ANTHONY HOROWITZ

If you were to ask a boy aged between eight and twelve who his greatest fictional hero is, the answer wouldn’t be Harry Potter, but Alex Rider. The reluctant teenaged spy, blackmailed into working for MI6 has now saved the world four times, and is back in Scorpia, published this month to a fanfare of publicity that is, for once, completely deserved. For Anthony Horowitz, who published his first children’s novel at 23 and has written over 23 books while simultaneously becoming one of Britain’s leading TV scriptwriters, is himself something of a hero. His struggle to break through a mountain of indifference was so monumental that he twice gave up – once after being told by his ex-publisher that “you might as well stop.” That was before JK Rowling galvanised the children’s market, and before Alex entered the picture in Stormbreaker, the novel that, according to The Ultimate Book Guide, children want to see filmed more than any other – and a series that, as one critic put it, “reads like every bored schoolboy’s fantasy, only a thousand times slicker and more exciting.”

They are finally to get their wish, with shooting of Stormbreaker to begin later this year. The Gathering, Horowitz’s horror-film starring Christina Ricci, is finally coming out this summer, and he has just been signed up for $1 million to write a new fantasy series currently titled Raven’s Gate which he describes as “Stephen King for kids”.

“I like fantasy that’s close to you, just around the corner,” he says. “I’m not attracted to the idea that you need to go into a cupboard or a space-ship to find the paranormal. I conceived the idea 20 years ago, but it went wrong. It’s more timely now – with the sense that things are out of control, and that politicians may destroy us – so I fished it out, and now it’s on its third draft.”

This is the year Anthony Horowitz is going to be everywhere. There is his first adult novel, The Killing Joke, and scripts for the detective series Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War, which his wife Jill Green produces. Yet it’s his Ian Fleming for kids that readers are most fascinated by. Stripped of the squalid sex, snobbery and silliness of the originals, this is a kind of thriller that children yearn for, rooted in meticulous realism yet soaring with inventiveness, action, humour, and characters who engage the heart as well as the mind. Alex Rider’s exploits have included snowboarding down an impassable Swiss mountain on an ironing-board cut into shape with a portable CD player that becomes a circular saw, outrunning six cars on a customised bicycle in Amsterdam and, most recently, jump-diving off the cliffs of Ravello in Italy. Horowitz researches the technology and stunts meticulously, from operating a 150-metre crane for Point Blank to the deadly nanotechnology used in Scorpia.

“I use the internet to research weaponry, but I also talked to a scientist who asked for his name not to be put in, because the terrorist application of nanotechnology is so scary,” he says. His large, unpretentious house in Crouch End bears witness to his fascination in how things work, housing not only original Herge drawings for Tintin, but a collection of automata.

As one of the most prolific writers in Britain, his energies are astonishing. Going for a walk with him across Hampstead Heath is not to be undertaken lightly; one discusses not just children’s literature but the works of George Gissing, spies, politics and film, while moving at three times the normal speed. He must be the only writer in North London who skis, and his son Nicholas, now 15, is passionately sporty and checks out the credibility of the books with Cassian, 13.

“I still read to them,” he says, praising Philip Reeves’s Mortal Engines. “The greatest moments of parenthood come when reading to a child, and the best writers for children are adult-friendly, like Philip Pullman.”

Despite a wicked joke in one book in which Alex is given a Harry Potter book as a secret weapon (“press the title and a dart comes out guaranteed to send any adult to sleep in seconds”) he is a fan of Rowling’s.

“What she’s done just can’t be overstated, we owe so much to her,” he says. He is nervous about how The Killing Joke, his adult comic adventure, will be received, saying it “was a devil of a job to write, and is probably my entry for the Bad Sex Prize. But if I don’t push the boundaries after 25 years of writing, what is the point?”

Handsome and hugely entertaining in person as well as on the page, Horowitz’s childhood, so many great children’s authors, was wretched. The son of a multi-millionaire, he grew up in a mansion, complete with staff, his family the antithesis of the stereotypical warm Jewish family. His evil grandmother reappears in his excoriating satire, Granny: Horowitz is open about using fiction to exorcise his demons, and as a pudgy, bored schoolboy escaped into fantasy fuelled by Herge, Willard Price and of course Ian Fleming.

He was sent to prep-school, Orley Farm in Harrow which he loathed; the Groosham Grange series about a nightmare boarding school stem from this, though he “rather enjoyed” Rugby later on. Where JK Rowling, a product of a comprehensive school, fantasised about wizard boarding school, Horowitz’s hero is at an ordinary London comprehensive.

“I want to reach more than the usual white middle-class children living in Islington,” he says passionately, and indeed, having just read to a group of 12-year olds at Highgate School, he’s bound for a tough inner-city comprehensive the following day.

His heroes tend to be abandoned or orphaned, surviving on their wits like the Diamond brothers, or like Will in The Devil and His Boy, a terrific Tudor murder-mystery. What makes him outstanding is his sympathy for teenaged boys, typically the most despised of creatures. Alex, like Bond, lives in Chelsea, speaks several languages, is a natural athlete and equipped by MI6 with an enthrallingly clever series of gadgets, from plastic explosive bubble-gum, to brace with a radio transmitter inside them, but he is also terrified and increasingly scarred by his adventures. What the Bond films lack, Horowitz points out, “is a sense of danger. When you watch a Pirce Brosnan film, you never for a moment believe he might get hurt.” There’s no question of this in Alex’s missions. His youth keeps him from being crushed in a sugar mill in Skeleton Key, when the ex-Soviet general tries to adopt him in place of his own dead son, but Alex screams, faints and breaks his bones, as well as enduring a single kiss with his first girl-friend, Sabina Pleasure. In Scorpia, the darkest and most complex novel to date it is possible that Horowitz, like Conan Doyle and Fleming before him, has actually killed his hero off.

Horowitz laughs when I ask anxiously whether this is the end for Alex.

“I’m taking a break for a year to write the Raven’s Gate books – I’m signed up until the year 2010, which is crazy,” he says, “but there will be a smaller Alex book, next year, when he’s sent off to find the Weapons of Mass Destruction. That’s why they haven’t been found – because nobody can admit that a fourteen-year-old boy has got there first.”

And such is the power of his imagination that for a moment, I really believe him.

Scorpia by Anthony Horowitz is published on April 3 by Walker Books, £5.99