Skyfall? ‘Never liked it.’ Idris Elba? ‘Too ‘‘street’’ to play 007.’ Ian Fleming’s stories? ‘A bit slow.’ Anthony Horowitz takes no prisoners as he tells Event why his new Bond novel reboots the spy as a shamelessly macho killing machine... given his comeuppance by Pussy Galore

‘I am unlikely to earn as much as from an Alex Rider book, but I have never written with money in my head,' said Anthony Horowitz who has penned the new Bond adventure, Trigger Mortis

Anthony Horowitz walks, talks and looks like a spy. He has the glide, the posh, clipped voice and the faraway eyes of a man who knows secrets, and he absolutely loves James Bond.

‘I remember seeing Dr No in the cinema at the age of eight. It was one of the most significant moments of my life.’

The excited young boy went on to become one of the greatest adventure writers of our age, with a licence to thrill as the creator of the teenage secret agent Alex Rider, whose books have sold a staggering 19 million copies.

Horowitz almost certainly grew up among spies, as his father was a secret fixer for the Prime Minister of the day, and he has an extraordinary real-life tale to tell about how this man of mystery lost all the family money.

He won’t say if he’s a spook (he’d have to kill me) but he knows them, has visited their HQs and counts them as fans. ‘They like what I do.’

Given all of this, he was the obvious man to hire when Ian Fleming’s estate wanted a writer to create a new 007 adventure as close as possible to the style of the originals.

‘This is something I have wanted to do all my life.’

But incredibly, Horowitz nearly turned Bond down.

‘I was getting a bit frustrated, shall we say?’

Was it the money? Surely they give you enough to fill a 007-style suitcase if you write a Bond story?

‘No. Well, yes they do but actually, I’m taking a pay cut to write Bond.’

Read an exclusive extract from new Bond thriller Trigger Mortis below...

Anthony Horowitz was the obvious man to hire when Ian Fleming’s estate wanted a writer to create a new 007 adventure as close as possible to the style of the originals

But then he is used to getting all the royalties from his books. This time he is sharing them with the estate, having given in and written a new Bond adventure, called Trigger Mortis.

‘I am unlikely to earn as much as from an Alex Rider book, but I have never written with money in my head.’

You can say that when you are worth an estimated £10 million.

We meet in the rooftop cafe of his publisher’s office. With its epic view over London, it feels rather like the lair of a low-budget Bond villain.

The scene is set beautifully but only one thing really counts... is the new book any good?

Fortunately, Trigger Mortis is a blast. Set two weeks after the end of the novel Goldfinger in 1957, it has a superb plot based around the early space race and features the return of the best Bond girl of them all, Pussy Galore.

‘That seemed like a smiley thing to do,’ says Horowitz, who admits that as he wrote her he was thinking of the character of Pussy in the book but the look of Pussy in the film, as played by Honor Blackman in 1964.

She is one of two women who give the old chauvinist 007 a kicking this time around, physically and emotionally.

‘I wanted him to have a slight comeuppance.’

Bond usually loves then leaves his women, but this time he is the one who gets dumped.

Horowitz is lean, ruggedly handsome and has just turned 60, but dressed in clothes that 007 would not be seen dead in, unless undercover. Sandals, jeans and a T-shirt? Think Ralph Fiennes as as the elegant veteran M trying to fit in at Glastonbury.

But back to why he nearly declined the mission. If it wasn’t the money, was it the sense of rejection? I know he was turned down in the past.

Trigger Mortis is set two weeks after the end of the novel Goldfinger in 1957, and features the return of the best Bond girl of them all, Pussy Galore (played by Honor Blackman in 1964's Goldfinger)

‘I wanted to write a James Bond film,’ he says. ‘I met the producers years and years ago and tried to persuade them.

'That was when Alex Rider came into my head. They were talking about the next movie, not offering it to me. I thought, “Sod you. If you won’t let me make a Bond film, I’ll make my own up!”

‘By then Roger Moore was about 50 and way too old to be playing 007, so I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if James Bond was a teenager?”’

He certainly got his revenge: for a couple of years after the last of the Pierce Brosnan films, Die Another Day in 2002, Alex Rider was arguably more popular than Bond.

There were ten books and he looked set for a hit movie series of his own with the release of Stormbreaker in the summer of 2006.

The cast included Damian Lewis, Ewan McGregor and Mickey Rourke. But Horowitz admits that while some of the reviews were good, the film was not the great box-office hit everyone thought it would be. It is estimated to have made back only half its $40 million budget.

‘It was a near miss. There were very good things in it.

'There is interest from producers about making another but it is way too early to be able to talk about a film without putting a curse on it.’

Perhaps the main reason that Stormbreaker did not do so well was that Bond blew his young rival out of the water just a few months later in the autumn of 2006, when Casino Royale was released.

Howoritz isn’t bitter.

‘Daniel Craig is a terrific Bond. Casino Royale is probably my favourite. Of the films after Connery, it is easily the best. Fantastic. A total return to the gritty seriousness of it.’

However, he is spectacularly rude about the follow-ups.

‘Quantum Of Solace just went wrong. Skyfall is my least favourite. I know it is heresy to say so, but it is the one Bond film I have never liked.’

Why? ‘How much time do you have? Bond is weak in it. He has doubts. That’s not Bond.

‘Secondly, the villain wins. The villain sets out to kill M – the film finishes with the villain killing M. So why have I watched it?

‘And if you have to protect the Head of MI6 from a madman, do you take her to a Scottish farmhouse with no weapons? And tell your bad guy where you are, so he will arrive with six people to kill her? And then M escapes and stands on top of a hill waving a torch to tell them where she is! It’s that sort of thing that made me angry.’

‘In the original book, the fact that Pussy was raped as a girl becomes something attractive. If I had put that in I would have been killed,’ said Anthony Horowitz

And he is just as unimpressed with the trailer for the new film, Spectre.

‘I’m looking at the trailer and I am seeing a photograph of Bond’s family. The mum and the dad are in there and their faces are missing because the picture has been burned in a fire.

'This is going to be to do with his family background, and I know the fans are all terribly excited to know more, but I’m saying, “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”

'I don’t want to know about his doubts, his insecurities or weaknesses. I just want to see him act, kill, win.’

Neither is Horowitz impressed with the favourite to take over from Daniel Craig.

‘Idris Elba is a terrific actor, but I can think of other black actors who would do it better.’

He names Adrian Lester, star of Hustle.

‘For me, Idris Elba is a bit too rough to play the part. It’s not a colour issue. I think he is probably a bit too “street” for Bond. Is it a question of being suave? Yeah.’

Horowitz can be this frank because the films are owned by Eon Productions and are nothing to do with his employers at the Fleming estate, which controls the rights to the books.

The trustees asked three other writers to have a go at reinventing Bond before him, which brings us finally to the reason he nearly turned them down.

‘They asked Sebastian Faulks to write a Bond book, they asked Jeffery Deaver and they asked William Boyd, but they didn’t ask me.’

It certainly still rankles.

Faulks published Devil May Care in 2008, Deaver’s Carte Blanche came out in 2011 and Solo by William Boyd was in 2013. None of them were great, according to Bond fans.

Meanwhile, Horowitz was busy proving he could write other people’s stories by creating a screenplay for the Tintin film and two Sherlock Holmes books in the voice of Conan Doyle.

‘When they finally did approach, I wanted to say, “About time too!”’

But despite his frustration, he could not quite say no to Bond.

‘I did say, “If I had been sixth or seventh in line I might not have said yes.”’

How is his version different to the others’?

‘I hope you could take the name off the cover and think it was written by Ian Fleming.’

Isn’t Fleming’s Bond a racist, homophobic, male chauvinist pig?

‘Bond is not the most sympathetic of characters when you actually think about him. He is a man who kills people. He has unfortunate attitudes towards women, gays, Jews and foreigners.’

Horowitz pauses for a moment.

‘Daniel Craig is a terrific Bond. Casino Royale is probably my favourite. Of the films after Connery, it is easily the best. Fantastic. A total return to the gritty seriousness of it,' said Anthony Horowitz

‘I have to be careful how I say that, because we do like Bond. That is one of the tricks of the books, to make him likeable.

'He represents the country, in patriotic terms. Also, he is the Byronic hero who comes riding out of the shadows, puts the world to rights and moves on to the next adventure.’

Horowitz has found a brilliant solution to the sexism of the original Bond: make one of the women sharper, stronger and better than him.

‘The policy was not to fight any of it, not to try and change him and not to make excuses for him but to find a way to chide him.

'So one of the women in the book abandons him, and worse still – spoiler alert – walks out with another woman.’

The name of this formidable new Bond girl is Jeopardy Lane.

‘Jeopardy is at least as effective a spy as James Bond and probably more so. Without her, he would be killed. He has to acknowledge that she is unstoppable and doesn’t make mistakes, while he does.’

It’s worse than that for poor old James. Jeopardy runs out on him. Then he is given a female instructor to help him become a racing driver, and inevitably tries to seduce her – but they are interrupted by the need to go off and rescue Pussy Galore. And when the rescue is over, to his utter dismay, Pussy and the instructor run off together.

‘That is a double whammy for an old-fashioned macho man like Bond.’

This is the first time in all of the books and films that two of James Bond’s attempted conquests have ended up falling into each other’s arms instead – although since Horowitz is writing like Fleming, there is no explicit lesbian sex scene. Why bring back Pussy?

‘She is one of the greatest characters in the whole Bond canon. The novel Goldfinger finishes with a Stratocruiser crashing with Bond and Pussy Galore on board. We don’t really know what happens after that.

'So I thought, “Why doesn’t he bring her home with him?” Then it gave me something to write about: Bond living with a girl and trying to be domestic, which is hopeless.’

Isn’t Pussy Galore a somewhat unfortunate name, particularly in this day and age?

‘I say that in the book. Once he gets back to London, he has lost the glamour of Jamaica and he’s in a hotel, he introduces her and feels embarrassed. Which of course you would do. “Hello, this is Pussy Galore…” I mean, really!’

There are some things Horowitz had to leave out.

‘In the original book, the fact that Pussy was raped as a girl becomes something attractive. If I had put that in I would have been killed.’

Somehow he has kept the flavour of Fleming while giving Trigger Mortis the pace of a modern thriller.

‘I love the originals, but their languid pacing is for a Fifties or Sixties audience – it is not what we are used to now.’

Skyfall is my least favourite. I know it is heresy to say so, but it is the one Bond film I have never liked. Bond is weak in it. He has doubts. That’s not Bond,' said Anthony Horowitz

Did the estate impose rules?

‘Yes, lots of ground rules! I got very nervous. The Fleming estate gets involved in what is going to happen and it was clear from the start there were going to be very strict guidelines for writing this book.

'Part of the recruitment process was to demonstrate to them that I wasn’t going to write something embarrassing or wrong.’

He means out of character with the original Bond. For example, the estate would not have allowed James Bond to fall for a man and have a gay love scene, he says. There is, however, an openly gay friend.

‘Fleming’s attitude to gay people in the books is questionable to say the least. So we have this one person who can say to Bond, “You are a dinosaur, attitudes have got to change.”

‘That is playing to the audience a bit. The attitude of the Government and civil service to homosexuality in the Fifties was disastrous, for homeland security apart from anything else, with Guy Burgess [gay double agent who defected to Russia] and the rest.’

Bond does get to wrestle in the nude with a younger man.

‘Can you imagine Roger Moore doing that scene? No thank you!’

Most of the estate’s suggestions were helpful, says Horowitz.

'With the end of the Pussy Galore sequence, and the way he parts company with Jeopardy Lane, I had been a little crueller to Bond than they liked.

'The women left him more abruptly, with less explanation. Jeopardy left him with not quite contempt but a dig in the ribs, and they didn’t like that. They were right. It left a sour taste in your mouth. You don’t want Bond to end the book too bruised.’

The most surprising thing is the background he gives to the bad guy, Jason Sin, who is revealed as the survivor of a real-life massacre, where U.S. soldiers fired on Korean women and children.

‘His personality was created as a result of one of the greatest atrocities of the war. So you lose your devil incarnate and instead you have a human being.’

Horowitz does the same with a new play about to open at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, called Dinner With Saddam. It’s a political farce based around an encounter with the deposed dictator.

‘Saddam Hussein was a monster. A vicious, evil, sick, depraved man... but a man. That’s the point.

'The moment you portray your villain as a cartoon monster – whether it’s Stalin, Hitler or Bin Laden – you fail to grasp them.’

Is he asking us to have sympathy for Saddam?

‘He was, for some years, the saviour of modern Iraq. You have to understand where he began, to understand where it went wrong,’ says Horowitz, who opposed the invasion of Iraq from the beginning.

‘The Chilcot Inquiry [into the causes of the war] is meant to have nailed Tony Blair. That is what I heard.

'For some reason, there is a delay. Is that report ever going to appear in our lifetimes? If it does will it not be blacked out, watered down and be cut? It is the running sore on the life we all live that this is allowed to continue.’

He stops himself.

‘Forgive the rant. My play about Saddam is a comedy. It looks at the Iraq war and asks these questions but in a scatological, knockabout way.’

Horowitz admits that while Stormbreaker got some of the reviews were good, the film was not the great box-office hit everyone thought it would be. It is estimated to have made back only half its $40 million budget

He has long refused to write more Alex Rider novels, but reveals the teenager will return to solve the greatest mystery of that war.

‘I’m going to write a new novella – my Octopussy. A five-chapter story set in Iraq. Nobody knows that, so you’ve got a scoop. It has Alex penetrating the mountains in northern Iraq to discover the weapons of mass destruction.’

There are some, then? ‘Not after Alex finishes with them. That’s why Tony Blair never found them!’

He blames the war for the troubled times we live in now.

‘I worry every time my children get on a bus or a Tube.’

They are grown men of 22 and 24. They are also braver than him.

‘I don’t like scary stuff. My sons are much more 007 than I am. Nicholas is a hugely physical person who does triathlons and anything that is dangerous or involves heights and such. Cass, my younger son, is a political journalist.

'How like James Bond am I? Sadly not much at all.’

How close is he to the real version of the world that Bond inhabits?

‘I’ve had contact with spies and the world of intelligence and quite honestly I am not really allowed to mention it. I have had invitations and met people, but they ask me not to use such things in publicity.’

If he was a secret killing machine, would he say so? ‘No.’

Thought not. He does have a great back story for a spy, though. His father almost certainly mixed with them as a secret fixer for Harold Wilson.

Then, at 17, Horowitz found himself in a scene that could have come from the movies.

‘I have a vivid memory of carrying £150,000 in bearer bonds in a rucksack on my back – that is like a million pounds now – and having to deliver it for my father to a man in an office in London.’

The family was plunged into bankruptcy when his father died.

‘He went to the bank in Switzerland, put all his money in a suitcase, walked to another bank and put it there. Then died, without saying which bank it was or the name of the account.’

His mother found a leather notebook with a list of codenames.

‘She knew that within this book the money could be found. Meanwhile the banks are chasing her for debts of a million pounds.

'She is wiped out. The house, the cars, the jewellery, the mink coats, everything has got to go.

‘She can’t persuade the banks that she doesn’t know where the money is, so she is travelling to Switzerland to try to find it using the notebook but she never does.’

What does he think happened?

‘My belief is that one of his crooked associates went to the bank and took it. He was working with high-class, white-collar criminals. We lost everything.

'My father had this quest for money and it ended in a cruel way. The lesson I take is that the pursuit of money is a waste of time.’

Only very rich people say that.

‘All I can say is that writing for me is the means and the end. I don’t care how much money the books make.’

I tell him that I don’t quite believe him. ‘Obviously I like having money. It’s nice to be able to fly to other countries and buy things like fountain pens.’

Does he keep a secret bomb in his Mont Blanc? Maybe. But Horowitz looks too much like a spy to be one, unless it’s a double bluff. I think it’s true he’s a scaredy-cat, but anyone who loves Bond should be grateful he has found his mission in life, because Trigger Mortis is terrific.

‘If ever there was a book I was born to write, it is this one.’ Thank M he didn’t turn it down.

‘Trigger Mortis’ by Anthony Horowitz is published on Sept 8 by Orion, priced £18.99. Offer price £15.19 (20 per cent discount) until September 13 2015.

Order at mailbookshop.co.uk, p&p is free on orders over £12.

Event’s exclusive extract from new Bond thriller Trigger Mortis

He came to a clearing and Bond knew that, even with all the extraordinary things that he had experienced in his line of work, he would never forget the sight, bathed in moonlight, that presented itself to him now.

The Devil’s Own consisted of seven huge stones, broken fingers worn away by time and the elements. The ground on which they stood, forming an irregular circle, was flat with patches of wild grass and the surrounding trees seemed to lean in – as if they were complicit with what was going on. Pussy Galore was standing, stark naked, the moon accentuating her shoulders, her outstretched arms, the curves of her breasts. Ropes led away from her wrists, disappearing behind two of the stones. She was swearing, her body writhing, but the men were ignoring her as they continued with their work.

They were killing her. With gold paint.

Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger

Bond watched them in disbelief. Each of the men had a paintbrush and a tin of paint, which they were slapping onto her body so that it covered every inch of her flesh. Her arms and stomach were already coated. There was gold paint in her hair and it was trickling down the insides of her legs. Pussy rasped something particularly filthy and one of the men slapped paint across her face, half-covering her nose and lips. She choked and fell silent. The other man said something and they both laughed.

Bond knew exactly what was happening. He remembered what had been done to Jill Masterson, the girl who had helped him when he had first met Auric Goldfinger at a hotel in Miami. As revenge, Goldfinger had had her painted gold, clogging up the pores of her skin and causing her to die of suffocation. Bond was grateful he hadn’t seen the obscenity for himself. He had been told about it later, by Tilly Masterton, Jill’s sister. So the two men in the grey Austin must be in some way connected to Goldfinger. Someone, somewhere, blamed Pussy Galore for her part in his downfall and the failure of Operation Grand Slam and they had come for revenge. This was a hideous death in a public place that even had a suitably lurid name (the two men had surely chosen it deliberately) and would make the front pages of every newspaper in the world. And the message would be clear, the link to Goldfinger obvious. She was the betrayer. This was the price.

If Bond had not followed her from the hotel she would have been dead before morning. As it was, he had very little time. Her body was almost entirely covered with gold. He wouldn’t be able to clean it off himself and the nearest hospital must be at least an hour away. He had to act now.

The two men had their backs to him. They had no idea he was there, about 50ft away at the edge of the clearing. Bond had two cartons with him, which he had taken from Logan’s shopping: Fry’s cocoa and Cerebos salt. Had two such innocent items ever been put to more deadly use? He had emptied the contents and then filled the containers with petrol from a spare jerrycan that Logan kept in the boot. He’d also made two fuses out of strips of torn newspaper. There was every chance that they would blow up in his hand but it was too late to worry about that. Bond waited for the right moment. Now. The two men had stepped back as if to admire their handiwork. Pussy Galore was slumped between them, glistening gold, her head hanging down, the muscles in her arms straining to support her body weight. Bond took out his lighter, lit the fuses and threw his two makeshift bombs.

One fell short. The other hit the ground right next to the nearest of the two men and exploded, the flames leaping up, instantly devouring his legs and stomach. The man screamed. His companion had been splashed by some of the burning petrol – not enough to put him out of action but as Bond raced forward, covering the short distance between them, at least his attention had been well and truly diverted. He turned as Bond approached but too late. The heel of Bond’s palm, lent extra force by his own momentum,slammed into the underside of the man’s chin, rocketing his head back and almost certainly breaking his neck. Bond was already turning his attention to his partner, who had seen what was happening and was caught between a set of contradictions that might almost have been comical: trying to scrabble for his gun with hands that were also fighting the flames. Bond didn’t want to burn his own fists so used a judo move, twisting round and lashing out with the flat of his right foot. The man went down but even before he hit the ground the fire had half done Bond’s work for him. He was dying or dead, a crumpled figure with the flames licking his back.

Bond ran over to Pussy Galore and released her. She fell against him and he felt the gold paint sticking against his clothes. He was sickened by what she had just been through and wished that he had listened more carefully when she had described the two men following her in London. CIA indeed! She didn’t speak as he laid her gently on the ground and took off his jacket to cover her lower body. Using his bare hands he rubbed off as much paint as he could, exposing the flesh and, hopefully, allowing it to breathe.

‘What have they done to her?’

Logan Fairfax was suddenly there beside him, and Bond glanced up at her angrily. ‘I thought I told you to wait in the car.’

‘That’s right, James. And I decided to ignore you. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on here? Who is she?’

‘A friend.’ The two words sounded feeble, the stale admission of a suburban husband found cheating by his wife. While he had been trying to seduce Logan over roast lamb and a classic Bordeaux, Pussy Galore had been walking into this. ‘We have to get her into hospital,’ he went on. ‘I can carry her to your car.’

‘Do it quickly. We’ll take her to Marlborough.’

‘James?’ It was the first word Pussy had spoken since he had reached her and it seemed to Bond that she spoke it with hostility. She couldn’t open her eyes. The paint had sealed the lids shut.

‘Don’t talk,’ he said to her. ‘We’re going to get you some help.’