Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue is "antidote" to "cosy crime", says writer Anthony Horowitz
For his latest thriller, Anthony Horowitz has created a murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie but with a dark, modern edge.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
A tiny plane comes down in the Mexican jungle. All eight passengers, plus the pilot and the flight attendant, are left stranded in the wreckage, at the mercy of the elements and, as it transpires, one another. Eight days later, a group of body bags is lined up in a dusty military station-turned-makeshift morgue. A sad but straightforward story, it appears, until the plane’s contents are inspected by an officer with a furrowed brow. “We have nine bodies, sir,” he tells his commander. So, what’s the problem? “We have 10 passports…”
Thus begins Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue, the latest TV mystery from the pen of Anthony Horowitz, the crime-writing powerhouse who brought us Foyle’s War, early Midsomer Murders episodes and, more recently, Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders.
With its jungle setting and abruptly increasing body count, Nine Bodies is, he claims, the “antidote to so-called cosy crime”. “Here, I thought I would tear the envelope and do something nobody can accuse of being cosy,” he explains. “It’s a tough situation, everybody is almost immediately at each other’s throats and nobody is riding a tricycle on a village green. It’s the anti-cosy crime drama.”
Un-cosy it may be, but unfamiliar it is not. Horowitz shares that early viewers of the show – including his wife and producer, Jill Green –were quick to remark on the plot’s similarity to the entertainment juggernaut The Traitors. Horowitz accepts there is a shared conceit at its centre – “Who is my enemy, who is my friend?” – but points out he hasn’t watched The Traitors and began drafting before that series aired.
He far more readily acknowledges the influence of Agatha Christie’s mystery masterclass And Then There Were None (ten people on a secluded island, one murderer among them). He says, “I like to think of it as a modern variation. Every writer of murder mysteries in the world wishes they’d come up with And Then There Were None. It’s the greatest, cleverest, most enjoyable mystery Christie ever wrote, and one with no detective, which is interesting. It’s what we have here, too – you’ve been sitting next to somebody for hours on a plane and you don’t know who they are. If they’re a killer, you only find out when they start killing.”
Christie is one of the few revered crime writers from a bygone age for whom Horowitz has not written “continuity novels” (although that’s not a term he’s keen on). Besides his own catalogue of more than 50 novels for adults and children – including the bestselling Alex Rider teen spy series – Horowitz has been tasked with furthering the exploits of Messrs Holmes and Bond. Does that stretch the same creative muscles as conjuring up his own heroes and villains?
“All writing is about energy, immersion, storytelling, character, keeping people hooked,” he muses. “When I’m writing about Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, I’m in the shadow of writers much better than me, so it’s about raising my game, about ventriloquising their work, being more them and less me.”
When it comes to the latter, Horowitz – who has written three critically acclaimed 007 novels, set firmly in Ian Fleming’s era of spycraft – cheerfully says he’s “never been asked, never really wanted to” work on a script for the films. “You need a thick skin for that business [of dealing with big-budget film producers]. I’m probably happier out of it.”
There’s also what he calls “one major issue” that he’s happy to leave to Steven Knight, who was recently announced as the next Bond film’s screenwriter: how to resurrect our hero.
“The last time we saw Bond (in 2021’s No Time to Die) he was poisoned and blown to smithereens – how will they get past the fact he is dead with a capital D? I think that was a mistake, because Bond is a legend. He belongs to everybody, he is eternal – except in that film. If I was asked tomorrow to write the script, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Where would you start? You can’t have him waking up in the shower and saying it was all a dream.”
With Horowitz in such forthcoming mood, I ask him about another ubiquitous trend, that of celebrities turning their attentions (and high profiles) to crime fiction authorship – or, in some cases, “authorship”. He chuckles. “Every writer harbours a grudge against celebrities who get a certain shelf space and publicity. There’s an envy for the names who’ve done well. He’s quick to add, “However, if a book is good, I have no problem. Good work will out, and so will bad work. The crime-reading public of Britain have high standards, they can tell a dog.”
Horowitz may not be losing any sleep over this, but I wonder who’s on hand to tell him if he’s created a dog himself? He says his toughest critic is his wife, but adds: “The reason our marriage has been so successful is that Jill is always right, so when she tells me where I’ve gone wrong, even if I stamp my foot, I’ll come back and rewrite.”
He’s equally tough on himself. “I hate any murder-mystery with a hole in it, or one where the writer or viewer doesn’t have enough information to solve the puzzle. I don’t believe that’s fair, which means I have to endlessly check and check again.”
With so many books and TV shows to his name, how does he decide what something like Nine Bodies is going to be? “I just know instinctively,” he answers immediately. “This show was always conceived visually as a series of shocks, and the idea of a person disappearing every episode fits perfectly. I’ve always used a murder as a punctuation point, to keep people watching. Back in the days of Midsomer Murders, when I had an ad break coming up, I’d kill someone.”
And if it came to a choice? For the first time, he pauses. “My books last longer. Many young people have come to reading through Alex Rider, and that gives me the most pride. But the solitariness can get to you after a bit.
“When you find success as a writer, the only thing that changes is that you get a slightly bigger room. TV gets me outside. I love the collaboration and excitement. You visit the set, you see a burnt-out fuselage in the jungle with lots of cameras, and you think, ‘This all started with me sitting in a chair on my own in a room’. It feels incredible.”
Whichever the medium, 46 years after the publication of his debut novel, Horowitz shows no sign of burning out. When I tell him I binged four episodes of Nine Bodies on the trot, then tried and failed to go to bed without finishing the final two, he’s delighted, adding: “The only difference between a successful writer and an unsuccessful writer is that the unsuccessful one stops – and I won’t stop.”
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