anthonyhorowitz.com

In case you’re wondering why I havent posted anything in a while, Ive just got back from an eight-week trip around the world.

Id say Im home except weve just sold it. Goodbye Crouch End! From now on I’m going to be living in Clerkenwell which is a really old part of London Fagin (Oliver Twist) lived close by and when I wrote Ravens Gate, I put the HQ of the Nexus in the same street. Trains rumble past every few minutes and ghosts hang around the corners. I have a new study which I’ve built on the top floor and while I work I’ll be able to look at St Pauls and the Old Bailey. There’s not much green around although I have got my own lawn on the roofeven if it is made of plastic.

Not sure how I’m going to exercise the dog but I\m experimenting with a treadmill and a hanging bone.

Anyway, the world tour had its high points and its low points.

I started in Bangkok where I was researching Alex 7. I found some great locations in the Chinese area where Alex has to live, pretending to be an Afghan refugee and also on the river. Expect filthy water, mouldering buildings, vicious Thai criminals and lots of rats! I also saw some stomach-churning food on sale in the streets. Most of it actually seemed to be made from churned-up animal stomachs. Maybe Alex will have to face up to a bowl of entrail soup. Well see.

Then I went to Perth and visited Swanbourne which just happens to be the headquarters of the Australian SAS. Also very useful for the book although sadly they wouldnt let me in. Well I’ll have my revenge when I portray the whole lot of them as a bunch of cissies.

I did a couple of school visits before heading off for New Zealand, then back to Melbourne and Sydney, probably my two favourite cities in the world. Alex walks round Sydney Harbour in Chapter Four and I made loads of notes in the sunshine, watching the ferries pull in and out, occasionally smashing into the jetty in a cheerful, Australian sort of way. I also did the famous bridge walk while I was there. Amazing views particularly as night fell and a storm closed in. It was like watching the end of the world.

I got back home in September but I was only there a few days before I had to head off to Canada and the Toronto Film Festival for some early screenings of Stormbreaker. The film went down really well although I felt a bit weird being there. Actors and directors go to film festivals but the truth is that nobody is terribly interested in writers and as far as I could tell I was the only writer there.

By now I was travelling with Alex Pettyfer and his mother (who will soon find herself in one of my books you wait and see). It was the beginning of a four-week Odyssey and very odd it was too. We went to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Saint Louis (home of the worlds biggest arch so big it looked faintly ridiculous although I have to admit its very impressive too), Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC and New York.

The best thing about the tour? Seeing so many different cities, standing on the grassy knoll where President Kennedy was assassinated, staying in some pretty classy hotels (my bedroom in Washington was so enormous I actually managed to get lost in itno kidding), the weather, art galleries, the International Spy Museum in Washington, seeing Little Miss Sunshine at the cinema, writing the first episode of my new BBC TV series in the evenings, cheap T-shirts and definitely getting back to the UK.

The worst thing? Well, almost everything else, really. Being asked two thousand times where I got the idea for Alex Rider from. All that travel! Airports and security systems. Suitcases and passports. Packing and unpacking. Doing TV interviews at 11.00am in the morning and knowing that nobody was really watching apart from bored housewives and kids missing school.

Was it all worth while? Well, the film opened in America last week but on a very limited number of screens. I dont really understand why. Its still possible that Stormbreaker will do well in the USA just as, if you strike a match in a rain forest, theres always a chance youll start a fire. But I cant say Im very optimistic. Which is a shame because we screened the film loads of times in the USA and all the audiences I spoke to seemed very enthusiastic.

Anyway, its all behind me now. Im back, working on Chapter 5 of Snakehead and look out for a brand new Alex Rider short story in the Daily Mail close to Christmas. Its called Christmas at Gunpoint and takes place on a ski resort (Gunpoint, Colorado) the year before Ian Rider died, before Alex became a spy.

I’ve also finished really finished – Nightrise and I still think its one of my best books with a lot of things in it that are going to surprise you. Well, they surprised me. That comes out next April. Only two more books and the series is complete. The next one is set in Hong Kong and Ill be heading that way early next year.

Finally, there’s the new design of this website. I hope you like it as much as I do. My thanks to Xero in Cork, Ireland who put it all together and, of course, HHQ who run it and occasionally beat me around to get me to write a couple of pages like this. I do drop in from time to time for what its worth and try to answer your postseven from fonoS who is clearly a prat. (The clue is in his name)

All the best,

Anthony Horowitz

Finally the movie you’ve been waiting for has reached the shores of North America. Alex Rider : Operation Stormbreaker premieres in New York on Friday the 6th of October and opens nationwide in the USA on Friday the 13th of October.

Get your popcorn now!
www.stormbreaker.com