Anthony Horowitz

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and six.

Presenter0:27

My Castaway this week is one of Britain's foremost T V dramatists and children's writers, Anthony Horowitz. His prodigious output ranges from his numerous T V Whodunits, including Poirot, Midsummer Murders, and Foyle's War, to a slew of novels, most notably the Alex Ryder series about a fourteen year old secret agent. His approach is cheerfully populist. His last book knocked Harry Potter off the number one spot in the children's bestseller list, and he says his purpose is to entertain.

Presenter0:57

But the breadth of his appeal masks how for him writing has always been an intensely private pursuit.

Presenter1:03

After surviving a desperately unhappy childhood, it was, he claims, only through writing that he found himself. What was it about writing that unlocked your sense of self,

Anthony Horowitz1:14

Well, my childhood wasn't wasn't entirely unhappy. I mean, i I sometimes feel a bit embarrassed, you know, having brought being brought up by such wealthy parents and given such a good education to claim an unhappy childhood, although every every kids' writer does need one. What was unhappy for me was a school I was sent to, Worley Farm, uh, where I was sent in nineteen sixty three, which was very cold and very difficult for me. And it was at that time, between ages eight to thirteen, that I discovered books and the library and telling stories, and discovered that I was only really going to be happy when I had a pen in my hand, or a book in my hand, and so it really was um a great escape for me.

Presenter1:47

Fascinating that you say that every writer needs one. Why does every writer need an unhappy at least an unhappy part of their childhood?

Anthony Horowitz1:51

No, it's not.

Anthony Horowitz1:54

Well, I think that um all writing does come out of tension to a certain extent, and certainly uh for a children's author I think that having missed out on some of the fun of childhood and and feeling that childhood was taken away from me or lost to me to a certain extent helps me to try and recreate it in my books.

Presenter2:09

What about the the unashamedly populist nature of your writing? Was it always your intention to write for the masses?

Anthony Horowitz2:16

Well, I think that a that a book only or a story only really exists when it's told to a lot of people. I mean if I tell you a story then it has a small flicker of life in it. If I tell ten people then it's doing better. But if I can tell that same story to a million people I think the story is up there and running. It was always my intention to write for as many people as possible because what I am doing after all is writing fairly simple stories. I'm not doing anything that's very deep or serious or meaningful or even important.

Presenter2:38

I mentioned that you knocked J. K. Rowling from the top of the bestseller list this summer. At the same time, you had six other novels in that top twenty children's bestseller list. You've said that J. K. Rowling almost made it acceptable to be a children's author. What do you mean by that?

Anthony Horowitz2:53

Well, before JK Rowling it was quite embarrassing to say that you were a children's author, because the whole world was so different then. After the success and all the all the money of JK Rowling are made, uh suddenly it became not just respectable to be a children's author, but to become uh it was actually s something that you could be quite proud of, almost like a sort of modern pop star. So the whole world has changed now, and to be a children's author is a real accolade.

Presenter3:14

And are you treated better by well, let's say your publishers? I mean, does everybody sort of fet you in a way they didn't before?

Anthony Horowitz3:19

Well, publishers always treat their authors terribly, of course, uh and and all they really want is more and more of the same. Uh but I don't think we're treated differently, but I think that children's books are treated better, which is which is great.

Presenter3:31

Anthony, what's your first record?

Anthony Horowitz3:33

Well going back to my childhood, this is a piece of Chopin. I've played Chopin very, very badly all my life. And one of the very happiest memories that I do have of my childhood is uh listening to my mother, having lessons. She was taught by a very good concert pianist called Bernard Vitebski, and at the end of a lesson, as a special treat for me, he would sometimes play the revolutionary study. And I just remember thinking that it was impossible for a human being's fingers to move as fast as his. So that's my first choice.

Presenter4:58

Chopin's study in C minor, the revolutionary study, played by Vladimir Horowitz, no relation, Antony Horowitz, um chosen there for the memory of your mother's piano teacher and his mastery of the keys. Your parents were very well off.

Anthony Horowitz5:04

And make a whisper.

Anthony Horowitz5:12

Extremely, yes.

Presenter5:13

Uh tell us about life at home.

Anthony Horowitz5:14

It was very strange. I mean, if if I'd been living in sort of eighteenth century Versailles, it would have been fine, but twentieth century North London it was a bit odd. Uh my father I know I still to this day don't quite know what he did. He was a solicitor, I think, but uh he was involved in sort of very mysterious circles. My mother was a sort of a socialite playing bridge and disappearing for tea parties and charity events. We lived in a huge house with servants and vast gardens. And it was a sort of very arid existence. You know, looking back on it now, it was sort of emotionally very empty. I'm very fond of my parents, you know. They they were, I think, in their own way very good to me, but they were at the same time, my father in particular, very distant. So you know, we're talking about a gong ringing at seven o'clock for dinner and servants serving it and if the conversation at the table wasn't good enough you were up to the nursery with the sort of the dread words you w waited to hear. And it was just this sort of extraordinary formality of it all, ah, so out of place, as I say, among sort of, you know, middle class Jews in Stanmore.

Presenter6:07

You say you're not quite sure what your father did. That seems extraordinary that you didn't actually know the job that your father occupied.

Anthony Horowitz6:12

He was a very mysterious man. I mean he was given to sort of ciphers and codes and secrets and uh you know I I have a memory in in my teens once of of going across London on a motorbike carrying a hundred thousand pounds in bearer bonds to deliver to a an office somewhere pretending to be from a security company. Now he never told me that by the way would be worth about half a million now I guess but um he never told me w where the money had come from, who it was going to, why I had to pretend to be a s uh a dispatch rider and all the rest of it. That was how he was and of course when he died all the money disappeared. I put it in a Swiss bank somewhere and and left a series of code books behind, but no ciphers. So we went from everything to nothing almost overnight.

Presenter6:50

As an adult, then, d do you wonder whether there was in fact any money left?

Anthony Horowitz6:55

We wonder if some of his colleagues took it. We wonder sometimes if it existed at all. My mother, after his death, did make a few trips to Switzerland to try and track it down, because, you know, all his business schemes had sort of turned into a s into a nightmare. I just have vivid memories of those two weeks after he died living with her and as these terrible letters came in, you know, Dear Mrs. Horowitz, we're so sorry to hear about the death of your husband. PSU O has a hundred thousand pounds. And whether he was a fantasist, whether he really was wealthy to this day, I I just don't know.

Presenter7:21

Uh you mentioned before the first record that your childhood was taken away from you.

Anthony Horowitz7:26

Yes, I think that's true to a certain extent. I look at photographs of myself when I'm sort of seven and eight, and compare them with photographs of my children, who are sort of romping about and having fun, and I'm always sort of standing rather primly and stiffly. I was not the most attractive of children, being rather sort of more round than I was tall, as I recall, but uh there is a sort of a s a peculiar sort of old fashionedness about the the photos of my childhood, which don't seem to tally with the fact that I'm not that old really. I wasn't quite born in Victorian era.

Presenter7:51

In nineteen ninety four you wrote a book called Granny.

Anthony Horowitz7:54

Yes, that's that was based on my grandmother, my mother's mother, who was a a a completely horrible woman. I mean, it is it is quite remarkable how horrible she managed to be, a a a waste of life, really, who sucked everything into herself.

Presenter8:07

Can you give us examples of what sort of things she would do?

Anthony Horowitz8:10

Well, it's difficult to give examples because they'll all sound petty and slight and small. But it was it was the demands of it. When my mother became terribly ill I just one example and was dying of cancer, in terrible pain, my grandmother would ring her every week to shout at her, to to boss her about. Why haven't you done my shopping? Who's going to help with my laundry? Why can't you uh sort out the broken light in my kitchen? And my mother was in bed dying. She was dying but she would still drag herself out of bed to go and service this this spider at the heart of the web. Most most evil in this world, you know, is not big evil, it's little, it's petty. And she was a a prima face example of that. I should say that the book I wrote about her, Granny, turns her into a joke, and I'm quite proud of the fact that in her death she's actually managed to make people laugh and smile, which she certainly never did when she was living.

Presenter8:57

Given what an important part she played in in your childhood, what what happened when she died? Well, the funny thing about her death is.

Anthony Horowitz9:05

She was stuck in an old people's home, uh, on her own. My mother had died, my father was dead, and the only person who went to visit her, ever, was me. I was suddenly stuck, dutifully, because I knew that my mother would want this. Uh, going to see her once a week or once every two weeks, uh, and trying to chat to her and trying to be nice to her. And this is an awful thing, but we had a terrible row one day. I finally lost it with her, and got very upset and said, you know, how much she'd hurt my mother, and how awful she'd been. I I just got it off my chest. I shouldn't have done it, because the next day she dropped dead. That was it. It was always as if the truth was just too much. And, um uh that was the end of it.

Presenter9:41

And how did you feel when she was gone?

Anthony Horowitz9:43

Relieved.

Anthony Horowitz9:44

My brother, my sister, and I famously danced on her grave.

Presenter9:47

Literally.

Anthony Horowitz9:47

We literally did a a small tango, not one of the pieces of music I've chosen you'll be glad to hear, but um we just suddenly realized that we needed to put this ghost to rest. And so remembering the phrase Dance on the Grave, we decided to do just that, and uh uh I think we did a little a little uh can can actually was what it was.

Presenter10:03

Did it make you feel better?

Anthony Horowitz10:04

Much.

Presenter10:05

What's your next record?

Anthony Horowitz10:06

Um going into my teens, I think it's impossible for a man of my age not to have been influenced in some way by the Beatles. Ah, I mean, I grew up with them all the time and and they were always around, and so I've chosen Ellen Rigby, which is my favorite song.

Speaker 410:32

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in her church where her wedding has been Lives in a dream, waits at the window, Wearing the face that she keeps in her jar by the door

Presenter10:50

The Beatles and Eleanor Rigby. The words are the thing there for you, Anthony Horowitz.

Anthony Horowitz10:54

It's a it's a brilliantly written song. I do love the words, that's right, yes.

Presenter10:57

The character of Alex Ryder, who is this schoolboy hero in your HIT series of children's novels, he's been described as a sort of 007 in Nikes. Where did he come from?

Anthony Horowitz11:09

Well, I suppose he came from Ian Fleming to start with, I have to admit it. Uh the influence both of the books which I read in my early teens and loved, and also the films which were a very big event, and the early ones, Doctor No Goldfinger from Russia with Love, were m my happiest times at the cinema were spent watching them. Uh so there is a little bit of bond in there, but at the same time he's a very modern boy, Alex. Um and he's a composite, really. There's a a little bit of Myan Sons in him. There's a son of a friend of mine was that was a model for him. And he's many modern kids that I've met.

Presenter11:36

Is any of him the boy you would have wanted to be?

Anthony Horowitz11:40

No, because I was never really an action boy. I mean, I knew from a very early age that I was not going to be an adventurer. I had heroes like Shackleton, the Explorer, a long time hero of mine, but I knew that that wasn't me. I was always going to be the boy sitting in the corner with the paper and the pen. So I never imagined myself as a spy. I imagined myself as somebody who might write about spies, which is what I then did.

Presenter11:59

And all this imagining was going on then when you were sent away to boarding school, aged eight.

Anthony Horowitz12:04

Yeah, you know, I I I have sort of uncomfortable memories of the place. I'm talking about teachers who were allowed to beat kids for a start, beat you until you bled. I mean, growing up in this sort of environment that seemed

Anthony Horowitz12:15

designed entirely to turn you into a sort of a twisted individual. I mean, I was saved, I think, from all that by books, by my writing.

Presenter12:22

It was their mental as well as physical humiliation.

Anthony Horowitz12:24

Yes, all the time. I mean, I was made to stand up in front of all the school and told that I wasn't invited to Christmas this year, because I was such a a bad boy. I don't think that's a good thing to do to a kid. I really don't. And, you know, I went back to Orley Farm about five or six years ago and uh to visit. It's all modern now, it's all changed, of course, but they have kept the core exactly as it was, sort of the old crumbling lockers, the headmaster's study, the the slightly uneven floor and the dining hall. And when I walked into that place I absolutely froze solid. Something happened to me. I'm not a very emotional person, but but I found I was sweating, my heart was sort of palpitating, I could barely breathe, and it was at that moment, as a visiting author at Orley Farm, that I realized just how much damage that place really had done to me.

Presenter13:07

Were your parents aware at the time of how unhappy you were?

Anthony Horowitz13:09

You know what's so weird is this. If I if my kids every time they were going back to school began to scream and to cry and to go on sort of crashed diet so they weren't going to be teased about being fat, which they aren't, but if if they were doing all that sort of stuff, I would know something was wrong and I would pull them out of the school pretty fast. Now, I did all that, but my parents never thought about pulling me out of the place and just, you know, get on with it, go there. Now, they weren't cruel people. I just think it was the time, you know, that um that you know, if you had paid for that sort of education, the sort of the the spirit was your kid just got on with it, your child had to put up with it. So it is surprising to me, though, that they didn't question it more, why I was so unhappy and so unsuccessful there.

Presenter13:48

What's your next record?

Anthony Horowitz13:49

Well, my parents sent me to um Sunday school as well to to learn the Jewish religion, which had the immediate effect, of course, of turning me into an atheist, which I've been all my life ever since. But if I were going to turn to to God on your island, I guess this piece of music might help convert me. It's um Out of the Gloria by Vivaldi.

Speaker 414:20

God's carelessness of creative.

Presenter15:01

At Interra Pat's Omnibus and On Earth Peace to Men from Vivaldi's Gloria performed by the Taverno Consort and players led by Andrew Parrott.

Presenter15:09

You've described fourteen-year-olds as the coolest people on the planet. Why is that?

Anthony Horowitz15:14

I think I was slightly misquoted on that. I uh what I do believe is that the years thirteen and fourteen are a very wonderful and special time in your life. It's that very brief window between when you're not quite a child any more and are you quite an adult, the in-between years, where anything really is possible, you're finding yourself. You know, thirteen and fourteen was when I was writing my first books and and becoming a writer. So I I very much like writing about that, that uh age range.

Presenter15:39

Those first books that you were writing, what were you writing about?

Anthony Horowitz15:42

My early books. Um, adventure stories. I think one of them was about Guy Fawkes trying to blow up Parliament, something I still sometimes think about blowing up Parliament that is. And um it was just before I got into sort of sixteen and seventeen when I began to write about death the whole time. So I was still writing sort of fun stuff at that age.

Presenter15:43

Um

Presenter15:58

And you knew you were going to be a writer.

Anthony Horowitz16:00

I knew from the age of eight. I mean, I knew when I was as as as my first day at Orley Farm, I you know, as soon as I was there and discovered the library and and discovered story telling, there was never any doubt in my mind. It helps that I'm no good at anything else, you know, so it wasn't exactly a sort of a huge amount of choices being dangled in front of me, it was it was right or poverty, uh, and I think I chose well.

Presenter16:20

What is the feeling you get? What was the feeling then and now you get when you're writing?

Anthony Horowitz16:24

huge pleasure, more um than you can uh begin to imagine. I mean, I write with a pen and ink and I love the scratch of the nib on the paper, I love watching the words form, I love it when phrases come together in your mind and when a sentence works out well, I love the rhythm of the books, I love the stories, I love the surprises. It is just the most enormous fun writing for me. It always has been, always will be, a real passion. So the process of writing is one which gives me enormous and sustained pleasure.

Presenter16:49

You are a father of two teenage boys. Do your boys ever advise you on the contents of your books?

Anthony Horowitz16:53

They're both brilliant critics. They're very, very good. My older son, Nicholas, is great on some of the sort of sporting side of things. My younger son is also uh Cassian has got w a wonderful sense of um humour and and is great about sort of helping me with jokes and and he's great on structure and if a paragraph is boring he'll be the first person to tell me. Both the kids are are great in it, they're fearless, they won't um hold back if they don't like what I'm doing.

Presenter17:15

What's your next record?

Anthony Horowitz17:16

Oh, this is a slightly odd one. I'm a great fan of Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director, and one of my favourite films of his is Moulin Rouge. And although some of your listeners, I fear, may find this sort of a slightly unpleasant noise, it's a piece of music which I just love, and I can see myself on the island dancing naked under the palm trees to the sound of the tango out of Moulin Rouge.

Speaker 417:38

Mr. Rocks.

Speaker 317:40

Yeah.

Speaker 317:42

You don't have to sell your money to the night.

Speaker 417:50

Yeah.

Speaker 317:50

Uh

Speaker 317:50

Uh

Speaker 417:50

On your face.

Speaker 417:53

His hand upon your hand His lips caress your skin

Speaker 318:02

Uh

Speaker 418:02

It's more than I can stand.

Presenter18:07

Ewan MacGregor, Jose Feliciano, and Yatzik Komen singing El Tango de Roxanne from the soundtrack of Moulin Rouge, and images of you there, Anthony Horowitz, on the desert island, dancing naked under the palm trees. You had your first novel published at the age of twenty two. What was it about?

Anthony Horowitz18:24

It was about a very, very rich and unpleasant boy, isn't that a surprise? who sort of takes over the world.

Presenter18:29

So at twenty two, I mean a young age to have it first published, and and suddenly Hollywood came calling at the same time.

Anthony Horowitz18:34

That's right. I mean, it was all very strange. I mean, the t why did I write a children's book in the first place? To this day, I don't know, other than that it was wet and I was bored. Um and then yes, Disney optioned the book. I mean nothing came of it, but there was a time when suddenly every producer in Hollywood seemed to be holding my book and I was out there for two or three weeks writing the screenplay and uh it was like a weird dream which sort of burst quite suddenly and I woke up and I was back in London again. But uh it was an interesting start.

Presenter18:57

So there was their son, a published novelist, at the age of twenty-two. What did your parents make of that?

Anthony Horowitz19:01

So unfortunately my father was already dead. He never saw me published, which does make me sad, because, you know, he didn't ever encourage me very much, and and I would have liked to have shown him I could do it. My mother, on the other hand, was absolutely thrilled. She used to say that every bad character I invented was based on her, which wasn't true. Uh but she loved it and she loved the excitement of it and seeing the books in the shops. She was the first one to be going into the shops and pulling them up from the bottom shelf and putting them on the tables.

Presenter19:23

You said that your mother then had to go on this journey of trying to unpick his finances and there were lots of bills that needed paying and that she didn't know how to get hold of your father's money to pay the bills. Did you feel in any way robbed of this life that you'd had? I mean, you'd lived a very lavish lifestyle up until then.

Anthony Horowitz19:39

Um no, because the life that I lost wasn't actually a life I hadn't particularly enjoyed, so losing it didn't bother me at all, on the contrary. My mother and I spent uh five or six years living in Stamore. We we sold everything and she bought a very l little cottage and went back to work, and I think both of us were happier in that time than we had ever been before. You know, she loved actually earning her own money and saving up for little treats and and then really enjoying those treats, and it really taught me something about wanting and about needing and about how good for you that can be.

Presenter20:14

Given that you were writing so early in your life, it seems that almost the purpose of writing was to cut yourself off from the the childhood that you've had. Is would that be a fair analysis?

Anthony Horowitz20:22

When I began writing at school that was true. When I began writing to be published, it was to entertain people, purely and simply, nothing more than that. You know, I never in my entire life wrote a single word to earn money. That's never been the point of writing for me. The point of writing is to tell stories and to have fun.

Presenter20:40

Answer, what's your next record?

Anthony Horowitz20:42

Well, the the greatest mainstay of my life has been Jill Greene, who is the producer of Foil's War, to whom I should also add I am I am married and have been for uh gosh seventeen or eighteen years now and I think that probably I would not survive long on this island without her, would need something to remember her by and this song Billy Joel She's Always a Woman was I think playing the very first time we met and whenever I hear it anyway perhaps it's a lyrics I always think of her.

Speaker 421:10

She just changes her mind.

Speaker 421:15

And shall promise you more than the Garden of Eden.

Speaker 421:20

And she'll carelessly cut you and laugh while you're bleeding.

Speaker 421:25

But you'll bring out the best and the worst you can be Blame it all on yourself, cause she's always a woman to me

Presenter21:39

Billy Joel and She's Always a Woman. Memories of some of those fresh dates with your wife, Jill. Y you were working at the time in advertising?

Anthony Horowitz21:46

That's how we met. Yes, she was the account director and I was the copywriter and uh it was one of those sort of mutual hatred at first sight, in fact. Um she demanded to be taken off any accounts that I was working on and I did my best to avoid her. And yet at the same time I knew

Anthony Horowitz22:00

I think from the first time I met her that that I would marry her, that we would get married. I don't know why, she was just sort of stronger and and more s more more more special than anyone I'd ever met.

Presenter22:11

What did she hate about you?

Anthony Horowitz22:13

Oh, everything. Uh my arrogance, I think she said, and the the fact that I was so sort of determined in my writing that it had to be done my way and I wouldn't listen to anybody else, and all that sort of thing. Uh and my dress sense, also, which which he quickly got to work on.

Anthony Horowitz22:28

But uh but it didn't last long. We went on a date to Alton Towers, our very first ever date was Alton Towers. I have a love of fun fairs, and we got friendly there.

Presenter22:34

The nineteen eighties, of course, uh famously a boom time in advertising. W were you a good copywriter?

Anthony Horowitz22:40

No, I wasn't a very good copywriter. Most of my um our lines tended to rhyme, like our Tanzan Torres, and You Can't Say No to a Cheaper Toe or Would Quiet Desperation Air Linger's Please Ring Us. Uh we didn't get that account. So I wasn't very good, I'm afraid. I never had any interest in the products. That was the trouble, and I was only doing it really to mark time while my novels took off.

Presenter22:59

The volume of your output is almost as striking as your success. How how much time do you spend writing?

Anthony Horowitz23:05

I write every single day, uh, certainly, sometimes up to about ten hours a day, never less than about five. Uh but as I say, you know, people say how how are you so disciplined? But discipline is stopping, not starting. I love what I do, therefore I have to remind myself at some stage in my day that there is a world out there, but I do have a family, I have even got one or two friends here and there, uh, but I should get out and see them. So

Anthony Horowitz23:27

That's how I work. It sounds compulsive. I wouldn't go that far. I don't think I'm compulsive. I love it. That's all. What's your next drawing? Um

Anthony Horowitz23:35

Oh, this is a uh another piece of religious music, although modern classical. Uh one of the few regrets I have in my long career is that I was invited to write a play for the National Youth Theatre many, many years ago on Crystal Night, and I still regret to this day not doing it. Ed Wilson, the director, uh invited me and it was a it was one of the very few mistakes I've made and he played me a piece of music to inspire me, and that is the piece of music that I'm going to play now, which is Go Down Moses from Sir Michael Tippett's A Child in Our Time.

Speaker 424:02

Is not my sky your first born day?

Presenter24:56

John Shirley Quirk singing Go Down Moses from Sir Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time. I mentioned in the introduction Midsummer Murders and Foyle's War and Poirot. You've also written Murder Most Horrid, Murder in Mind. We the viewer seem to have an insatiable appetite for these murder mysteries. Do you have any moral dilemma, if you like, about murder as a sort of cosy Sunday night entertainment?

Anthony Horowitz25:21

No, none at all. I mean murder has been used by every great writer since writing began, uh as an excuse for a story. What I'm writing about is something quite different than murder is, if you like, only an excuse for it.

Presenter25:32

What about that then? Because something like Midsummer Murders is almost absurd in its gentility. We've we've got other uh programmes like Cracker or Prime Suspect that are very real and gritty and try to get us closer to the nature of the crime as it exists.

Anthony Horowitz25:46

Well Midsummer Murder Trial I haven't written now for many years was really just an excuse to revisit an England which of course never really existed in the first place. But you know I'm much more proud of the work I've done now on Foyle's War where again these aren't really murder stories at all. Yes there's a murder every week but our in Foyle's War the murder is always almost irrelevant because we're talking about th you know stories that m interest me much much more about the Second World War and the Home Front and the RAF and all the different characters around that time. You know the murder is the excuse. Let's get now to the real story.

Presenter26:13

We hear a lot of drama writers bemoan the fact that a lot of these murder mysteries have in fact edged out more creative writing, an ability for writers to to show the viewer something new, something that they might not have known they wanted, but once they watch it they really enjoy it.

Anthony Horowitz26:26

I think it's a fair point. Um, you know, there are too many detectives on television, but television is itself shifting so much and changing so so terribly in so many different ways. Uh to complain about the amount of murder on television is a bit like complaining about how many ice cubes there were on board the Titanic. It's sort of a it's a very small part of a much bigger picture and a and a picture which is not a very happy one.

Presenter26:45

What's your next record?

Anthony Horowitz26:47

Um, going back to the theatre again, uh, I still have very strong memories of going with my sister Caroline to see Guys and Dolls many, many years ago at the National Theatre. Quite simply the most wonderful uh evening uh in of going to the theatre I think I've ever had. And it occurs to me that this song, Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat, uh following a storm is again good music for a desert island.

Speaker 427:07

For the people all said, Beware, you'll have a heavy track.

Speaker 427:12

People all said beware, you'll scuttle the ship And the devil will drag you under by the fancy tide around your wicked float Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down Sit down, you're rockin' a boat

Speaker 427:25

And as I laughed at those passengers to heaven,

Speaker 427:30

A great big wave came and rushed me overboard and as I sank

Presenter27:38

David Healy singing Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat from the original National Theatre cast recording of Guys and Dolls. The disturbing parts of your childhood that enabled you to write that initially motivated you to live inside your head and to exercise the problems on the page. Of course, they've given you all of this material and it's been rich rewards for you.

Presenter28:01

Would you rather have had a normal, happy, regular childhood and no success, or have had the childhood you have and the success you have?

Anthony Horowitz28:09

Uh that's a wonderful question. I'm very, very h happy with the way things have turned out in my life. I really am. And uh I don't think I'd have changed anything of it much, uh really and it's difficult to answer the question honestly because at the time going through Orley Farm and and being so unhappy with myself and what I was uh maybe that wa maybe it would have been better then but but I wouldn't have known what would have happened next. And what's happened next for me has been so good, Alex Ryder and the other books and and all the rest of it that um that I you know, one goes with the other. So I wouldn't have changed anything, I suppose.

Presenter28:43

Do you envy your children their childhood?

Anthony Horowitz28:45

Oh, horribly. When I go and visit them at their school I I just seethe with envy and jealousy and and they're so, you know, young and healthy and they've got such attractive friends, girls and guys, and and you know, they're all so sporty and they're doing so well. I just sit there green with envy and anger.

Presenter29:00

Do you think that given their lives have been so straightforward, relatively straightforward, that in a way they won't be motivated to reach the higher points that you have, to to strive in some way to to run ahead of their life?

Anthony Horowitz29:13

Your question suggests that you've got to beat your kids around to get something good out of them at the other end, which is you know, do you need adversity? Do you need misfortune to succeed? No, I don't think you do. And I don't think for a minute that my children will um

Anthony Horowitz29:26

will be either boring or unhappy in their in their in their later years. Uh to an extent I try not to look forward. I think it's very dangerous for a father to sort of have too many ideas about what their kids are going to be or to do. You know, my job is to get them to eighteen, well educated and sort of rounded and and basically nice people. I think I've done that. What happens next? You know, they can't disappoint me if I don't have too many expectations for them. And, you know, they're on their own from that I'll I'll always be there for them, but after this point they're sort of on their own.

Presenter29:55

What's your final, your eighth record?

Anthony Horowitz29:57

I spend a great deal of time in Suffolk, where I'm probably at my happiest. I absolutely love it up there, particularly in Orford, a village on the coast, which is where I go to write and where I feel comfortable. Even if most of the residents do seem to be drunk most of the time, it is still a wonderful place to go. And I can't go to Suffolk without thinking of Benjamin Britton, who is buried at Alborough, just down the coast, and whose work was often premiered in Orford. And I once went to a semi-professional production of an opera called Albert Herring in St Bartholomew's Church in Orford. It's a very light, rather silly opera in many ways, but in the middle of it there's this absolutely wonderful requiem, but just seems to come out of nowhere, and I'd like to choose that.

Speaker 430:44

Let the trends of smallest strength, fight and sleep and morning.

Speaker 430:57

So I sigh for you, that's what to die, and lives to eternal eternal

Speaker 431:12

Within a sense here.

Speaker 331:24

Oh my god.

Presenter31:31

In the Midst of Life is Death from Benjamin Britton's Albert Herring, recorded live at Jubilee Hall in Aldborough in nineteen sixty four. So, Anthony, you have, of course, the complete works of Shakspere and the Bible. What's your third book going to be on this island?

Anthony Horowitz31:44

Well

Anthony Horowitz31:46

I really think that if I'm going to be stuck there for any length of time I'm going to need to improve myself. So I'm not going to take fiction or anything too enjoyable. What I'd like is a large French dictionary, so I can improve my French and feel that if I was rescued, or rather when I am rescued, I'd actually learned something and done something. And of course I could thank my rescuers in pretty fluent French.

Presenter32:04

It's yours and the luxury.

Anthony Horowitz32:06

Well, I'm wondering if you're going to allow me to take my dog, Lucky, because he's.

Presenter32:09

I'm not. I'm afraid I'm not.

Anthony Horowitz32:10

So he is going to die quite soon. I mean, he's very old, and so I thought I could have him stuffed and have him there, or turn him into a hat, perhaps.

Presenter32:10

Uh

Presenter32:18

You can have him there stuffed, you can't have him there alive.

Anthony Horowitz32:19

Oh

Anthony Horowitz32:20

Oh dear Let's go back on that then. I can't bear the notion of killing my own poor dog. I'm going to be very boring then and ask you for what is so obvious will me. I'll take my fountain pen, but you're also going to have to give me a very large amount of paper and some ink uh copious amounts of both.

Presenter32:38

That you are allowed and if the waves were to threaten to wash away your music, which one would you run through the sand to save?

Anthony Horowitz32:43

Oh, I think the Villy Joel.

Presenter32:46

Anthony Horowitz, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island disc.

Anthony Horowitz32:48

Thank you.

Presenter32:56

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.