A woman just can’t be Bond. So says Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz frowns like M mourning a fallen spy and says, ‘I would never have killed James Bond, because I like him too much.’

He’s talking about the end of the last Daniel Craig movie No Time To Die, in which 007 perished for love under a barrage of missiles. ‘Also, I think it takes away his mythic quality.’

If anyone knows how to write a hero it is Anthony, creator of the teenage spy Alex Rider and Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle from the long-running crime show Foyle’s War.

He’s written more than 50 books, including two novels continuing the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and three featuring James Bond, at the request of the estate of original Bond author Ian Fleming.

‘I always thought I was writing a trilogy and they hang together well,’ says Anthony, who has given us a mid-career Bond trying to stop a supervillain from blowing up America’s space programme in Trigger Mortis and a prequel imagining his first mission as a double-0 agent in Forever And A Day.

The third book, With A Mind To Kill, is released in paperback later this month, and sees an ageing, weary 007 venture into the heart of the Soviet empire. It’s a sequel to Fleming’s final Bond novel, The Man With The Golden Gun, in which a brainwashed Bond tries to kill his boss and mentor M.

‘I always wondered what would happen if they secretly sorted Bond out and sent him back to get at the people who did that to him,’ Anthony says. So 007 returns to a grim 1960s Moscow to confront his tormentor Colonel Boris, a character who appears only in passing in a couple of Fleming’s books.

‘Fleming created this villain but told us nothing about him except that he brainwashes people.’

The name is not then, as some critics have suggested, a satire on our former prime minister?

‘Absolutely not. There is no way I would have done that. I find Boris Johnson’s name so depressing, so destructive and negative generally, it seems to me that any report with him in it is always going to be bad news. So I had absolutely no interest in referencing him whatsoever.’

His son might be amused. Anthony is married to the television producer Jill Green and they have two grown-up sons: Nicholas, who’s a film-maker, and Cassian, who happens to be special adviser to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Head of Strategic Communications and Digital at 10 Downing Street.

Still, there are striking parallels with modern foreign politics in the book, with Bond musing on Russia, ‘Evil in this country wasn’t just a group of men talking in a room. It wasn’t one madman hanging out in Crab Key or another planning to steal all the gold from Fort Knox. It was a huge machine, a sickness that had corroded itself into the souls of a hundred million people and at the end of the day they were the only ones who would ever be able to rid themselves of it.’

Anthony nods. ‘That is, of course, very much what they haven’t done and where the country now is, unfortunately. With A Mind To Kill was written before the invasion of Ukraine and is not meant to be a commentary on Russia, but nonetheless I think it does shed some light on the Russian way of thinking, particularly from the 60s onwards, which is when Putin began.’

He’s written more than 50 books, including two novels continuing the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and three featuring James Bond

If anyone knows how to write a hero it is Anthony, creator of the teenage spy Alex Rider and Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle from the long-running crime show Foyle’s War

The book also has a really strong Russian heroine, a psychologist who begins to realise the faults of the Soviet system even as she falls in love with 007, and ultimately saves his life.

She is predictably gorgeous but also hard as nails, and is called Katya Leonova, not something daft and vaguely suggestive like the names of so many Bond women.

‘I decided to eschew Ian Fleming’s practice of having names like Pussy Galore and Plenty O’Toole, because it’s not really of the times – it feels a little bit schoolboy now.’

The genius of these Bond books is that Anthony re-creates all the mood, detail and attitude of the originals but tells the stories in a fast-paced and thrilling modern way. Bond still likes to be on top when it comes to women, but the women challenge that.

‘The female is once again much stronger than Bond in this book,’ Anthony says. ‘That is something I inherited from Fleming, at the same time as being aware that these days it would be impossible to create, shall we say, a woman raped at the age of 16 by her uncle who has been a lesbian ever since who then converts and becomes a full-blooded heterosexual two minutes after seeing Bond’s biceps.’

His latest project – Magpie Murders – is a TV adaptation of his own book, starring Lesley Manville, already aired on BritBox and now bought by the BBC

He’s talking about Pussy Galore from Goldfinger, who was played in the movie by Honor Blackman.

‘I did bring Pussy back for Trigger Mortis, but with an eye to modern mores I had her abandon Bond for another woman.’

He knows how to stay on the right side of the PC police, but there is one change he definitely would not make to 007.

‘Bond could be any ethnicity, any age, any look, but he can’t be a woman. Barbara Broccoli herself has said it cannot happen and that’s because the character with all his faults is aggressively masculine. A woman just can’t be Bond.’

Not that he has any say over that. ‘I would reboot the franchise by remaking all the original books in the right order in their proper period settings, that would be gorgeous. But when it comes to the movies I am no more than a punter like anyone else.’

How come? ‘Ian Fleming sold the rights to Bond on screen in perpetuity to Eon [the production company owned by the Broccoli family] and drew a separation between his own family and the company which exists to this day. They’re very friendly, they talk to each other, but the film people do their own thing with their people and the Fleming estate do theirs with people like me. The two don’t meet.’

Isn’t he taking a bit of a risk, in the current fevered climate, bringing back a heavy drinking, frequently violent, sexist dinosaur like the 007 of the books?

‘I’m sitting very firmly inside the 50s and 60s in these stories. I’m writing about a time when attitudes and language were different to how they are now, although obviously there is no value in offending an audience unnecessarily. I have never written with a sense of fear or nervousness, but at the same time I’m wise enough to self-edit.

‘I believe writers should be free and unfearing about how they express themselves. I don’t believe in cancellation. I don’t believe that somebody who says something foolish should necessarily be extinguished for life from expressing themselves.’

What about if they said it in one of their old books?

‘I think Puffin made fools of themselves,’ he says sharply, talking about the publisher’s recent decision to take words like ‘fat’ out of Roald Dahl’s books in case they upset modern readers.

‘I’m not a huge fan of Dahl, by the end of his life he was saying some really quite horrible things, but the attempts to bowdlerise his books were an own goal. What we need to do is not pretend that these things were never said or thought, but rather congratulate ourselves on having moved away from them.’

He brings up another author whose works are currently being revised.

‘I was reading Agatha Christie recently. Are you aware of how shockingly antisemitic her books are? I read nine books in a row before giving a lecture on her and I was knocked out by the endless depictions of hooked noses and tight, greedy, shabby Jews – yet I’m not going to suggest for a single second that somebody should go in and scissor out all those descriptions. It’s how a woman in the 30s and 40s thought. We should be happy that no writer could do the same again.’

New editions of Miss Marple and Poirot are being published having been edited by sensitivity readers, who remove any language likely to offend.

Anthony had one imposed on him for The Twist Of A Knife, a recent novel containing a Native American character, but on the whole insists he has no need of one and nothing to regret in any of his works. ‘You don’t need a sensitivity reader if you’re sensitive yourself.’

His latest project is a TV adaptation of his own book, starring Lesley Manville, already aired on BritBox and now bought by the BBC.

‘Magpie Murders is a very different and slightly humorous take on the classic whodunnit. Lesley plays an editor who is publishing a murder mystery, but the author is murdered in real life and the clue to who killed him is somehow contained in the book he’s written. The editor becomes a detective in trying to figure out how.’

Aren’t we saturated with crime on the telly? ‘It’s not a crime show. It’s something new. The fictional detective enters the real world to solve crimes with the editor and all the actors double up as modern people and the characters they’re based on. It’s a joy.’

The sequel, Moonflower Murders, will be filmed by the BBC this year. ‘If I look a little tired it’s because I’ve been up all night looking at the script,’ Anthony says happily. 

He used to work at his own Bond-style central London lair, a stunning penthouse in Clerkenwell, but that’s been sold.

‘I’ve recently moved to Richmond. Walking with my dog there is the most crucial part of my day, when I think and get exercise.’

What prompted the change?

‘I was sad to move but the boys were heading their own ways and as a family we were going in different directions. I suppose this is my last house, a sense of, “This is it.”‘

Perhaps, but Anthony Horowitz looks much younger than his years – he’s just turned 68 – and like Bond in the books, if not the movies, he shows no sign of stopping. 

‘There’s never a day when I don’t write. It’s part of who I am.’

With A Mind To Kill by Anthony Horowitz is out in paperback on 27 April (Vintage, £8.99).

Magpie Murders is on Saturday, 9.15pm, BBC1 and iPlayer.