Teenage action hero

There can't be many adults who think that 14 is a golden age, but Anthony Horowitz does. In fact he rates it so highly that he would rather terminate Alex Rider, his super-successful 14-year-old boy spy, than take him forward into acne and full-blown adolescence.

Scorpia, out next week, concludes a series that Horowitz began in 2000. The first, Stormbreaker, set an ominous tone from the outset: "When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it's never good news." The bad news is that Alex's uncle, with whom he has lived since his parents' death in a plane crash, has died. Alone, but with money in trust, Alex Rider soon becomes the unwilling recruit of MI6 and is sent on the first of many hair-raising missions to save the world.

In the three following adventures - Point Blanc, Skeleton Key and Eagle Strike - Alex, again coerced by the secret services, battles against maniacal figures with names such as Herod Sayle, Dr Grief and Damian Cray, destroying them and their killer viruses, human clones and nuclear missiles using nothing more than boyish gadgets and bravery.

As the series continues, Alex's character grows darker and angrier. The books have sold more than a million copies in the UK alone, and Scorpia's first print run is 250,000. There is to be a movie of Stormbreaker, for which the author is writing the screenplay.

I took two fans, Archie Campbell (10) and Gabriella Lebrecht (14), to interview Horowitz (48) at home in Crouch End, where he lives with his television producer wife, Jill Green, two teenage sons and a large brown labrador. What, wondered Archie, makes Alex such a success?

"One of the reasons is that his world is treated with a certain amount of seriousness," explains Horowitz. "There aren't jolly japes with loads of giggles and farting adults. The fact that Alex doesn't want to be a spy is what makes him attractive. And he's nothing to do with me. I was the exact opposite at school, physically unfit, generally unattractive, not very bright, and yet I used to dream of being James Bond. The one thing there was to look forward to every year was the new James Bond film."

Unlike Bond, however, Alex yearns for ordinary, family life. Gabriella points out that he shares Bond's taste for exotic locations, gadgets, dangerous stunts, and even, in Eagle Strike, an intriguingly-named girlfriend, Sabina Pleasure. "S'been a pleasure," chuckles Horowitz, delighted with the pun, a trademark of his writing.

Far from being a distraction, Sabina helps Alex destroy some nuclear missiles. They kiss once, chastely. "I realised very quickly that a lot of young readers, especially young male readers, found this faintly embarrassing," says Horowitz. "When I first wrote that big goodbye kiss between Alex and Sabina it was about four lines long, but I think my son threatened to leave home if it stayed in the book, so it didn't ..."

Horowitz did his own research for some of Alex's stunts: deepsea scuba diving and climbing up the outside of a 150-metre crane; but for the spectacular BASE jumping scene in Scorpia, where Alex hurls himself off an Amalfi hillside terrace to penetrate a nanotechnology complex 300 metres below, the author consulted a pro. "The guy had broken at least eight bones in his body, including his neck, I think; he'd broken his back twice before deciding to give the sport up."

A senior lecturer at London University who advised Horowitz on nanotechnology found the scene so accurate that "he asked to have his name taken out. No acknowledgment, no mention of who he was, because he believes that the terrorist application of nanotechnology is the next horror coming."