The Word is Murder (Hawthorne & Horowitz #1)

by Anthony Horowitz

few shelves with books that had that peculiar sense of sadness that comes with being unread.

It’s funny how many literary festivals there are all over the world. There are some writers I know who never actually write any more; they simply spend their time travelling from one shindig to the next.

copy of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire that was lying on the bedside table. Well, at least Mrs Cowper had been spared the slightly disappointing ending.

I think the world has had quite enough of white, middle-aged, grumpy detectives

I’ve never found it easy coming up with titles. Almost two hundred thousand books are published in the UK every year and although some of them will have the advantage of a well-known author attached, the vast majority have just two or three words on a surface measuring no more than six by nine inches to sell themselves. Titles have to be short, smart and meaningful, easy to read, easy to remember and original. That’s asking a lot. Many of the best titles are simply borrowed from elsewhere. Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Vanity Fair . . . all of these were drawn from other works. Agatha Christie used the Bible, Shakespeare, Tennyson and even The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam for many of her eighty-two titles. For my money, nobody has beaten Ian Fleming: From Russia, with Love; You Only Live Twice; Live and Let Die. His titles have passed into the English language although even he didn’t find it easy. Live and Let Die was almost published as ‘The Undertaker’s Wind’. Moonraker was ‘The Moonraker Secret’, ‘The Moonraker Plot’, ‘The Moonraker Plan’ and even, for a short time, ‘Mondays Are Hell’, while Goldfinger began life as ‘The Richest Man in the World’.

followed by a silence that was almost physical, that slammed shut like a mortuary door.

Hawthorne certainly had a magnetic personality. Although, of course, magnets can repel as well as attract.

And I can honestly say that Watson had never looked up to Sherlock Holmes nor Hastings admired Poirot more than I loved Hawthorne right then

If I walked away, Hawthorne would just go to another writer and what would be the result of that? I’d end up as a minor character, nothing more than a sidekick in someone else’s book, which would actually be considerably worse than being a real character in one of my own. They would be able to do anything they liked. They could make me look like a complete idiot if they wanted. On the other hand, if I wrote the book, I would have control. Hawthorne had admitted that he had come to me and only me. It was my story.