional sidekick Anthony Horowitz who, despite playing the author of the first book in both the first book and this one, the sixth in the series, has no idea who committed the murder. And that’s the problem facing the second Anthony Horowitz.

The man opposite me in London’s Ivy Club has something else on his mind. “Anthony in the book lives with an endless existential fear that Hawthorne will either not solve the crime and therefore there won’t be a book or, worse still, he will solve it very easily and he’ll have a book two chapters long,” explains the real Horowitz.

“My fear is that I have found out more about Hawthorne and why he is so damaged in A Deadly Episode than in the five previous stories, and my original aim of writing 12 books isn’t going to be possible because once I know the truth I will be unable to continue.”

That seems a remote possibility for a famously prolific author who will have at least the next three Hawthorne books sketched out somewhere (he writes each one longhand before his TV producer wife Jill – yes, the same one who appears in the books as his, er, TV producer wife Jill – gives the story a first read).

Clearly he doesn’t have to look far for characters. “I think the people who I work with are aware that there is a possibility they might appear in one of my books [although the real-life former detective who worked with Horowitz on a TV show and inspired the Hawthorne character is still, apparently, blissfully unaware of his contribution].

I think Selena Walker, my editor, has been in a book. And, funnily enough, when I gave a talk in Hungerford yesterday there was a lady called Susan Lamb who came to say hello. She was my publisher and editor at Orion and she became Susan Ryeland (played by Lesley Manville) in the Magpie/Moonflower/Marble Hall Murders trilogy – the joke being that Ryeland is a breed of lamb. I do like cryptic crosswords and plays on words.”

Real or imagined, he sympathises with his cast: “The whole idea for A Deadly Episode began with a moment when I was deeply inconvenienced and annoyed by something, and it occurred to me that other people in the same situation as me might even be driven to murder.

“That said, the people in my stories don’t kill with relish. They are usually scared, trying to hide something or protect themselves. It can be through grief or revenge, but I see the forces that drive somebody to murder to be like an illness. I don’t excuse them, but when the killer or killers are revealed in the final chapters, I feel sympathy because they didn’t set out to be like that.”

It comes as little surprise to learn that Horowitz’s extensive TV credits include early episodes of the Midsomer Murders series, including the very first, The Killings at Badger’s Drift. “This is a show where you have to have the ability to suspend disbelief long enough to accept there’s an area of England where people are endlessly being bumped off with croquet mallets or rolling cheeses,” he laughs.

But, just to get meta once more, when are we likely to see the Detective Hawthorne series of books on our screens (as opposed to in a book where one of the stories is being made for our screens)? “I’ve written the first script of what would be a six-part TV series,” he says. “Jill is producing it but she says it’s murder trying to get high-end TV made these days…”

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