Biography
In the novels courses, I typically introduce the author by providing some background information, like education or previous employment, particularly if those relate in some way to the author's beginnings as a novelist.For Anthony Horowitz, this background history is especially pertinent because it gives readers insight into what he's creating, his writing style, the genres and media he employs.
Biography (excerpted from his website)
Horowitz is a somewhat unusual writer because he works across many media, writing books, TV series, films, plays, and journalism. He has written over 40 books including the teen spy series Alex Rider, first adapted into a movie in 2006. The novel, Oblivion, the epic conclusion to the Power of Five series, was published in October 2012.
But he writes for adults as well. He was commissioned by the Conan Doyle Estate and Orion Books to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels. The House of Silk was published in 2011 and the sequel, Moriarty, was published in 2014.
Most recently he was commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write the James Bond novel Trigger Mortis, published in 2015.
Biography (excerpted from his website)
Horowitz is also well known for television series; he produced the first seven episodes (and the title) of Midsomer Murders. He is the writer and creator of the award-winning drama series Foyle’s War and for other original complex dramas, particularly thrillers. Collision was a five part “state of the nation” piece telecast in November 2009, and in June 2011, Britain's ITV showed the legal thriller Injustice.
Foyle's War returned in March 2013 as a Cold War thriller and he wrote one final series, bringing the show to an end in January 2015. His latest show New Blood will premiere on BBC later this year.
Anthony is on the board of the Old Vic Theatre and regularly contributes to national newspapers and magazines on subjects ranging from politics to education. He currently has a travel column in The Telegraph.
Horowitz was awarded an OBE for his services to literature in January 2014
Biography (from Wikipedia, not nearly as complimentary)
Horowitz was born April 5, 1955 in Stanmore, Middlesex, England. At age 13 he went to Rugby School, a public school in Rugby, Warwickshire. His mother introduced him to Frankenstein and Dracula and gave him a skull for his 13th birthday. He graduated from the University of York with a lower second class degree in English literature and art history in 1977.
Horowitz's father was associated with some of the politicians in the "circle" of prime minister Harold Wilson. Facing bankruptcy, he moved his assets into Swiss numbered bank accounts. After he died from cancer when Horowitz was 22, the family was never able to track down the missing money despite years of trying. An English novelist and screenwriter specializing in mystery and suspense, his works for children and young adult readers include the Diamond Brothers series, the Alex Rider series, and The Power of Five series (known in the U.S. as The Gatekeepers).
Biography (from Wikipedia, not nearly as complimentary)
His work for adults includes:
the play Mindgame (2001);
two Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk (2011) and Moriarty (2014);
two novels featuring his own detective Atticus Pund, Magpie Murders (2016) and Moonflower Murders (2020);
and three novels featuring himself paired with fictional detective Daniel Hawthorne, The Word Is Murder (2017), The Sentence Is Death (2018) and A Line to Kill (2021), with an upcoming fourth novel entitled The Twist of a Knife scheduled for publication in August 2022.
The Ian Fleming estate (James Bond) chose Horowitz to write novels using unpublished Fleming material starting with Trigger Mortis in 2015, followed by 2018's Forever and a Day, with a third novel entitled With a Mind to Kill to be released in May 2022.
Biography
Horowitz lives in Central London with his wife, Jill Green, whom he married in 1988. She produced Foyle's War, the series he wrote for Britain's ITV. They have two sons. Horowitz is a prolific writer and is purported to work 10 hours a day on his various projects. He says that he knew he was going to be a writer early in life; he often composed stories for his school mates. He credits his family with much of his success in writing, as he says they help him with ideas and research.
Interviews/YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTjqdB83y8o
Cast of characters
Anthony Horowitz:
The author of this novel, of course, but also a character and the first-person narrator of the murder mystery story created within this novel. Horowitz fictionalized himself as a character within the murder mystery. To further confuse readers, AH, the character, shares many characteristics and accomplishments of AH the author.
Cast of characters
Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne:
Fired from Scotland Yard, for unspecified reason, but hired back on a contract basis for his expertise in solving crimes.
He has also worked as a consultant on TV series with Horowitz.
He proposes that Horowitz write a book about him based on the case he's working, Diana Cowper's murder, with a 50-50 split and royalties.
According to Horowitz the character, "Hawthorne was clever and he was well educated but he didn’t strike me as having any interior imaginative life at all."
Title starts out as Hawthorne Investigates, but at the end of the novel, Horowitz changes it to The Word is Murder, based on what Hawthorne had said early in the case about detective fiction.
Cast of characters
Diana Cowper: murder victim, widow of Lawrence Cowper, mother of Damian, a famous actor living in the U.S.
But she is also the hit-and-run driver of the car in Deal, Kent, that killed Timothy Godwin and seriously injured Jeremy Godwin.
Mr. Tibbs: Diana's cat, who disappears. She fears he's been kidnapped and killed by Alan Godwin. Hawthorne posits that his disappearance is the "final straw" in Diana's decision to commit suicide.
Mr. Tibbs re-appears at the end of the novel. He'd gotten into a neighbor's house, through a skylight, and couldn't escape. The neighbors found him when they returned from vacation.
Cast of characters
Damian Cowper: successful, rich actor but also egocentric, manipulative, and ambitious
And the second murder victim because of his behavior at RADA. When Daniel (Cornwallis) won the lead role in the RADA production of Hamlet, Damian and his girlfriend, Amanda Leigh, made Daniel sick so that he had to relinquish the role to Damian. Amanda disappeared some time after that, and, Cornwallis tells Horowitz at the end of the novel that she could be recovered by exhuming seven bodies that he buried at the time.
Grace Lovell is the mother of his child, although they're not married; she has sacrificed her acting career, at least temporarily, for Damian and their child. Her father is Martin.
Cast of characters
Robert Cornwallis, funeral director at Cornwallis and Sons, where Diana arranges her funeral at the beginning of the novel.
But he is also Daniel Roberts, once an aspiring actor at RADA and competitor with Damian Cowper.
Irene Laws, Cornwallis's assistant and cousin, in this family tradition business
Cast of characters
Godwin family:
Father Alan, mother Judith, both of whom have motives for murder. Alan threatened Diana Cowper just before her murder.
Brothers: Timothy was instantly killed in the accident at Deal; Jeremy was seriously injured and remained disabled as an adult
Mary O'Brien was their 25-year-old nanny at the time of the accident; perhaps because of guilt, she stayed with Jeremy into his adulthood.
Andrea Kluvánek—Slovakian housekeeper who cleans for Diana Cowper
Nigel Weston—judge who exonerated Diana for the hit-and-run accident
Detective Inspector Meadows—hired Hawthorne
Raymond Clunes—theater producer who had lunch with Diana Cowper on the day she died.
Charles Kenworthy—Diana's lawyer
Cast of characters
RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) is a drama school in London, England, that provides vocational conservatoire training for theatre, television, film, and radio. It is based in the Bloomsbury area of Central London, and is one of the oldest drama schools in the UK, founded in 1904 by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Questions for discussion
What do you think of these characters? Do they grab your attention or engage your interest in the same way characters in other novels do?
In particular, some reviewers found Hawthorne not very likeable. Some weren't particularly fond of Hawthorne either.
Are there any sympathetic, engaging, likeable characters here? If not, what purpose do these characters serve?
Structure
On the simplest level:
Classic murder mystery: Diana Cowper is the initial murder victim that detective Hawthorne and writer Horowitz investigate.
The is of course a structure introduced by Arthur Conan Doyle with Holmes as detective as Watson as writer. They examine clues, the scene of the crime, and interrogate possible suspects: another common structure for crime fiction.
Agatha Christie employs a similar pattern with Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot, in particular, who gathers the suspects at the end of the novel and explains all.
P. D. James also follows this pattern, with a crime at the beginning, clues, and a cadre of suspects that Adam Dalgleish interrogates, one by one, person by person. He investigates their backgrounds and examines motives until the denouement, when the murderer, and his/her motives, are revealed.
Structure
This is the classic pattern followed, with variations, by many, many detective/crime fiction writers.
On a more complicated level, Horowitz, the author of this novel, is also a character in the story. The real author has inserted himself as a character in the fictional story he's writing, a character who shares many of his personal characteristics, particularly his writing history.
AH, the author of this book, is also AH, a character and the narrator in his own fiction who is coincidentally writing a novel initially called Hawthorne Investigates but ultimately titled The Word is Murder.
This is therefore a boxes-within-boxes structure, but one that breaks through, rather persistently, the barriers in this structure.
So, not only do we have AH the author and AH the narrator/character, but we have two books.
AH the character is writing a book about Diana and Damian Cowper's murders, with Hawthorne, tentatively titled Hawthorne Investigates. But at the end of this novel, when the murders are solved, AH decided to change the title to The Word is Murder. In other words, that book becomes this book.
Questions for discussion
In the biography section, we noted that Horowitz has also written two Sherlock Holmes novels, dubbing for Arthur Conan Doyle, and he has written a couple of James Bond novels, taking on the persona of Ian Fleming.
Does that have anything to do with this book?
Quotes about the real/fictional spaces H & H visit
Mrs. Cowper's living room:
• Mrs. Cowper’s living room couldn’t have been more different. As I stepped onto the thick-pile carpet with its floral pattern etched out in pink and grey and took in the crystal chandelier, the comfortable, faux-antique furniture, the Country Life and Vanity Fair magazines spread out on the coffee table, the books (modern fiction, hardback, nothing by me) on the built-in shelves, I felt like an intruder. I was on my own, wandering through what might as well have been a museum exhibit as a place where someone had recently lived.
Quotes about the real/fictional spaces H & H visit
Spaces: Diana Cowper's home in Deal
• We entered a small square area, with bushes on all four sides. It wasn’t exactly a garden; more a courtyard with miniature yew trees and rose beds surrounding a pretty marble fountain and two wooden benches that faced each other. The ground was paved with York stone. The effect was theatrical – like a scene from a children’s story. • Even as we walked up to the fountain, which was dry and hadn’t been used for some time, I felt a sense of sadness and had a good idea what we were going to find.
Quotes about the real/fictional spaces H & H visit
Damian's apartment:
• I’m not sure at what stage he’d been able to afford a two-bedroom flat on Brick Lane but this was where he lived when he was in London. It was on the second floor of a warehouse that had been carefully converted to show off its original features: stripped wooden floors, exposed beams, old-fashioned radiators and lots of brickwork. My first impressions of the vast, double-height living room was that it looked almost fake, like a television set.
Quotes about the real/fictional spaces H & H visit
Theatrical producer Clunes's home:
• Clunes lived in rather different circumstances to Andrea Kluvánek. His home was behind Marble Arch, close to Connaught Square, and I wasn’t at all surprised that this was the home of a theatre producer. The building itself was like a stage set, made of red brick and almost improbably two-dimensional with an imposing front door and brightly painted windows set in perfect symmetry. Everything was pristine, even the dustbins standing in a neat line on the other side of the metal railings. We went into a large hallway between two reception rooms, the floors fabulously carpeted, the ceilings triple height. It didn’t look at all like someone’s home. It was more like a hotel, though one without paying guests.
Quotes
So, in other words, AH the narrator/character sees the fictionally "real" word he inhabits as a stage construction, a museum exhibit, or a movie set.As the character is travelling through London, he even notes that they had used a particular street he was on as a setting in Foyle's War.
In other words, he waffles between author and character throughout this book.
Quotes
Conversation between Horowitz and woman at an author talk in a bookstore:
• ‘I was wondering,’ she said. ‘Why is it that you always write fantasy? Why don’t you write anything real?’
• ‘I like writing fiction,’ I said. ‘That’s what I do.’
• ‘Aren’t you worried that your books might be considered irrelevant?’
• 'I don’t think they have to be real to be relevant.’
• ‘I’m sorry. I do like your work. But I disagree.’
Quotes
AH as narrator/character:
• On the train back to London, I couldn’t help thinking about what she had said. Was she right? Was my work too focused on fantasy? I was about to launch myself as an adult writer but my first outing, The House of Silk [Sherlock Holmes], was about as far from the modern world as it was possible to be.
• Some of my television work – Injustice, for example – was set in a recognisable, twenty-first-century London but perhaps it was true that I had spent too long living in my own imagination and that if I wasn’t careful, I would lose touch.
• Maybe I already had. Maybe a crash course in reality would do me good.
Quotes
AH as character: on writing
If I had sat down to write an original murder mystery story, I wouldn’t have chosen anyone like Hawthorne as its main protagonist. I think the world has had quite enough of white, middle-aged, grumpy detectives and I’d have tried to think up something more unusual. A blind detective, a drunk detective, an OCD detective, a psychic detective . . . they’d all been done but how about a detective who was all four of those things?
Actually, I’d have preferred a female detective, someone like Sarah Lund in The Killing. I’d have been much happier with someone who was younger, feistier, more independent, with or without the chunky jerseys. I’d also have given her a sense of humour.
NOTE: Here, purportedly AH the narrator/character is speaking, but it would appear to be AH the author. And he's talking directly to the reader, breaking the fictional boundary.
Quotes
Horowitz to Hawthorne, about request to write a book I write about fictional detectives. I’ve just finished a story about Sherlock Holmes. I used to do Poirot and Midsomer Murders. I’m a fiction writer. You need someone who writes true crime.’
"What’s the difference?’
‘All the difference in the world. I’m in control of my stories. I like to know what I’m writing about. Creating the crimes and the clues and all the rest of it is half the fun. If I were to follow you around, just writing down what you saw and what you said, what would that make me? I’m sorry. I’m not interested.’
Quotes
Horowitz with Hawthorne reviewing his first draft
• . . . I think it’s important to explain how the book was written; the rules of engagement, so to speak. These are my words but they were his actions and the truth is that, to begin with, the two didn’t quite fit.
• . . .I knew I was in trouble when he took them [pages of first draft] out of his case and I saw that he had printed them, covering them with red crosses and circles. • I am very protective of my writing. It’s fair to say that I think about every single word I write. (Do I need ‘single’? Would ‘true’ be better than ‘fair’?) When I had agreed to work with Hawthorne, I had assumed that although he was in charge of the case, he would take a back seat when it came to the actual narrative. He quickly disabused me.
• ‘It’s all wrong, Tony,’
Quotes
Horowitz with Hawthorne reviewing his first draft
This is the agreement that we made. I wouldn’t show Hawthorne any more of the book, certainly not while I was writing it and probably not even after it was finished. I would write what I wanted to write and if that meant criticising him or adding thoughts of my own I would simply go ahead.
But when it came to the scene of the crime, the interrogations or whatever, I would stick to the facts. I wouldn’t imagine, extrapolate or embroider the text with potentially misleading descriptions.
NOTE: so he would stick to reality with the facts of Diana Cowper's murder, but fictionalize the rest. Except that this entire book is fiction.
Quotes
Horowitz, on his role as Hawthorne's writer:
What had happened to me? When I had first met Hawthorne, I had been a successful writer. I was the creator of a television show that was seen in fifty countries and I also happened to be married to the producer. Hawthorne had worked for us. He had been paid ten or twenty pounds an hour to provide information which I had used in my scripts. But in just a couple of weeks, everything had changed. I had allowed myself to become a silent partner, a minor character in my own book! Worse than that, I had somehow persuaded myself that I couldn’t work out a single clue without asking him what was going on. Surely I was cleverer than that.
Quotes
Horowitz, on his role as Hawthorne's writer:
I’d talked to them about the way a character is created. Christopher Foyle, for example, existed on the page a long time before Michael Kitchen was cast but only when that decision had been made did the real work begin. There was always a tension between the two of us. For example, Michael insisted almost from the start that Foyle would never ask questions, which made life difficult for me and seemed, to say the least, unusual for a detective. And yet it wasn’t such a stupid idea. We found other, more original ways to get to the information that the plot demanded. Foyle had a way of insinuating himself, getting suspects to say more than they intended. In this way, year after year, the character developed.
Quotes
On Cornwallis:
I got the feeling that he might have been very handsome as a child but something had happened to him at some time in his life so that, although he still wasn’t ugly, he was curiously unattractive. It was as if he had become a bad photograph of himself.
End of novel, Horowitz has been drugged by Cornwallis who plans to kill him:
• ‘I really wish you hadn’t come here,’ Cornwallis said. He still had that very reasonable, mannered way of speaking which he had cultivated over the years and which suited the role he had taken. Because I knew now that it was just a role. With every second that passed, the real Robert Cornwallis was revealing himself to me.
Quotes
On Hawthorne, when interviewing Cornwallis:
I saw at once that he was quite different when he was dealing with witnesses or suspects or anyone who might help him with his investigation. He came across as ordinary, even obsequious. The more I got to know him, the more I saw that he did this quite deliberately. People lowered their guard when they were talking to him. They had no idea what sort of man he was, that he was only waiting for the right moment to dissect them. For him, politeness was a surgical mask, something he slipped on before he took out his scalpel.
NOTE: Working on TV or movies sets, he sees that actors are themselves and they take on a role and become a fictional character (see his reference to Michael Kitchen and Foyle).
Quotes
AH as character: on writing
The trouble was, I didn’t like him [Hawthorne] very much and that made the book almost impossible to write. The relationship between an author and his main protagonist is a very peculiar one.
Take Alex Rider, for example. I’d been writing about him for over ten years and although I sometimes envied him (he never aged, everyone liked him, he had saved the world a dozen times). I was always fond of him and eager to get back to my desk to follow his adventures. Of course, he was my creation. I controlled him and made sure that I pressed all the right buttons for a young audience. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t swear. He didn’t have a gun. And he certainly wasn’t homophobic.
NOTE: he switches from AH the character to AH the writer, or he's both at the same time.
Quotes
AH the character as writer and narrator:
It occurred to me that I could make up my own rules. Who had said that I had to write down everything exactly as it happened? There was absolutely no need to mention what Hawthorne had said about Raymond Clunes. For that matter, I could remove any reference to the black-and-white photograph [Mapplethorpe] and the other artwork that had sparked the whole thing off. In fact, I could describe him in any way I wanted. There was nothing to stop me making him younger, wittier, softer, more charming. It was my book!
Quotes
AH the character as writer and narrator:
At the same time, I knew I couldn’t do it. Hawthorne had approached me and he was what he was. If I changed him, it would be the first ripple in the pond, the start of a process that would shift everything back into the world of fiction. I could see myself reinventing all the people he spoke to and all the different places he went.
What, then, would be the point? I might just as well go back to what I always did and make up the whole thing.
Quotes
On Hawthorne:
Hawthorne actually sounded as if he meant it and I saw that he had undergone another of his transformations. He had been hard with Andrea Kluvánek, coldly matter-of-fact with Raymond Clunes, but now it was a polite and accommodating Hawthorne who presented himself to Judith Godwin.
NOTE: in other words, Hawthorne is also playing roles within his identity as a fictional character, and he plays different roles, depending upon the person he's interviewing. So he's an actor playing a role and a character is his own real, but fictional, life.
Quotes
Horowitz, at the end of the fictional murder story:
In retrospect, it’s a pity that I decided to write all this in the first person as it will have been obvious all along that I wasn’t going to die. It’s a literary convention that the first-person narrator can’t be killed although it’s true that one of my favourite films, Sunset Boulevard, breaks all the rules with its opening shot and there are one or two novels, The Lovely Bones for example, that do the same.
I wish there had been some way to disguise the fact that I would make it through to this chapter and wake up in the A&E Unit of Charing Cross Hospital, just a short way down the Fulham Palace Road, but I’m afraid I couldn’t think of one. So much for suspense!
NOTE: this is AH the character, working with Hawthorne; he's in the hospital after the attack by Cornwallis and was completely wrong about the murder suspects.
Quotes
Horowitz on writing:
• Over the next couple of days, I wrote the first two chapters. I was trying to find the ‘voice’ of the book. If I was really going to appear in it, I had to be sure that I wasn’t too obtrusive, that I didn’t get in the way. But even in that very tentative first draft (and there would eventually be five more) I saw that I had a much bigger problem. It was Hawthorne. It wasn’t too difficult to capture the way he looked and spoke. My feelings towards him were also fairly straightforward. The trouble was, how much did I know about him?
Quotes
AH the author, on p. 29:
Being the writer on a set is a strange experience. It’s hard to describe the sense of excitement, walking into something that owes its existence entirely to what happened inside my head. So I’ll sit down in a folding chair which never has my name on the back. I’ll watch from the side. I’ll chat to the actors. Maybe a runner will bring me a cup of tea in a styrofoam cup. And as I sit there, I’ll take comfort in the knowledge that this is all mine. I am part of it and it is part of me.
Next paragraph: (AH the narrator/character)
Mrs. Cowper’s living room couldn’t have been more different.
Author Surrogate, Self Insert, "Mary Sue"
In art, the "self insert" has been a common device since the Renaissance when artists included their own image in their paintings. Some of these paintings included other portraits of well-known contemporaries as a "group" portrait.
• Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife
• Raphael, The School of Athens
• Michelangelo, The Last Judgment
• Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath
• Jacques-Louis David, The Coronation of the Emperor Napoleon I and the Crowning of the Empress Joséphine in Notre-Dame Cathedral on December 2, 1804
A more modern equivalent could be Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearances in his films. Woody Allen does the same in his.
Self Insert
This literary device should not be confused with a first-person narrator, an author surrogate, or a character somewhat based on the author, whether the author includes it intentionally or not. Many characters have been described as unintentional self-insertions, implying that their author is unconsciously using them as an author surrogate:
• The Razor's Edge, Somerset Maugham.
• Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
• The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
• The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
• The Divine Comedy, Dante
• The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
• Ariadne Oliver, in Agatha Christie's Poirot novels
Author Surrogate
As a literary technique, an author surrogate is a fictional character based on the author. The author surrogate may be disguised, with a different name, or may be quite close to the author, with the same name. Some writers use author surrogates to express philosophical or political views in the narrative; some may do so for humorous or surrealistic effect.
Frequently, the author surrogate is the same as the main character and also often the narrator. For example, the author surrogate may deliver a political diatribe that expresses the author's beliefs, or expound on the strengths and weaknesses of other characters, thereby directly expressing the author's opinion. Philosophers and writers may use author-surrogates to express their personal positions, especially if these are unpopular or run counter to established views.
Author Surrogate
A surrogate's life may be quite similar to the author's. For example, James Clavell uses the character Peter Marlowe to write about his experience as a prisoner of war with the Japanese during World War II and as a Hollywood writer who visits Hong Kong to research a book on its trading companies.
"Mary Sue"
An author surrogate is a frequent device in amateur or hobbyist writing, so much so that fan fiction critics have evolved the term Mary Sue to refer to an idealized author surrogate.
The term "Mary Sue" is thought to evoke the cliché of adolescent authors who use writing to idealize themselves rather than entertain or inform others.
For male author surrogates, similar-sounding names such as 'Gary Stu' are occasionally used.
Note: as the author of adolescent fiction, the Alex Rider series, for example, Horowitz is probably familiar with this device.
Breakout Room Question
Why is Anthony Horowitz playing this game with his readers? What is he saying
about real life and imaginative fiction? What are we supposed to learn from this?
Curious question: over the past couple of years, we've lived a very limited real, in- person, existence, with only a handful of people. But we have also lived a much larger virtual existence.
Is that anything like this novel?
Final Thought
So, would it be fair to say that this is not a murder mystery, but is in fact a book about writing a novel. The murder mystery is the story contained within the larger novel, and that novel is about how a writer writes. It's about the real world that authors inhabit and the imaginative world they live in when they create it through writing.
AH the author moves in and out of the imaginative frame he has created, and plays both roles—author and character—in his own fiction.
But, then, as readers, don't we too enter the imaginative fiction of the book we're reading, living in it for a while, then emerge.
Final Thought
But then, as Shakespeare said:
“the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact. . . . The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to Heaven, and, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. " (Midsummer Night's Dream)