Authors Electric

  Imagine you’re a you ng journalist from  The Times , reporting on the Hay literary festival. Nice job if you love books and writing – which journalists do, or they’d be doing something else – and you should enjoy it while you can, as literary festivals are sadly in their   Götterdämmerung   p eriod, what with no corporate sponsor being pure enough to be allowed to fund them, and grants from such lofty organisations as the Arts Council being extremely unlikely, owing to books being lamentably highbrow and middle class (not!). Anthony Horowitz By Edwardx - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126308848 So there you are, listening to Anthony Horowitz speak on a panel on the subject of rewriting classics by dead authors in order to remove ‘offensive’ language ( as Puffin did last year with a new edition of Roald Dahl’s works ), and you hear him say he doesn’t approve of burglarising books.  Yup, that’s what he said. Well, h...

Authors Electric's Jan Needle ‘Bash a burglar’ is the latest cry from the men and women who run our country, which raises some interesting questions for a man who’s just finished writing a thriller about a   violent robbery at a country house. I can’t imagine that even Theresa May or Christopher Grayling would have encouraged my innocent victims to have fought back against three bloody madmen, but who can tell? Maybe I should go back and do a re-write. At the very least the body count would go up. Hamlet, anyone? It does raise some interesting moral questions, though. In the past I’ve been accused by one MP of insulting his constituents by suggesting a certain sort of murder was even possible in a certain part of Manchester, and generally of making violence seem ‘almost normal’. But Mr Grayling’s exhortation seems far more likely to make things worse than anything I can do. If you indicate that it’s all right to attack people with ‘unreasonable force’ for breaking into...