Anthony Horowitz, the novelist who writes himself into his own murder mysteries

Anthony Horowitz

Photo: Edwardx / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 5, 1955 Stanmore, Middlesex, England
Occupation	Novelist
Awards	Lancashire Children's Book of the Year · Hampshire Book · Officer of the Order of the British Empire · Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature · Commander of the Order of the British Empire · Edgar

In A Deadly Episode, published this spring, a film of the first Hawthorne case goes into production and the rising star cast as the detective Daniel Hawthorne is stabbed to death in his trailer. The man telling the story is called Anthony Horowitz, and so is the author. The joke at the centre of the series, a successful crime writer recast as the sidekick and chronicler of a private investigator, has now carried six novels. It also sums up a career in which Horowitz has rarely stayed on one side of the page.

Few living British writers have been trusted with so many other people’s characters. He has written Sherlock Holmes for the Conan Doyle estate and James Bond for Ian Fleming’s, turned a teenage schoolboy into one of children’s fiction’s best-known spies, and created television that still sells around the world. This autumn alone, the final Susan Ryeland mystery reached viewers on PBS and BBC One, and a new run of Midsomer Murders, which he helped launch, is premiering in Australia.

Horowitz was born on 5 April 1955 in Stanmore, Middlesex, into a prosperous Jewish family. He was an underachiever at school who found his escape in books, and began writing at eight or nine. “I was quite certain, from my earliest memory, that I would be a professional writer and nothing but,” he said in a 2006 interview. His mother gave him a human skull for his 13th birthday, which he has said reminds him to finish every story. He went on to Rugby School, which he later called “foul”, and graduated from the University of York in 1977 with a degree in English literature and art history. When his father died of cancer, Horowitz was 22; the assets he had moved into Swiss numbered accounts were never traced, and the family lost its home.

His debut, The Sinister Secret of Frederick K Bower, appeared in 1979. In 1986 The Falcon’s Malteser launched The Diamond Brothers, starring the brothers Tim and Nick Diamond, its title a wink at a hard-boiled classic. Two years later came Groosham Grange, set at a boarding school for young witches and wizards, which won the Lancashire Children’s Book of the Year award in 1989, nearly a decade before Hogwarts opened its doors.

The breakthrough arrived in 2000 with Stormbreaker, in which a 14-year-old schoolboy, Alex, is recruited by MI6. Point Blanc followed in 2001 and the Hampshire Book Award winner Skeleton Key in 2002. The Alex Rider series ran to its 13th novel with Nightshade Revenge in 2023. Horowitz wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film of Stormbreaker, and Amazon‘s television version, starring Otto Farrant, ran for three seasons between 2020 and 2024, adapting Point Blanc, Eagle Strike and Scorpia. In 2005 he opened a second young-adult cycle, The Power of Five, with Raven’s Gate, reworking his occult Pentagram novels of the 1980s. It closed with Oblivion in 2012.

All the while he was learning his trade in television, writing for ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Poirot in the 1990s and, from 1997, adapting Caroline Graham’s novels for Midsomer Murders, including its first three episodes. In 2002 he created Foyle’s War, a detective drama set during and after the Second World War, which ran to 28 episodes over eight series until 2015. His wife, Jill Green, produced it. Writing for viewers who have to be kept guessing all evening, with every clue on screen, shaped the novelist he became.

The estates noticed. In January 2011 the Conan Doyle estate announced that Horowitz would write a new Holmes novel, the first to carry its official endorsement. The House of Silk came out that November, and Moriarty followed in 2014. The Fleming estate then commissioned Trigger Mortis (2015), built partly on unpublished Fleming material, followed by Forever and a Day in 2018 and With a Mind to Kill in 2022. No other author in recent years has been invited back for successive official Bond novels.

His most ingenious work, though, is his own. Magpie Murders appeared in 2016, a decade after he first described it. It is a novel with a second novel inside: the editor Susan Ryeland reads the manuscript of a classic-style whodunit starring the detective Atticus Pünd, and discovers that its author has died in circumstances as suspicious as anything on his pages. Moonflower Murders continued the game in 2020, and Marble Hall Murders closed the trilogy in April 2025. In Japan, Magpie Murders and the three novels that followed it there topped the country’s major mystery rankings, including Kono Mystery ga Sugoi!, four years in a row from 2018 to 2021, which no author had done before.

Horowitz adapted the books for television himself: Magpie Murders arrived in 2022 with Lesley Manville as Susan and Tim McMullan as Pünd, and its first episode won him an Edgar Award for best television teleplay. Moonflower Murders followed in 2024. The six-part Marble Hall Murders, directed by Rebecca Gatward, premiered on PBS’s Masterpiece on 6 September 2026 and on BBC One on 26 September.

The Hawthorne books, which began with The Word Is Murder in 2017, push the same playfulness further. Horowitz puts a version of himself into the story, a novelist enlisted by an out-of-work detective to write books about how he solves his cases. A Deadly Episode, the sixth, sends the pair onto a film set. Publishers Weekly called it a “brilliant sixth installment” and praised its “Scream-like Hollywood satire”. It reads like the work of someone who knows the screen business from the inside.

Horowitz was appointed OBE in 2014 and CBE in 2022, both for services to literature, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. He lives in Clerkenwell, central London, with Jill Green, whom he married in Hong Kong in 1988; they have two sons. What makes him worth reading now is the deal he offers: he hides every clue in plain sight, admits he is playing a game, and still wins it. Few writers have built a career out of letting readers watch how the trick is done.

Tags: writers, novelists, Anthony Horowitz, Midsomer Murders, Sherlock Holmes, Alex Rider