Church bells sound triumphantly. Everyone looks around the drawing room, confused. We’re not near a church. We’re in the Drayton Court Hotel in Ealing on a snowy day attending Talent Campus 9.0. But the bells toll on and no, we’re not in an Agatha Christie drama.
‘No-one ever rings me except when I’m doing talks,’ laughs a relaxed Anthony Horowitz as he slides his phone from his pocket and turns it off. ‘Now, where were we? Ah. Robin Hood.’
Anthony wrote five episodes of Robin of Sherwood, the 1984 British TV series starring Michael Praed and Judi Trott. ‘I started the script on the Monday, delivered it on the Friday and it was shot Monday.’ It was a steep learning curve for a novelist, but Anthony cherishes those times. ‘I learned to hide my own style and write in someone else’s voice. I was writing in the character’s voice, so I became them. I spoke in many voices. The book How to Write for Television really helped.’
Another book that Anthony rates is Adventures in the Screen Trade: A personal view of Hollywood by William Goldman. ‘Nobody knows anything is written in stone metaphorically on my desk. It’s really important to write what you love because at the end of the day, no-one in the entertainment industry can predict with certainty which movies will be box-office successes.’ He grins. ‘I do know that everything I do is a work of genius, until it isn’t. You need that belief while you’re writing, otherwise why do it?’
He’s been approached by the Bond and Holmes Estates and Enid Blyton’s, Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl’s but he prefers creating his own worlds. ‘I like living inside of them. I immerse myself in them. Immersion is the funnest part of my writing. It takes you away from yourself.
‘I started writing when I was ten, at boarding school, in North London. For various reasons I had no friends, so I read and I started telling the other children stories and I wrote at 11 to escape the real world. I think many writers write to escape the real world. When I wrote, everything about the school faded away. I don’t know if I’d swap my childhood. Tension in my life has helped – a sense of fighting against the rest of the world. It’s me on my own. We’re all on our own when we write.’
But where do his ideas come from?
‘I’m like a radio receiver. Ideas come from goodness knows where. I have ten ideas a day and I could just be somewhere and think of something – like firewalking is the beginning of a story – I loved that you all did firewalking. Oh, and every writer should have a dog. I get up from my desk for two to three hours every day and I get ideas when I walk.’
Anthony has jury duty on the horizon. ‘Ah it is so irritating, but I can use it. I will be in court so I’m already thinking what if one juror refuses to accept the accused is guilty and then gets murdered. Everything we do in life has a story in it.’
Anthony can tell instantly if an idea is a feature or a TV show. ‘The more you write, the more in-tune you are with the story. Good ideas stay with you, just let the ideas sit. The only way to get rid of an idea is to write it. It means if the idea survives, I will write it.’
Anthony considers. ‘I’ve maybe ten more years writing and twenty more on this earth, so I need to choose what I want to work on. Murder is an enduring genre. Everyone talks about cozy crime but being murdered is never cozy. Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue is my answer to cozy crime. Murder is a fast and easy way to get to know a community. I kill you. Why? The reason you watch a whodunnit is because you want to know who did it.’
Anthony’s asked if he always knows who did it when he starts writing. ‘Of course! But some writer’s don’t.
‘Our business is to write something that makes someone smile and say I want to make this. Like Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue. I came up with the title a minute before I went in to meet with Sony. Titles matter. Most crime stories have terrible titles. And endings matter. The greatest ending ever made is The Italian Job’s original ending.’
The Nine Bodies ending made Anthony smile. ‘Knowing the ending is helpful because then you know when you can stop.’
Listen to the session below
I am a novelist and screenwriter based in London. My latest horror script, Hardware Hell, Mean Girls meets Tremors, set in the Nevada Desert, was a second rounder at the 2025 Austin Film Festival. My historic fiction novel, Mad Girls, that tells the story of the first ever women’s international football match held in Edinburgh in 1881, was long listed for the 2025 Jenny Brown Debut 50 Novel Award. I’m an Executive Producer on Feathers and Blood, a horror short in post-production directed by Jane Sanger. I’m currently writing a vampire horror set on a Scottish Island and looking for a Producer for The Letters of Chris Mass, an uplifting family Christmas tale set in the Highlands. www.elliewallace.co.uk
