H
aving written more than 40
books, Anthony Horowitz
wanted to do something dif-
ferent with his Susan Ryeland
series. “It’s my attempt to do
completely new things in the
murder mystery genre,” he says.
What he wrote is a novel within a
novel, in which the crime writer of the
first novel is murdered and the hero of
the second novel finds out whodunnit.
The first novel is set in the Fifties, the
second in the present. Still with me?
This box of tricks is obviously impos-
sible to televise so Horowitz’s wife, the
TV producer Jill Green, told him to do
exactly that — and the show, Magpie
Murders, the title of the first book, is
about to come to Britbox, starring Les-
ley Manville as the murder mystery
story editor Susan Ryeland and Tim
McMullan as detective Atticus Pund.
The six episodes took him two yearsto adapt. It is brilliant, not least because
Manville is one of our greatest acting
talents. Talking to Horowitz — we are in
the ritzy Ivy Club in Soho, London — is
easy. He speaks in perfect paragraphs
and always has something to say. Last
time we spoke he stumbled when I
asked him a tricky one about woke cul-
ture — “F***, this interview was going
so well.” This time he has thought it all
through. He’s 66 and just accepts that
the young are making a different world.
“You get to my age and it’s very, very
easy to get set in your ways and say this
is the world — the world that we see
now is both incomprehensible and it’s
different to how it was when I was
young, therefore it must be worse. But
you have to embrace the fact that all
change is for the good.”
I raise my eyebrows at that. “The
people who are deciding that change
will live with it. If it’s not good in my
view it’s good in theirs, and that’s what
matters. I think it’s very easy — espe-
cially if you’re a television writer, to sit
there and say, ‘This isn’t the world as I
knew it.’ But the moment you start say-
ing that you might as well stop writing.”
Magpie Murders, the show, includesTELEVISION
‘THE YOUNG
ARE MAKING
A NEW
WORLD’
a black actor playing a village vicar in- This would be unlikely, but Horow-
itz believes in colour-blind casting.
“That is just the way it has to be. I
think it is the way that it should be —
and you are of course quite correct that
it is extremely unlikely that in the 1950s
a village like Saxby-on-Avon would
have a black vicar. But if you take that
view, you’re going to make a drama
now that just simply looks calcified and
wrong. You’ve got to have on one hand
sociological, or social history accuracy,
and on the other you’ve got modern
television and what an audience
expects. You have to steer yourself to
one at the expense of the other.”
He is, however, staying strong when
the cancel culture starts censoring
writers, notably JK Rowling because of
her views on sex and gender. “There is
a sense of writers under siege at the
moment and that does bother me. JK
Rowling is a gold-plated hero in the
world who has done an enormous
amount for children’s literacy and
charity, and she is under attack. Writ-
ers must lead the agenda, not be cowed
into following it. You must be free to
write what you want, and to express
the views you want to express with-
out the world falling in on you.”
He worries about causing
offence and admits there are whole
areas that make him nervous — too
nervous even to tell me what
they are.
“There are moments
when I’m writing a
character, who might
be from a different
ethnicity to mine, orAnthony Horowitz says
writers must embrace
the fact that all change
is for the good — just
because everything
looks different today
doesn’t make it worse
THE BRYAN
APPLEYARD
INTERVIEW
You get to my age
and it’s very, veryeasy to get set in
your waysModern view
Chukwuma
Omambala
in Magpie
Murders8 6 February 2022