Gun in hand, Horowitz plots the end for his young hero

IT WOULD take one of teenage “super spy” Alex Rider’s state-of-the-art gadgets to penetrate the high-security entry system guarding the London penthouse apartment of his creator Anthony Horowitz.

Once through two sets of heavy double doors and a lift journey to the third floor, a courteous Horowitz, 55, welcomes me into the living area of his home.

In this huge open plan space, a flat screen TV and neon wall art intermingle with an old piano and a bookshelf brimming with Ian Fleming first editions.

Horowitz himself is a mixture of old and new. Private school manners, traditional values and a confidence so often seen among people brought up in privilege, as he was, effortlessly combine with a visible love of all things trendy and modern.

He’s currently working on the ninth and final Alex Rider novel, Scorpia Rising, which will be published next April.

“If I appear twitchy it’s because I’ve got Alex into a very difficult situation which I need to go and get him out of,” he explains.

Up another floor and we arrive at his office, a long, light airy room with stunning views over the capital, where he shows me his latest acquisition – a gun, disabled of course, which he bought because his last Alex Rider novel will see the reluctant young hero use a gun for the first time. Horowitz wanted to know exactly what it felt like.

The Alex Rider series (the most famous of which, Stormbreaker, was made into a film starring Alex Pettyfer, Mickey Rourke and Bill Nighy) has sold more than 12 million books in Britain and been translated into 28 languages.

“It’s the right thing to do,”

Horowitz reflects, on his choice to end the series. “It makes me sad and I’m sorry, but I’m not a machine churning out a product. I think writers owe it to themselves to keep moving on and to stop while they’re ahead.

“I’m a great fan of Ian Fleming and James Bond, but if you look at the last four or five Bond novels, they get worse and worse and just taper out – and I saw the same thing could happen with Alex.

“I’d run out of chases, out of bad guys, gadgets and reasons to want to blow up the world, and I thought, limit yourself. Be unhappy to stop.”

“So is Alex going to die in the end?” I ask tentatively, looking at the gun.

“It’s worse,” says Horowitz gravely. “When you read the book you’ll see very definitely that it’s the end. As desperate as I am to give him a happy ending, I can’t find it.”

But his young fans have nothing to fear. Scorpia Rising will be followed by a book about the Alex Rider anti-hero, Yassen, and Horowitz has just written a collection of horror stories entitled More Bloody Horowitz.

Parents may baulk at the stories involving murderous game shows, a slaughtered publisher and a robo-nanny, but the author says the grisly episodes are tongue-in-cheek and filled with humour.

He’ll also be writing one more in the Power of Five children’s series and one more Diamond Brothers novel. After that he’ll stop.

When he has completed the young series, he wants to write an adult novel, a play, a film and more television.

He’s no stranger to TV work.

His screen writing includes Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders and, more recently, the ITV series Collision.

There have been murmurings of another Alex Rider film, but he’s not holding his breath.

“Apart from Harry Potter, I cannot think of a single children’s adaptation in the last ten years that has particularly worked. The Philip Pullman film bankrupted the company, Spiderwick came and went and even Jim Carrey couldn’t save A Series Of Unfortunate Events.”

Horowitz is currently working on a new five-part thriller for ITV, which will be filmed this autumn with his wife, Jill Green, producing.

They moved to East London three years ago with sons Nicholas and Cassian, but Horowitz misses his Edwardian house in North London and the garden studio he used to write in.

Born in Stanmore, Middlesex, into a rich Jewish family, Horowitz lived an upper-class lifestyle and went to a boarding school, which he hated.

“I was unsuccessful and overweight, in an odd environment with distant parents, at a vile prep school for five years.

“I only began to find myself in my late teens and early twenties through writing and through books.”

His father acted as a “fixer”

for then prime minister Harold Wilson, but when he became ill, he removed his wealth from his bank accounts and hid it away under a pseudonym.

He then died and the family was never able to track down the missing money, despite years of trying.

“We never found it. My mother went to look because she was effectively bankrupted after his death.

“I have no interest in that money at all. If it’s taught me anything, it’s that the pursuit of money in life is the ultimate vanity and the ultimate foolishness.”

His mother died ten years later, but Horowitz says she was much happier in the last years of her life than she had been when they’d had money.

● More Bloody Horowitz is published by Walker, priced £9.99.