Anthony Horowitz

‘Alan always said there would be nine books. He’d decided that from the very start. There was something about that number that was important to him.’

They knew how he worked.

I suddenly got the feeling that it wouldn’t end well for him. It was a curious thought but perhaps he had needed Alan Conway in much the same way as James Fraser had needed Atticus Pünd. There was no other place for him in the story.

one sweep of the pen and literary history was made.

Names have a way of stamping themselves on our consciousness. Peter Pan, Luke Skywalker, Jack Reacher, Fagin, Shylock, Moriarty … can we imagine them as anything else?

He’d come up with an anagram.

But an anagram of what?

An hour later, the train pulled into Paddington and I still hadn’t seen it

crimson curtain cord

the fractured hyoid bone

leapt at the opportunity

the growlers rattling over the cobblestones,