Anthony Horowitz turned down as James Bond screenwriter in 1980`s

"Just have a look at this," says Anthony Horowitz, getting out his camera-phone and pointing at an image on it. "I haven't shown this to anyone else yet." On the screen there's a model of the main set that Ewan McGregor, Bill Nighy and Mickey Rourke will be clambering on when they start work on the $40 million film of Stormbreaker, Horowitz's first Alex Rider novel, later this year. Without any figures to give a sense of scale, without colours and movement, without everything else necessary in the background when a 14-year-old boy goes about his everyday business of saving the world, it looks singularly unimpressive, like an assemblage of white blocks that fifth-form art students might use in drawing lessons - reports The Scotsman.

To Horowitz, though, that matchbox-sized image means a whole lot more. In the early 1980s, after he had finished his English and art history course at York University, he had a meeting at which he tried to sell himself as a screenwriter with the James Bond team. They turned him down. Very well, he thought: maybe one day he'd write his own way into the job.

There is, you may notice, a certain chutzpah about deciding to create your own version of the cinema's most popular action hero. But Alex Rider's adventures (six books and counting, sales two million and rising) were always, he resolved, going to be different from 007's. Although Horowitz can still quote whole paragraphs of Fleming's prose, Alex Rider was always going to be more than just a junior James Bond.

Twenty years after that abortive job interview, Horowitz knew infinitely more about his craft. He'd dropped out of advertising and, with no training, taken up writing for television. Episodes of Poirot and Midsomer Murders, the whole of Foyle's War: all this and more had poured off his word processor and into the bottom line of the production company run by his wife, Jill Green. In the meantime he'd written a shelf-full of children's books. They'd sold respectably, but not spectacularly well. His wife wondered why he kept on with them when the TV work was keeping them busy.

By 2000, though, Harry Potter was casting his spell over the children's book market. Horowitz's own blend of similarly themed fantasy humour was, he says, "blown out of the water". So back to that first, absurd-sounding plan: create something to rival James Bond.

He decided he'd ditch comic wordplay (although not completely, which is why Alex Rider's explosive chewing gum is called Bubble 07 and his flame-throwing hand-held computer a Napalm organiser). He'd make Rider feel pain, not relentlessly bounce back against villainy. And from the moment he started writing about him, he felt certain he was on to a winner.

And so he was. His own publisher, Walker Books, was gearing up to more aggressive marketing. His own children, Nicholas and Cassian (now 16 and 14) were at an age when they could put him right about what Alex would really be thinking, as opposed to what a grown-up might imagine he was.

The media, reflecting the culture, was taking children's books seriously too. Ten years ago, he says, someone like me wouldn't have been interviewing someone like him: yet back in May, when his last Alex Rider novel, Arkangel, was published at the same time as the General Election, the Pope's death and Prince Charles's wedding, it still made it on to the television news schedules.

In five years the Alex Rider books have propelled Horowitz into that rare category of children's writers (Rowling, Darren Shan, Lemony Snicket and Eoin Colfer are almost the only other ones) whose books have a magnetic hold on boys' imaginations. And his new series is, if anything, even more compelling.

With Raven's Gate, Horowitz is once more breaking new ground in children's literature. "Stephen King for kids" is his shorthand phrase for what he is attempting in the five-book series, the first of which sets up a tale of sinister supernatural adventures that nudges the supernatural horror genre further down the age range than it's probably ever been.

In the novel, 14-year-old orphan, Matthew Freeman, is caught breaking into a warehouse and sent to Yorkshire to be fostered on a farm by the frightening Mrs Deverill. If she's not what she seems, neither are any of the residents of the nearby village. The scares get progressively bigger. One scene in particular - when dinosaur skeletons in the main hall of the Natural History Museum come to life by night and start attacking Freeman - is the kind of bedtime reading that can haunt the dreams of adults and children alike. Tautly told, the nightmare - which only seems preposterous in precis form - is graphic and unpredictable, growing coherently out of credibly mundane beginnings.

In that respect it is almost the opposite of Horowitz's own childhood, which is Balzacian almost beyond belief. He is tired of talking about it, yet it inevitably overhangs every interview. The house in Stanmore with gardens so large that 16 houses have now been built on them and which had more servants than family members. The summons to dinner every night at 7.30pm; and every night the fear of being banished from the table if he wasn't amusing enough. The millionaire lawyer father whose fortune evaporated into unknown Swiss bank accounts on his death. An affection-starved childhood made even worse by the rigours of a truly appalling prep school.

For all that, Horowitz says, he has known that he wanted to be a writer since he was eight. By the time he was 18 he knew it was a realistic ambition: three inspiring English teachers at Rugby had instilled the requisite confidence in him.

"But why I actually started baffles me to this day. I was working in advertising and one day I was bored, it was raining, and without planning anything at all, I started writing this story. It was about this multi-millionaire's kid. And that was it: I was up and running.

"It may well be because I had an unsatisfactory childhood, that the books are an attempt to reinvent something I never had. And certainly the kid I started to write about was thoroughly rich, thoroughly unpleasant and thoroughly out of shape - just as I had been. It was my comment on myself - but it was a joke too, nothing to be taken too seriously."

THESE DAYS HE'S UNRECOGNISABLE from that podgy, desperately unhappy Jewish boy driven around leafiest Middlesex by Rolls-Royce. Tanned, handsome, looking 15 years younger than his 50 years, he is engaging, vital, inquisitive, enthusiastic, immensely likeable. His wife says she's never met anyone with more creative ideas each day, and it's easy to see why. When I ask what ideas he's had the day we meet in Edinburgh, he reels out a list which starts with wondering what would happen if he went off with someone holding up a card in the airport arrivals hall and ends with wondering if Alex should climb up the Sydney Harbour Bridge in his next adventure. Everything has a story to it, he told the children at a school he visited in Glenrothes that afternoon. Everything.

He doesn't keep a notebook: if it's a good idea, it will stay; if it's dross, it won't. All the same, he writes daily. "If I don't write, I don't sleep," he says. I look up. He means it. He has already told me about the long years of not being famous, how it was the same even then. He doesn't begrudge any of that time out of the limelight: "If I'd written Stormbreaker when I was 25 instead of 45, I'd have been pigeonholed: I wouldn't have been able to do the TV writing, the films, writing for adults and for the theatre." Always, he knew fame was coming, even if it was going to be posthumous. Always, as he'd told the children at Glenrothes, the difference between a successful writer and an unsuccessful one "boils down to three words - never give up".

As a credo, it radiates chutzpah, almost to the point of arrogance. But if you look hard, there's a certain desperation about it too. And for all Anthony Horowitz's happiness and success, you can't help thinking that the demons that still drive him go a long, long way back.

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

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