If you have teenagers you'll have heard of Anthony Horowitz, whose Alex Rider novels have sold millions of copies. His own life is as intriguing as his 14-year-old hero's, writes Louise East.
A training in espionage might not be essential for getting into Anthony Horowitz's apartment, but it would help. At an anonymous door on a busy London street, I press one of three unmarked buzzers and a disembodied voice gives me a four-number code for the lift. Inside there is no sign of a lift and no one to ask. The high-ceilinged lobby is empty but for a few framed film and television posters, their titles offering clues: Stormbreaker, The Gathering, Foyle's War.
The lift, it turns out, is concealed in a cupboard. It is tiny but high-tech, with bright green AstroTurf on the floor. A large sign orders me to stay off the grass. I scan the lift for hidden cameras, then punch in the code; the lift whirrs into action. On the third floor the doors glide open to reveal a huge loft-style apartment.
A beautiful grand piano stands in one corner, an enormous sheepskin-covered divan in another. One wall is given over to oak shelving full of first editions; another holds a plasma-screen TV; a third, stretching along the front of the building, has several huge windows looking out on St Paul's Cathedral.
A voice floats down a staircase - "Are you in?" - and Anthony Horowitz descends from his study, a lolloping brown Labrador called Lucky at his side.
If you have no teenagers in your life, you may not have heard of Horowitz, but, one way or another, you almost certainly know his work. As the man behind the Alex Rider novels, in which a reluctant 14-year-old spy repeatedly saves the world, Horowitz has a profile to rival JK Rowling's. The six Alex Rider novels have sold four million copies in Ireland and the UK, spawning a film, Stormbreaker, released earlier this year and prompting the UK education secretary to hail Horowitz as the author to keep teenage boys reading.
That alone would probably pay for a plasma screen or two, but Horowitz, who wrote his first children's book some 21 years before he hit the big time with Alex Rider, has another, rather impressive string to his bow. With his wife, Jill Green, he created and wrote the Bafta-winning Foyle's Warand wrote episodes of several other midmarket-television classics, including Murder in Mind, Poirotand the enduringly popular Midsomer Murders. "The two words I contributed to the English language: Midsomer murders," he says wryly. "They were going to call the series Barnaby until I came along."
Right now, though, there's an online clock on Horowitz's blog, ticking down the seconds until his extremely avid fans get their hands on the seventh Alex Rider novel, Snakehead. Horowitz is poised to embark on a blitz of signings, appearances and talks in Dublin, London and across Europe, and he admits he's nervous. "The greatest pleasure about writing for kids is that they're so voracious in their enthusiasm. They don't read a book; they live it. It's great, but it means I have this terrible, terrible fear of disappointing them."
Snakeheadis unlikely to do so. It has a timely dissection of people-smuggling and Chinese gangs, with a conference on climate change led by a rock star called Rob "Bob Geldof" Goldman, a colourfully vile criminal in the shape of Maj Winston Yu, and - what will please Alex Rider fans most - revelations about Alex's mysterious past.
The secret of the books' success, according to Horowitz, is that he takes Alex seriously. "The heroes of my other books are just kids having fun. They're very aware they're in a children's book, and they stay more or less the same throughout the book. With Alex I made a conscious decision that this was someone who would live in the real world and react to the real world. He's manipulated and pushed into adventures he doesn't want, and that gives a richness to the whole thing that kids respond to."
Very little about the Alex Rider books panders to a whimsical view of childhood. Their punchy metallic covers blend almost seamlessly with adult blockbusters'; inside they're stuffed with colourfully gory deaths and plots built from the stuff of news: crime syndicates, chemical warfare, space tourism and nanotechnology.
The idea of writing "an adult book for children" came to Horowitz at the same time as a realisation that James Bond was looking a little too old to be snowboarding. "One day it occurred to me that to be really cool, James Bond would have to be a teenager."
Although he looks boyish, Horowitz is 51, and he is acutely aware of the age gap between himself and his audience. He has always relied on his sons, 18-year-old Nicholas and 16-year-old Cassian, for editorial input - "Cassian in particular lets me know what is cringe" - and to give him feedback on the extreme sports at which Alex Rider excels: scuba-diving, white-water rafting, snowboarding and the like.
Research has taken Horowitz to the top of industrial cranes, on to oil rigs and container ships, and across the glass roof of London's Science Museum. "One of the great things about being a children's author is that people are extremely generous with their time and access." So far, only the people in charge of Air Force One have turned him down.
That research is all important, because although Horowitz doffs his cap to Ian Fleming ("a guiding light"), Len Deighton's reluctant spy Harry Palmer and the muddy loyalties of John le Carré, the Alex Rider series's most obvious equivalent is television and film. "It's a visual generation I'm writing for, kids who have grown up with plasma screens, telephones, computer games and MTV. They're highly trained in visual awareness, and, therefore, a book has to create pictures in their heads."
This willingness to tell a cracking good story, without getting bogged down in the overtly literary, was what earned Horowitz the praise of Alan Johnson when he was education secretary. "First time a new Labour minister ever said anything I agreed with," Horowitz says with a snort. "Broadly, what he was saying was quite intelligent: that books don't have to be literature to be valuable. They can be just a good read, and that's a good start in reading."
As to the renaissance in children's literature and to its huge crossover appeal, Horowitz is convinced it has something to do with the morally dubious times in which we live. "I think we need to find moral absolutes, because they're missing in life. Look at Guantánamo: are we the good guys or the bad guys? Extraordinary rendition: same question. Even consumerism: everything we eat, the holidays we take, we're now being told is destroying the planet.
"With Alex Rider there is absolutely no doubt that he is a force for good, just as Scorpia or Maj Winston Yu are, without any question, evil. They provide this black-and-white world which we once understood and no longer do."
If Horowitz's current existence sounds like the ultimate teen fantasy of being a grown-up - even down to a huge bowl of chocolates on the kitchen table - his childhood was equally fantastical, if not quite so dreamy. Born to extremely wealthy parents in north London, Horowitz was sent to an old-fashioned prep school at the age of eight, where he was beaten regularly, before being parcelled on to public school.
Then, in a moment straight out of one of his books, Horowitz's very wealthy father died, leaving the family's money in a Swiss account without having told anyone the details.
"That was all part and parcel of this very weird childhood with a father who was not, I think, criminal himself but certainly involved with people who were very dubious. He died and the money disappeared overnight," he says, pausing. "I've never for a single second been sorry about it. If they found the money now and said, 'Look, Anthony, there's a vault here with your name on it,' I don't think I'd want to know."
That odd, and unsettling, childhood provided for Horowitz in other ways, though. As a 22-year-old copywriter he skived off work one rainy afternoon and wrote his first children's book. "What made me do it? To this day I don't know, but it probably had something to do with this awkward and unhappy childhood. The emotional barrenness of it, and its violent and cruel edges, certainly led me into an exploration of childhood itself."
For years, though, it was television rather than books that brought Horowitz professional and financial reward. After years of writing on other successful series, he and Green, whom he met during his advertising days, created Foyle's War, a second World War drama, in part because he grew frustrated at putting so much work into Midsomer Murdersonly for it to become a whodunnit. "It seemed so much work for such a minor resolution that I wondered whether it wasn't possible to write a murder-mystery series that actually was about something as well."
With a CV like his, making the film of Stormbreaker(for which he wrote the screenplay) would appear to be a no-brainer for Horowitz, but he always had ambiguous feelings about the idea. "I knew it was going to be almost impossible to produce a film of Stormbreakerthat would beat what a kid had already imagined. You can't beat a child's imagination with all the money and all the talent in the world. It's just not possible."
Despite the large number of Alex Rider fans in the US, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax decided not to release the film there, "for reasons which are still unclear", says Horowitz. "That did us terrible damage in terms of trying to set up the next film, Point Blanc. You may notice Weinstein turns up in Snakehead, very thinly disguised." Needless to say, he meets a sticky end.
Yet it is to Hollywood that Horowitz is returning, writing a series for Fox about an Albanian detective named Raffik. "It's probably going to be much much more horrible, writing in America," he says with a rueful laugh. "I'm sure it's going to turn into a complete nightmare. But I've always believed that it's vital for any long-term writer like me to keep challenging myself. The one thing you just must never do as a writer is continue doing what you're good at. We live in a society that is obsessed with success and terrified of failure. But if you don't embrace failure, or the possibility of failure, you will never really produce a great success. I really do believe that."
Snakehead is published by Walker Books, £12.99 in UK. Anthony Horowitz will be signing books at Eason, O'Connell Street, Dublin 1, next Saturday (Nov 10) at noon