Anthony Horowitz

Two estates have handed Anthony Horowitz their most valuable characters: the Conan Doyle estate for the Sherlock Holmes novels The House of Silk in 2011 and Moriarty in 2014, and Ian Fleming Publications for three James Bond books starting with Trigger Mortis in 2015. His own long-running series is Alex Rider, about a fourteen-year-old pushed into work for MI6, which began with Stormbreaker in 2000 and runs through Crocodile Tears, 2009, and Nightshade, 2020. For television he created Foyle's War and wrote episodes of Midsomer Murders and Poirot. Magpie Murders, 2016, puts a whole golden-age detective novel inside a modern one: an editor reads her author's manuscript, finds the last chapter missing and the author dead. In the Hawthorne books, among them The Twist of a Knife from 2022, he writes himself in as the reluctant sidekick to the ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne. Born in Stanmore in 1955, he received a CBE in 2022.