Books are like doors,” says the novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz. “They have the same proportions as a door, the same mechanism as a door in the sense that they open, and you can travel through that door into other worlds.”
Horowitz knows all about secret doors. He has one in his central London flat, where we meet. It is concealed within a bookcase stacked with Charles Dickens and Sarah Waters, and leads to a hidden room full of magic tricks and other curiosities. It’s exactly what you’d expect of a man who has made his name writing mysteries: the arcane and escapist disguised by the everyday.
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