Anthony John Horowitz CBE (born 5 April 1955) is an English novelist and screenwriter specialising in mystery and suspense.

Horowitz was born in Stanmore, Middlesex, into a Jewish family, and in his early years lived an upper middle class lifestyle.

He graduated from the University of York with a lower second class degree in English literature and art history in 1977, where he was in Vanbrugh College.

[9] Horowitz's father was associated with some of the politicians in the "circle" of prime minister Harold Wilson, including Eric Miller.

Entitled The Devil's Door-Bell, the story saw thirteen-year-old Martin Hopkins trying to adjust to a new life with a foster mother on a Yorkshire farm, but it quickly becomes a nightmare when he ends up having to battle an ancient evil that threatens the whole world.

In 2021, Horowitz revealed to a fan on Twitter that he had plans to write a third book, but was dissuaded after the success of the Harry Potter series.

Some time before the new millennium, Horowitz attempted to reach out to an adult audience with a novel called Poisoned Pen.

In the novel, William Shakespeare is reimagined as a Hollywood screenwriter who is murdered in a set of circumstances that Martin Holland finds rather odd, despite attempts from a Los Angeles detective to dissuade him.

The novel follows Martin's attempts to solve the ever-growing mystery through a series of rather unusual circumstances and a number of people who seem rather glad that Shakespeare was murdered.

The novel has never been published in the UK or even in English, but copies in Spanish and Dutch have been released (retitled as El asesinato de Shakespeare and William S.

In 2008, the pair had gotten into a joke dispute over O'Shaughnessy's use of Horowitz's name for an objectionable character (Antoine Horwitzer) in Wolf Island.

[22] In retaliation, Horowitz chose to plot a gruesome literary revenge in the short story The Man Who Killed Darren Shan.

Based heavily on one of his earlier novels entitled The Devil's Door-Bell, each of the first four entries of The Power of Five subsequently ended up being a rewritten and expanded version of their respective counterpart from the Pentagram series.

[24] In October 2008, Anthony Horowitz's play Mindgame opened Off Broadway at the SoHo Playhouse in New York City.

[26] On 19 January 2011, the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle announced that Horowitz was to be the writer of a new Sherlock Holmes novel, the first such effort to receive an official endorsement from them and to be entitled The House of Silk.

In October 2014, the estate of Ian Fleming commissioned Horowitz to write a James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, which was released in 2015.

[32] Horowitz is the only author in recent years to have been invited by Ian Fleming Publications to write successive, official James Bond novels.

In 2011, Horowitz tweeted that he had plans to write a new trilogy for the same demographic as his Alex Rider and Power of Five books, but that it's still "a secret".

[37] During 2012 and 2013, Horowitz tweeted out some more information regarding the series, where he stated that it will be "a completely new genre" from anything else he'd done so far,[38] and that it will have a contemporary setting in modern-day London with a 15-year-old protagonist.

This era in Horowitz's career also saw the release of Adventurer (1987), a thriller about a convict stuck on a prisoner ship with his sworn enemy based on the Richard Carpenter series, and Starting Out (1990), a collection of screenplays by the author himself, published.

Both McLinden and Dale reprised their respective film roles, which makes the television series act as a sequel to Just Ask for Diamond.

He also created two short-lived science-fiction shows, Crime Traveller (1997) for BBC One and The Vanishing Man (pilot 1996, series 1998) for ITV.

While Crime Traveller received favourable viewing figures it was not renewed for a second season, which Horowitz accounts to temporary personnel transitioning within the BBC.

Horowitz adapted his novel Magpie Murders into a television miniseries, which aired on BritBox and later BBC One in the UK and on the PBS series Masterpiece Mystery!

[42] Horowitz lives in Central London (Clerkenwell) with his wife Jill Green;[11] they eloped to be married in Hong Kong on 15 April 1988.

"[47] In 2017, Horowitz expressed criticism of the notion of cultural appropriation after a publisher had allegedly tried to dissuade him from creating a black character as a central figure in one of his novels, and supported fellow author Lionel Shriver's critiques on the same issue.

He also criticised the social phenomenon of cancel culture and "mobbing" of figures for expressing diverse opinions, stating, "There is a rigidity in the way we have begun to think and speak.