Bookworm: “When I go into schools, I don’t mind children thinking of me as somebody’s father, but I’m not sure I could carry on if they started thinking of me as somebody’s grandfather.”

Age shall not wither

ANTHONY Horowitz is a journalist’s dream – not only our bestselling male children’s writer but an effortlessly articulate, engaging, self-confident interviewee. Asked whether his Sherlock Holmes book The House of Silk (see cover story) heralds a move away from children’s fiction, the 55-year-old writer unusually hesitated for a microsecond, pointing out that he’s still got his the Power of Five series to bring to a close. “But I think I can’t be a children’s writer in my sixties,” he added. “When I go into schools, I don’t mind children thinking of me as somebody’s father, but I’m not sure I could carry on if they started thinking of me as somebody’s grandfather.”

Yet many children’s writers are only just getting into their stride when they reach 60. By that age, for example, Roald Dahl still hadn’t written Matilda, The BFG, The Witches or The Minpins. Just William creator Richmal Crompton (born in 1890) was even in her mid-seventies when she wrote William and the Pop Stars and William and the Masked Ranger (I haven’t read them, but would love to). And at Lennoxlove Book Festival next Friday, you can meet the wonderful Michael Morpurgo. Since he turned 60, the author of War Horse has written far more books – 22 – than most writers can manage over an entire lifetime.

Young guns on fire

Briefly spotted in Edinburgh this week – Philip Kerr, the creator of the acclaimed Bernie Gunther novels (the latest, Prague Fatale, is out next month). He was on his way to meet Candia McWilliam to discuss a screenplay he’s writing about her searing memoir What To Look For in Winter.

No better man to do it, though: back in 1993 the two Edinburgh-born writers were both on the 1993 Granta Best of Young British novelists list – which, though it’s hard to believe, now that time has proved the judges right, provided even more of a stushie in literary London than this month’s Man Booker Prize.