The Twist of a Knife (Hawthorne & Horowitz #4)

by Anthony Horowitz

He might have a moral compass, but he was the one who would decide which way it pointed.

Authors don’t write their books for other people. We write for ourselves.

‘Ambition, madam, is a great man’s madness,’ says Antonio in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, a play I first saw at the RSC in 1971 with Judi Dench in the title role. But it’s accepting that you will never achieve your ambition that can really drive you mad.

The trouble is, once the rules have been broken, nobody will be excited when someone else does it a second time. If something is unique, it can’t be done twice.

That’s why life is so different to fiction. Every day is a single page and you have no chance to thumb forward and see what lies ahead.

‘I never believe everything anyone says.’ ‘Including me?’ He smiled. ‘Why would I believe someone who spends his entire life making stuff up?’

She was “looking over my shoulder as if hoping someone more interesting had come into the room.”

I’ve visited many juvenile prisons – or ‘secure centres’, as they are now called – and I’ve always had my doubts about putting young people behind bars, particularly when both the costs and the reoffending rates are so high. It goes without saying that there are children who are a danger to both the public and themselves, and I’ve encountered them too. They were the inspiration for my play A Handbag. But the majority of them are mentally unwell rather than criminal and they need help, not punishment. Whatever the newspapers may say, and despite the title of Harriet’s book, every one of the young offenders I’ve met has been more sad than bad. It seems crazy to me that the prison system educates them until they’re eighteen, but then feeds them into adult jail where any good will be undone. Like Tirian, most of them will come out utterly unprepared for normal life.