A Line to Kill

A Line to Kill (Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery #3) by Anthony Horowitz

About the Author

Bestselling author Anthony Horowitz has written two highly acclaimed Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty; two James Bond novels, Trigger Mortis and Forever and a Day; three Detective Hawthorne novels, The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death and the forthcoming A Line To Kill, and the acclaimed bestselling mystery novels Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders.

He is also the author of the teen spy Alex Rider series, and responsible for creating and writing some of the UK’s most loved and successful TV series, including Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War. In January 2014 he was awarded an OBE for his services to literature.

Also by Anthony Horowitz

The House of Silk

Moriarty

Trigger Mortis

Magpie Murders

The Word is Murder

Forever and a Day

The Sentence is Death

Moonflower Murders

For Jill, who took me

back to Alderney.

With love.

1 An Invitation

My publishers, Penguin Random House, have offices on the Vauxhall Bridge Road, the other side of Victoria. It’s an odd part of London. Considering that the River Thames is at the top of the road and Tate Britain is just around the corner, it’s surprisingly shabby and unattractive, full of shops that look as if they should have gone out of business decades ago and blocks of flats with too many windows and no views. The road itself is very straight and unusually wide, with four lanes for the traffic that rushes past like dust in the vacuum tube of a hoover. There are side streets but they don’t seem to go anywhere.

I don’t get invited there all that often. Producing a book is a complicated enough business, I suppose, without the author getting in the way, but actually I look forward to every visit. It takes me about eight months to finish a book and in that time I’m completely alone. It’s one of the paradoxes of being a writer that, physically, there’s not a huge difference between the debut novelist and the international best-seller: they’re each stuck in a room with a laptop, too many Jaffa Cakes and nobody to talk to. I once worked out that I’ve probably written more than ten million words in my lifetime. I’m surrounded by silence but at the same time I’m drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.

But everything changes the moment I walk through the swing doors with the famous Penguin logo up above. I’m always amazed how many people work there and how young so many of them seem to be. Like writing, publishing is a vocation as much as a career and I get a sense of a shared enthusiasm that would be hard to find in most other businesses. Everyone in the building, no matter what their level, loves books – which has to be a good start. But what do they all do? It embarrasses me how little I know about the actual process of publishing. What’s the difference between a proofreader and a copy editor, for example, and why can’t one person do both jobs? Where does marketing end and publicity begin?

I suppose it doesn’t matter. This is where it all happens, where a thought that may have begun years ago in the bath or on a walk is finally turned into reality. When people talk about the ‘dream factory’ they usually mean Hollywood, but for me it will always be Vauxhall Bridge Road.

So I was happy to find myself there on a bright June morning, three months before my new novel, The Word is Murder, was due to be published. I’d been asked to come in by my editor, Graham Lucas, who’d surprised me with a telephone call.

‘Are you busy?’ he had asked. ‘We’d like to talk about publicity.’ As always, he went straight to the point.

Advance proofs of the book had already gone out and apparently they had been well received – not that I’d have heard otherwise. Publishers are brilliant at keeping bad news from authors.

‘What time?’ I asked.

‘Could you manage Tuesday? Eleven o’clock?’ There was a pause and then: ‘We also want to meet Hawthorne.’

‘Oh.’ I should have expected it, but even so I was surprised. ‘Why?’

‘We think he could make a serious difference to the sales. After all, he is the co-author.’

‘No, he’s not. He didn’t write any of it!’

‘It’s his story. We see you as a team.’

‘Actually, we’re not that close.’

‘I think the public will be very interested in him. I mean … in the two of you together. Will you talk to him?’

‘Well, I can ask him.’

‘Eleven o’clock.’ Graham hung up.