One of Britain's most successful contemporary writers, Anthony Horowitz' work spans books, TV, films, plays and journalism. He's perhaps best known for Midsomer Murders, Foyle's War, his Sherlock Holmes novels and the teen spy series Alex Rider.
Horowitz already has two James Bond novels under his belt, Trigger Mortis and Forever and a Day. Now he's got another one on his ejector seat. With a Mind to a Kill is the final part of a trilogy for the Ian Fleming Estate.
Set partly in 1960s East Berlin and Moscow it's classic Bond territory, with all the gadgets and the girls.
Bond novels have sold more than 60 million copies since Casino Royale in 1953. They sparked the hugely successful film franchise. We first saw Sean Connery as 007 in Dr No in 1962.
Fleming and Bond have been part of his life since childhood, Horowitz tells Kathryn Ryan.
Photo: JOEL SAGET
“I read him for the first time when I was about 11 years old, when Doctor No came out.
“They've always been sort of a solace to me and a lifeline,” he says.
With a Mind to a Kill bridges the gap between the world of Fleming and that of John Le Carre, he says.
“It’s set in 1963, which is sort of a bridge between the old world of spies and the new world, which is going to be exemplified by John le Carré, 1963 when my book is set is when The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was published.”
The Bond we find in his latest continuation novel is contemplating the end of his career, Horowitz says.
“He's just come back from The Man with the Golden Gun, in which he has tried to kill M when he was brainwashed by the Russians, that's what Fleming wrote.
“And there is a very, very unpleasant villain waiting for him, a man called Colonel Boris who was actually an Ian Fleming invention. He appears in two of the books, never described, and I think in those scenes when you get Bond versus Colonel Boris the two of them together, almost playing chess with each other, you get what Bond is all about.”
He thoroughly enjoyed fleshing out the character of the evil Colonel Boris, he says.
“Colonel Boris is mentioned briefly in From Russia with Love and he is a man who catches Bond at the end of You Only Live Twice and the beginning of The Man with the Golden Gun. We don't know what he looked like, we know very little about him, except that he does practice brainwashing.
“So, I was able to imagine him, the reality of this man and give him a physicality, to put him into a huge office on the edge of Leningrad, and to have him as the ultimate bad guy.
“In a funny sort of way, it was easier for me than if I'd actually been given the whole character, because I could make him mine in the knowledge, nonetheless, that he still belonged to Fleming, that Fleming was the originator.”
A Bond novel must get three things right, he says.
“The three most tricky things to get right in a Bond novel are the title, the love interest and above all the villain.
“Getting a good villain, and this guy [Colonel Boris] is a little bit less ‘taking over the world’ than a Goldfinger or Hugo Drax, or even my own Jason Sin.
“But he is thoroughly evil. I mean, he is a very, very nasty piece of work, and I think scenes with him and with Katya [Leonova] and Bond and all the brainwashing stuff is really a very dark heart to this book.”
The relationship between Bond and M is pivotal in Fleming’s novels, he says.
“M represents a sort of a father figure, a mentor, he represents everything which is good about Britain, he represents duty, he represents patriotism, and the relationship between them, it's almost headmaster to school boy when Bond comes into M’s office there is protocol he has to follow, they don’t use Christian names, M is always sir and normally Bond is 007 very occasionally, in Moonraker for example, he becomes James but that's when they go off to play cards together out of duty.”
In fact, the whole world of Bond represents Britain at its best, he believes.
“When everything in my country, in Britain, feels so dishonourable, feels so difficult to understand, for many people in the Bond novels you have an absolute certainty, a belief in the country, a belief in duty, a belief basically in goodness.
“I know he's an assassin and a killer. He's not a perfect character by any means, but at the same time, you can rely on him and he does represent, like it or not, some of the very best of what this country was about, certainly in the ‘40s and ‘50s - perhaps less so now.”
The novels must be true to the character that Fleming created, he says.
“If I start to muck around with him in a sort of a 21st century way, a simple example would be to stop him smoking, because smoking will damage his health, he could give up smoking, which he does actually briefly in Thunderball, but if you try and score points and make him seem like a 21st century paragon of virtue, I think you'd ruin half of what is in the character.”
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As it was his last Bond novel, he did toy with the idea of killing him off, he says.
“The thought came to me of a plane plunging towards the ground with Bond inside about to crash, but just cutting out at the moment before impact.
“But you know, the funny thing is, I decided it was just wrong. Bond does not belong to me. I've written three continuation novels, but Bond belongs to everybody.”
The character is forever, he says.
“There's something sort of mythical about him, something legendary, which says to me that Bond could do many things, but die is not one of them.”
Inhabiting another writer’s world requires humility, he says.
“The most important thing is to recognise that the author, whom you are as it were emulating, is greater than you are, is better than you are.
“And I certainly believe that about Ian Fleming, and also about Doyle [Arthur Conan] both of them are absolutely superb writers.”
Horowitz is on record as having had a “wretchedly unhappy” time at school, reading then telling and now writing stories was and remains a solace, he says.
“It was only when I started to read that I first of all found that there was something in that school that I loved, one room in the school where I felt safe - the library. And it was reading books, that gave me the idea well if stories are what I want to do, maybe I should start telling stories. And it was by telling stories to the other kids, I was nine, that actually got me to make friends.
“Other kids liked my stories. And I thought, wow, that's what I am, I'm a writer, that's what I'm going to do.”
Despite his teachers, and father, telling him he would never come to much as a writer he had an innate determination to succeed as a writer, he says.
“Books have been my lifeline and will continue to be until the very end.”
