Anthony Horowitz: The new kid on the block

What I really want to ask Anthony Horowitz about is the spectacularly miserable childhood he has talked about to other journalists – rich, uncaring parents, a grandmother so malevolent that when she died Anthony and his sister danced on her grave and drank champagne. Horowitz, however, would rather steer clear of this: "I've been getting so many phone calls from my relatives saying how can I possibly talk about my parents in this terrible way and they were marvellous people and how dare I complain. So perhaps I've overplayed that particular violin."

Perhaps we can get back to this later. Meanwhile, let's talk about the work, of which there is a lot: Anthony Horowitz is a peculiarly prolific scriptwriter for television: The Midsomer Murders, Murder in Mind, Murder Most Horrid (can you spot a theme here?), Crime Traveller. This autumn, ITV is showing Foyle's War, which stars Michael Kitchen as a detective during the Battle of Britain, and Channel 5 is doing a violent two-part thriller called Menace. Beyond your living room, next year sees the release of The Gathering, a horror film starring Christina Ricci; and then there is the book of a Broadway musical version of the Dr Seuss film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T.

All this goes on in parallel with a career as a children's writer. He used to write Roald Dahlesque comedies, packed with uncaring parents and malevolent grandmothers, gruesome events and even more gruesome puns – such as a street in London called Wiernotta Mews (ouch!). He did a series of spoof hardboiled-detective stories, starting with The Falcon's Malteser (oof!), and had written a couple of stories set at Groosham Grange, a school for witches and wizards. Then along came JK Rowling and Horowitz had to look for another theme.

Enter Alex Rider, a 14-year-old schoolboy spy, conscripted by MI6 and forced to save the world. The first two books, Stormbreaker and Point Blanc, have sold about 300,000 copies each, here and in America; the third, Skeleton Key, has just been published and, as of last week, was shifting 4,000 copies a day – Horowitz has entered JK Rowling territory himself.

Stories about juvenile spies are nothing new; but juvenile is what they tend to be. Alex is rather different. Despite his own miserable childhood – and we really are going to have to get back to that – Horowitz has an idealised view of childhood in general: "There is a sort of golden age in our life, which is around about nine to 14; that wonderful period when there is an adult inside you. You know they say every adult has a child in them: but every child has an adult in them too." It's that adult that Alex Rider is aimed at.

The books are written in a terse style consciously modelled on Ian Fleming, who is one of Horowitz's literary heroes. The new James Bond film was a regular highlight of Horowitz's own childhood in the Sixties (he is now 47), and he still loves them, but says "One of the reasons I wrote the Alex Rider books was a feeling that the Bond films missed something that the early ones had... What they lack is a sense of danger. When you watch a Pierce Brosnan film, I don't think you're ever for a moment believing that he might get hurt."

Horowitz hasn't entirely thrown off his punning habit – in "Skeleton Key" Alex acquires a girlfriend called Sabina Pleasure (as in "'S'been a pleasure to meet you"); but he argues that this is in keeping with the grand tradition of Bond girls such as Pussy Galore. He makes concessions to the later Bond films in the gadgets that Alex carries on his missions – all of them geared to a teenage boy's interests: a portable CD player with built in buzz saw, a GameBoy Advance that doubles as a Geiger counter, exploding bubble gum and a stun grenade disguised as a Michael Owen keyring.

For the most part, though, the books are deadly serious: Alex gets genuinely terrified and suffers realistic levels of pain when adult heavies push him around. This largely explains their appeal to teenage boys (and girls: Horowitz's fan mail is split 50/50).

Like most teenagers, and like Bond himself, Alex is a connoisseur of the finer things in life: he pedals a lightweight racer from Condor of Holborn, surfs in only the finest Quiksilver wetsuits, appreciates a well-balanced skateboard. Although the books are inherently implausible, Horowitz takes care to get technical details right, so that the storylines are at least possible. For Alex 4 – provisionally entitled either Gameslayer or Eagle Eye – he needs to know about aviation, but, as Horowitz points out: "When you say to somebody, I've got this story and it involves crash-landing a jumbo jet, can you help me with the technical specifications to get it right, they are unsurprisingly somewhat reluctant."

There have been other obstacles. Some of Alex's bolder stunts are rehearsed by Horowitz's elder son, Nicholas, who is 13 and hugely sporty. He has provided help with snowboarding and scuba-diving; and, for Alex 4, Horowitz hopes to get him base-jumping off a mountain, but suspects that his wife, the television producer Jill Green, will not let him get away with this. I wonder whether any of Alex Rider's glamour has rubbed off on Horowitz's two sons, but he says not: as far as they are concerned, the main spin-off from his career has been that they used to get called "Bookboy" at school.

Perhaps this is the time to talk a little bit about that unhappy childhood: is Horowitz repeating his parents' mistakes, in the Larkin manner? "No, I'm making much better, more original mistakes with my children." Horowitz loathed his boarding schools – the couple who ran one of them appear as fascists in Foyle's War – but Nicholas is off to one next year, of his own volition: "Says something about my skills as a parent, he can't wait to get out of the house."

Part of Horowitz's reluctance to talk about his own parents comes from an awareness that he sounds spoiled, given that his material circumstances were so privileged. His father was a multi-millionaire, though the sources of his wealth were somewhat obscure – Horowitz has described him as a "fixer" for Harold Wilson – and the family lived surrounded by servants in a mansion in Stanmore, a suburb of North-west London.

But money can't buy happiness, and young Anthony grew up feeling neglected, unwanted, though he does say that he adored his mother. It isn't as if the material advantages were passed on to him: his father was presumed to have millions squirrelled away in a Swiss bank account under a false account, but after his death nobody could track it down. Still, he does seem to have passed on to Anthony a gift for puzzles and mysteries; and as the Alex Rider books move towards their millionth sale, it doesn't look as if he was too hard done by.