Anthony Horowitz: Why the World Needs a Good Whodunit

Wheels Off with Rhett Miller

Rhett Miller

Arts, Performing Arts, Music

5.0 • 596 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Anthony Horowitz, one of the world's most prolific and versatile storytellers, joins Rhett for a conversation about creativity, craft, and the enduring power of the mystery novel. Horowitz reflects on a career built from the most unlikely of beginnings: a miserable boarding school, a library that became a refuge, and a boy who learned to make friends by telling stories. The two discuss his new book A Deadly Episode, and what it was like to write a book about filming a TV episode while simultaneously writing the TV episode itself. Drawing on decades of experience across every storytelling medium, Horowitz makes a compelling case for why murder mysteries aren't mere entertainment — they're a meaningful antidote to a world increasingly short on truth. Horowitz has written two highly acclaimed Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty; three James Bond novels, Trigger Mortis, Forever and a Day, and With a Mind to Kill; the mystery novels featuring book editor Susan Ryeland: Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders, and Marble Hall Murders, and the Detective Hawthorne novels: The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line To Kill, The Twist of a Knife, Close to Death, and now A DEADLY EPISODE. He is also the author of the teen spy Alex Rider series, which has sold more than nineteen million copies worldwide and has become a hugely successful show on Amazon Prime TV. His breakthrough murder mystery, Magpie Murders, and the follow up Moonflower Murders, were both adapted for TV and aired on PBS – the Marble Hall Murders series will air in September 2026. He lives in London with his wife and dog. A Deadly Episode is out now. More on Anthony at anthonyhorowitz.com. Follow Rhett @rhettmiller Wheels Off is hosted and produced by Rhett Miller. Executive producer is Kirsten Cluthe, Studio Kairos. Music by Old 97’s. Episode artwork by Mark Dowd. Show logo by Tim Skirven. Watch the podcast on YouTube and Spotify, and listen wherever you get your podcasts. You can also ask Alexa to play it. Revisit previous episodes of Wheels Off with guests Rosanne Cash, Rob Thomas, Jeff Tweedy, Lucinda Williams, Stewart Copeland, Jennifer Egan, Nick Hornby, and more. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Wheels Off, a show about the messy reality of the creative life.
0:06.7	I'm Rhett Miller.
0:08.3	That's when they got wheels off.
0:11.4	We started up and we ain't going to starve.
0:14.4	Oh, I said like you.
0:15.5	I could not.
0:17.0	That's where they got wheels off.
0:28.8	Anthony Horowitz is my guest on this newest episode of Wheels Off, and I could not be more thrilled.
0:35.5	He's one of my favorite writers, certainly my favorite modern mystery writer.
0:38.3	He's incredible. His Susan Ryland book series, which started with Magpie Murders, is an incredible work
0:44.3	of meta-fiction, working on multiple layers at once.
0:48.3	Every book contains two mysteries happening simultaneously, a book within the book, and then the book itself.
0:56.0	It's amazing. His newest book, A Deadly Episode, which comes out any day whenever you're
1:03.1	listening to this, is the sixth book in his Hawthorne-Horowitz book series, Horowitz being himself.
1:12.1	He appears in these books, a fictionalized version of his actual self.
1:16.0	We talk about that, obviously, in this interview as well.
1:20.8	He's just incredible.
1:22.1	The Susan Ryland books have become a series on the BBC that are really great.
1:29.6	He wrote for years a series of young adult novels, the Alex Writers series that sold 19 million copies worldwide, and that's a series
1:35.9	now as well. He's been writing for years. He's written James Bond novels. He's written Sherlock Holmes
1:43.0	novels. Both of those estates have handed the
1:46.1	reins of those books, or at least in part, to Anthony Horowitz. He's just an incredible writer.
	...

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