James Bond novelist Horowitz adopts Fleming’s voice for Trigger Mortis

Author and James Bond ‘freak’ Anthony Horowitz reveals what it was like to revive the famous spy for the latest 007 novel.

Anthony Horowitz, Author

He may have been entrusted with writing the latest James Bond novel, but Anthony Horowitz has some pretty strong opinions about the blockbusting 007 films. Remember Jaws, the assassin with the bone-crushing iron teeth from The Spy Who Loved Me? “Straight out of children’s books,’’ scoffs the British author and screenwriter, who knows a thing or two about fiction for kids, having sold 19 million copies of his Alex Rider teenage adventure series.

Sean Connery’s Bond was “spot on’’, Horowitz says, but Roger Moore’s films “get progressively sillier and sillier and almost kill the format’’. He mentions Pierce Brosnan’s widely mocked invisible car in Die Another Day. “An invisible car in a James Bond film? You just want to cry, really. I wouldn’t put one in an Alex Rider book, let alone Bond.’’

The latest incarnation of the MI6 agent, played with sexy, melancholic intensity by Daniel Craig, gets it in the neck for, among other crimes, drinking Heineken, although Horowitz loved the actor’s first Bond film, Casino Royale. “It was Bond heaven back again,’’ he enthuses.

The praise doesn’t last. It’s midmorning on a clear, cool autumn day in Sydney, but the temperature isn’t as bracing as Horowitz’s opinions of the liberties recent films have taken with Ian Fleming’s characterisation of the British spy with an eye for the ladies and a licence to kill.

Horowitz is holding court at a harbourside hotel to discuss his eagerly awaited Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, which is due out next month. In his sharp, uncompromising way, he notes how Casino Royale “was followed by Quantum of Solace, which was a disaster, a dog’s dinner. And then you’ve got Skyfall … I didn’t like it.

“I know I’m in a minority and it’s been a hugely successful film, but it seems to me that the character Daniel Craig portrays in Skyfall is not James Bond. James Bond does not drink Heineken beer. He doesn’t get worn out when he’s trying to do press-ups. He isn’t conflicted. He isn’t in love with M, not with Judi Dench anyway ... for the purist, it wasn’t Bond.’’

The bestselling novelist talks as if he’s in a race against the clock, and his rapid-fire answers are so dense, so packed with incident and information, that it’s slightly unnerving. Try jotting down a descriptive note or arresting quote, and you’ll find yourself several sentences behind the flow of conversation. Then you will be accused of asking the same thing twice, or not paying attention.

In the end, I put down my pen and turn my full attention to the rather intense interview subject. At which point Horowitz softens, talking about everything from his hands-on research for the Bond book to how he almost died in the outback as a “pudgy, unfit, stupid Pom’’ during a gap year. Still, it’s not so much a conversation as an hour-long landslide of words.

Initially prickly, the prolific writer — he has penned plays, children’s novels and TV crime dramas including Midsomer Murders and the acclaimed Foyle’s War — is far more accommodating when it’s time to take his photograph. Asked to pose at the hotel bar with a martini — 007’s cocktail of choice is, of course, “shaken, not stirred’’ — he goes beyond the call of duty. He darts behind the bar to search for glasses and lemon slices. Hotel staff still serving breakfast stare in astonishment as the 60-year-old guest apparently helps himself to the booze (in fact, he fills his glass with water, while pointing out that the original James Bond would never put an olive in his martini). The Ian Fleming Estate last year commissioned Horowitz to write Trigger Mortis, which is set in 1957 at the height of the Cold War. He joins a stable of big-name authors (among them Jeffery Deaver, Sebastian Faulks, Kingsley Amis and William Boyd) who have written Bond “continuation novels’’. Unlike the Deaver and Boyd books, though, Trigger Mortis mimics the style and mores of Fleming, the British naval intelligence officer turned writer who died in 1964, having created a bed-hopping, TheTimes-reading, villain-slaying fictional character who would become the 20th century’s most recognisable spy.

Trigger Mortis finds Bond embroiled in the glamorous but risky Grand Prix world. His mission begins at Germany’s Nurburgring racetrack as he uses a Maserati to thwart a dodgy crew of Russians planning to kill a British driver. The narrative then shifts to the US and a complicated criminal scheme to derail the American space program, involving an alienated Korean millionaire, a German physicist working secretly for the Soviets and a threatened explosion that could reduce the Empire State Building to dust.

Interestingly, Horowitz has incorporated about 500 words written by Fleming into the new novel, which also sees the return of Goldfinger heroine Pussy Galore, a lesbian and sometime Bond lover, as well as SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency that features in the early novels. Fleming’s description and dialogue are drawn from his work for a television series that was set aside after the first Bond film, Dr No, stormed the box office in 1962. One of those stories, titled Murder on Wheels, “leapt out’’ at Horowitz, even though “I knew nothing about Grand Prix”.

“I had zero interest in it,” he says. “I’ve always rather disliked it; the sound of those motors zapping around the TV screen like wasps. Nonetheless, I found out what a fantastic gift it was, because motor racing in 1957 was unbelievably dangerous; it was a shockingly dangerous sport with a very, very high mortality rate. People were killed all the time.’’ He shows me some of Fleming’s lines in a manuscript he has brought along to the interview. “If you’re a Bond freak like me, to be able to include even one sentence in your book is a big deal.’’

Horowitz initially agrees his Bond book is an act of ventriloquism to “a large degree’’. But he quickly contradicts himself, saying: “I don’t want to be the dummy on Ian Fleming’s knee. I think of it as an act of invisibility. I immerse myself completely in the book — in Fleming’s voice, in his world.’’

In common with his movie counterparts, the Bond we meet in Trigger Mortis seems Teflon-coated — he survives a near-fatal car crash, a machinegun attack and being buried alive. He has fleeting relationships with women, but he is no sensitive hipster. Early in the novel we are told “he simply could not imagine working with a woman who was plain or unattractive’’. He smokes 30 cigarettes a day, says “good heavens’’ and addresses his pipe-smoking boss, M, deferentially as “Sir’’.

To date, the Bond novels have sold more than 100 million copies. These muscular sales have undoubtedly been nourished by the screen blockbusters — the Bond films are the fourth highest-grossing film series, after the Marvel superhero, Harry Potter and Star Wars franchises. But Horowitz argues the secret agent millions of fans know from the films is a very different creature to the character who animates the original novels.

“The films are so different from the books,’’ he says. “If you’re writing a book and your audience largely understands the films, you’re talking about two very different worlds. The most obvious example is, do you have gadgets in the book? The answer is, if you want to be true to Ian Fleming, you don’t, because there are no gadgets in the original novels.’’

There is a further problem for a 21st-century writer crafting a Bond novel set in the 1950s — the super spy’s sexism. As Horowitz puts it: “The Bond that Fleming created has many attitudes that we now find offensive, particularly his attitude to women and his sexualisation of women.’’ So how does a contemporary writer get around this? “You have to accept [it],’’ he replies. “But it is possible to gently tease him, to gently point out in the book that his attitudes are not entirely admirable. So I’ve created very, very strong women who do more than sit on the sidelines and scream … they are more than a match for Bond.’’

He also tries to subtly modernise the special agent by giving him a gay best friend. The friend, he says, “happens to be an outspoken homosexual. His attitude is, ‘You’re blinkered, you’re antediluvian, you’ve got to wake up to how the world is changing.’ Again, that nudges Bond into the 21st century without breaking Fleming’s rules.’’

Horowitz reckons Bond endures because he has something of the “dark knight about him. He is the ultimate Byronic hero. He doesn’t go to the cinema or theatre or to concerts. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t really have what you or I would call a life. He is simply this dark knight, he’s this crusader, doing what he does.’’

The award-winning writer is a keen researcher. For his Alex Rider series, he climbed a 150m-tall crane and clambered on to the roof of London’s Science Museum. For Trigger Mortis, he tore around the Nurburgring racetrack “at great speed’’ with Scottish Grand Prix driver Marino Franchitti. “I was as thorough as could possibly be in terms of getting it right.’’

Trigger Mortis is not the first book in which Horowitz has adopted another writer’s voice. He has also penned two Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty, mirroring the style of Arthur Conan Doyle. He says these novels were “an absolute pleasure to write’’, as he drew on one of fiction’s great friendships (between Holmes and Dr Watson) and “a beautifully defined world. Doyle is a writer of considerable genius — his imagination and the way he has captured so exactly London at a certain time, the London of rattlers and cobblestones and gas lamps and fog — so you start ahead of the game, you start inspired.’’ He adds candidly: “I am not as good a writer as Doyle, so I have to raise my bar considerably to try to emulate him.’’ He also says that while Fleming was a “considerable’’ and sometimes powerful writer, “there are sections of the Bond novels where you feel he is slightly coasting’’.

In another unguarded moment, Horowitz says when he showed the first draft of Trigger Mortis to his wife, high-profile TV producer Jill Green, “she hated it’’. Why? “I had pushed Bond’s carnality too far and she really found it objectionable. I then rewrote it and now it’s fine. She was right. It was a balancing act.’’ Green has collaborated with him on the TV dramas Foyle’s War, Injustice, Collision and the forthcoming New Blood. He considers her his best friend and quips: “Don’t get the idea that I roll over and do 100 per cent of what she tells me. I do probably 80 per cent of what she tells me.’’

He admits he started writing the Alex Rider series after missing out on a job to write a Bond film. “I was a bit miffed and I thought, ‘Sod you, I’ll do my own.’ ” He has been writing junior fiction and TV scripts since his early 20s, but it was his series about a 14-year-old reluctant spy, spun out across 10 novels, that put him on the map as a heavy-hitting children’s novelist.

Alex Rider has been characterised as a young Bond, but Horowitz insists “Alex is not Bond’’. His young hero may have a proliferation of gadgets and a quirkily named girlfriend called Sabina Pleasure (as in “it’s been a pleasure’’) but he protests that “it would have been absurd to write a modern children’s series that had the values of James Bond. Writing the Bond novel, it had no connection with Alex whatsoever.’’ (Nevertheless, he avoided writing explicit sex scenes in Trigger Mortis, partly out of concern his younger readers might buy it.)

His publishers like to boast that Horowitz has committed more fictional murders than any other author, but he says this creative preoccupation with death — he writes with a human skull on his desk — doesn’t affect his optimistic nature: “I don’t think I’m a dark person particularly,’’ he muses. “My view of life is fairly rose-tinted and cheerful. I don’t think I like revelling in people’s misery.’’ In fact, his latest TV collaboration with Green — it’s being shot this month — is the comic crime drama New Blood. “The whole reasoning of it is that television has become too gloomy, too grim. I’m fed up seeing children being kidnapped and women being stabbed,’’ Horowitz says.

He has also written a political satire about the 2003 invasion of Iraq called Dinner with Saddam, which opens in London next month. He wrote this play, which will star Steven Berkoff as the Iraqi dictator, to keep the “fires of anger and indignation and outrage burning’’.

Horowitz’s visit to Australia earlier this year wasn’t his first. After he finished boarding school he worked in the outback as a jackaroo and “it was very nearly the end of me’’, he says matter of factly. He was 18 and ended up on a pastoral station in the Northern Territory. “I was sort of ill-equipped for it,’’ he says in a rare understatement. “I was this pudgy, unfit, stupid Pom. I’d never even sat on a horse. When the manager met me the first day and said, ‘Saddle up’, I said, ‘Where does the saddle go?’ ”

Fast-forward two months. The young Horowitz has learned where the saddles goes and is riding up to 60km a day. But when he and other jackaroos try to cross a swollen river, he almost drowns. His speech slows as he recounts how “about half way across, the horses panicked. Picanniny [his horse] came up, went down in front of me three times and came up twice … It was just screaming with fear. Its eyes were bulging and teeth were snaring and it can’t do it and it drowns in front of me, this poor horse.’’

Horowitz was floundering as well, and the other jackaroos formed a human chain to get him out. “The water was crashing past. That was a near-death experience.’’ He concludes, however, that the year he almost drowned was also “the happiest year of my life … I always say I became fully formed in Australia.’’

Horowitz returned to Britain and studied literature and art history at York University. He had always wanted to be a writer, and published his first novel, a children’s adventure story, Enter Frederick K. Bower, when he was 23. Soon after, he started writing for children’s TV and his career as a self-made polymath was on a steady upward trajectory.

The same could not be said for his family life. When he was 22, his father died from cancer and his family went from being wealthy to broke. His father had left his money in secret Swiss bank accounts that could not be accessed. Recalls Horowitz: “It was a redefining of my life, having been brought up in a very wealthy environment with my mother who was a socialite and who partied, saw her friends, lunched.’’ His mother had to sell her minks and jewels and “earn a living by herself. As I’ve often said, she found happiness — she became an independent woman.’’

He speaks with a toughened detachment about his father, explaining that he was a solicitor who was “involved in all sorts of quite shady practices’’. It was all code words and cryptic messages with his dad. “Strange man. A mix of many things. Not entirely bad but not entirely good either. Very kind to me in some ways and very cruel in others.’’

In contrast, the author is “very, very close’’ to his wife and adult children. His sons are 28 and 26, and the family lives on different floors of a multi-storey house in inner London.

Horowitz’s home office overlooks St Paul’s Cathedral, and he reflects that “when I look on my life and all the work I’ve done and all the things that have worked out for me, the one thing that always comes first is family, particularly because my family when I was a boy was so dysfunctional’’.

His latest book may centre on a lone dark knight, but Horowitz says that for him it’s the 28 years of marriage and family life that “makes me feel that it hasn’t all been for nothing’’.

Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz (Orion, $29.99) is out on September 8.