Book Talk: Author Horowitz on his life with a teenage spy

NEW YORK, Oct 24 (Reuters Life!) - Anthony Horowitz has been writing children’s books for 26 years but his teenage secret agent, Alex Rider, carved out a new path for him — action movies, and he thinks it’s awesome.

Horowitz has written six adventure stories about Rider, a 14-year-old British schoolboy who battles villains as a secret agent, since the first in the series, “Stormbreaker,” became a best seller in 2000.

The year “Stormbreaker” was turned into feature film with London-based Horowitz, 50, writing the screenplay.

Horowitz is currently writing “Snakehead,” his seventh Alex Rider book, along with a screenplay for the next film.

He spoke to Reuters about his life with a teenage spy:

Q. You said Alex Rider was inspired by the son of one of your friends?

A: “A boy came to lunch, called Alex, and he did Tae Kwon Do. … He also spoke two languages … He even looked quite a lot like I imagined Alex Rider should look. So I used quite a lot of his character for Alex Rider. Of course I added some more stuff — a healthy dose of Sean Connery and a little bit of a spy called Harry Palmer … a spy I liked when I was young.”

Q. You decided to become a writer when you were eight years old in boarding school?

A: “I used to tell stories in the dormitory. We used to sleep eight boys to a room and I used to tell stories at lights out to the other kids to keep them happy. It was a horrible school. We were all lonely and scared. They were always escape stories. They were about two boys named Jimmy and Edward… who ran away from school and they went to America and they had adventures in New York and in Chicago and in Los Angeles.” I was just making it up as I went along.”

Q. You write 10 hours a day?

A: “As soon as I start writing, I immerse myself in my work completely. This 10 hour stuff, I mean I don’t sit there with a clock saying in four more hours I can stop. I just simply get myself so lost in what I’m doing that the next thing I know it’s night time. The first draft I do in pen and paper. I like ink flow and I like the messiness of actually writing with a pen and ink. I write very, very quickly. It’s all just page and page of scribble. The second draft I sit at the computer and at that stage I revise.”

Q. How did you end up writing children’s books?

A: “I’ve been writing books for kids for 26 years. They published my first book when I was 22 (”The Sinister Secret of Frederick K. Bower). Why I wrote a children’s book when I was 22 is an enduring mystery to me. It was wet, it was raining, I was bored, and before I knew what I’d done I’d written a page of a children’s book and I found I enjoyed doing it. To my surprise the book got published immediately. And suddenly I was a kids’ author.

For years television and film writing was my job and the children’s books were just a hobby … then Alex Rider came out and the books took off in a huge way.”

Q. What was your coolest experience on the set as “Stormbreaker” was filmed?

A: “I can tell you that my best day was the first day I went to the set. I’m standing on a hill, and I’m watching a helicopter with a man dangling upside down from it, chasing at 70 miles an hour a BMW, with a second helicopter with a really sophisticated nose camera, chasing the first helicopter, and three camera trucks chasing the car. And I just looked and went “Wow, that is so awesome, and that came right out of my head.”

(Article courtesy of Reuters)