Horowitz!
Fun for all the family
The Falcon’s Malteser, Public Enemy Number Two, South by South East, The French Confection, I Know What You Did Last Wednesday, The Blurred Man, The Greek Who Stole Christmas, Where Seagulls Dare, Stormbreaker, Point Blanc, Skeleton Key, Eagle Strike, Scorpia, Ark Angel, Snakehead, Crocodile Tears and The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
Anthony Horowitz is so prolific that in certain British households, it’s difficult to decide for what he is best known. The Alex Rider books sold fabulously and made a poor film and, latterly, what I have been told is a respectable recent TV series. The Diamond Brothers books are very, very funny and gave impetus to a whole method for young and early-teenage boys telling jokes.
I tried to find the textual source for something my brother said he remembered reading in one of them, but I never could. I think he might have invented it himself.
What my brother remembered was, ‘You could have cut the tension with a knife. I wanted to cut Tim with a knife.’ If you’ve read the books you’ll remember the style — and you will find that kind of thing as funny as I do.
Other people, like me, read the creepy Power of Five series when very young and were upset when favourite characters were killed seemingly at random.
And some very fortunate people will remember the short-lived and, when I was a very little boy, much admired TV series called Crime Traveller. It involves time travel and detective work. Would you have guessed?
The Diamond Brothers series is possibly my favourite of Horowitz’s works, simply because it is still funny. How many things did you find funny as a child that still amuse you? Some YouTube videos are still funny.
‘Garfield, you fat cat, why are you so big and fat?’
‘I eat, Jon. It’s what I do,’ for instance.
That’s still funny.
P. G. Wodehouse is still funny. Ghostbusters is still funny. But what else?
The Diamond Brothers books detail the bumbling adventures of private detective, and cretin, Tim and his smarter, much younger brother Nick as they get embroiled in plots and schemes and crimes in progress.
Tim is the kind of man who will tap on the walls, his eyes half closed, looking for a secret room, and announce that there’s a gap behind this one, only to be told by Nick that, in turn, that’s because he’s tapping on a window.
Nick is smart but not smart-alecky; young enough to be at the occasional mercy of authority and events, and just about normal enough to be sincerely scared by the prospect of, for instance, going to a juvenile prison, or having a mad genius take against him.
He doesn’t know he’s in a book, you see. He doesn’t know he’ll be fine in the end.
Horowitz also writes books for adults.
The House of Silk is authorised Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and ought to be taken as such. Just like some of the James Bond continuation novels this century, a new question arose. Especially when the Fleming and Doyle estates started to get some literary and bestselling, rather than genre, writers to try their hands.
New questions: How much of the essence of the new author, as opposed to the essence of the originator, should flavour the new work? Whose readers are more numerous? Whose readers are best rewarded?
Horowitz appears, at first glance and first read, to have done a lot of research for his Holmes effort. The book is filled with details which are either slyly or transparently lifted from the Holmes canon. Endless little references to other stories, to this or that remembered thing from one or them or other. Allusions, some deft, some clunking.
And some of how Watson writes, bookending his adventure, for instance, might seem positively like Doyle’s own style. But in reality, given its content, its subject matter, this stuff is not like that. It’s more like the kinds of radio introductions that series called things like the ‘Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ used to have at their beginnings.
You know the form.
‘My name is Dr Watson, and if you are reading this, or even hearing it through copper telegraph wires, it must be the twenty-first century and I must be dead. For that is how long I decreed that my papers, in the old black metal box, be left in the storeroom of my old bank Cross and Co. So scandalous were their contents, so politically sensitive were their ramifications, that my dear friend and companion Sherlock Holmes and I ...’ and so on and so on. Many others have done it.
The book quickly and thoroughly reveals itself to be not really a Holmes story at all, but rather a Horowitz thriller. One or two scenes, except for their gruesome subtexts, could have been lifted completely from Alex Rider. One particular climax is staged — and no worse for it — on almost identical lines to passages in Stormbreaker and Skeleton Key, for instance.
The Alex Rider books are so immensely popular, and have been so copied, that reading them in adulthood might seem strange and uncanny. I remember as a boy reading the CHERUB and Henderson’s Boys series by Robert Muchamore without quite noticing that the idea of teenage spies was not wholly original. The Alex Rider plots are ridiculous — they are peppered with absurd descriptions of cars and guns and gear.
Alex sank into the Mini Cooper, dropping the 9mm Browning semi-automatic, its metal cold in his hands; his backside noticing the texture of the car’s vinyl seating and his spine responding to the steady motions of the impulse generated by the Mini Cooper’s 1.5-litre, three-cylinder engine. The door handle was thin plastic and a little chipped.
And there are one of two phrases which stuck out to me as awful even as a child. ‘Fireball of flame,’ for example. How did that one get through? Why not correct it in later editions?
But children don’t care and I didn’t care and even now, inclined to scoff because I am ancient and weary and it hurts to sit up and to stand and to bend my knees, I don’t feel inclined to. They were a lot of fun. They were once a lot of fun.