When I first meet Anthony Horowitz, he extends a heartfelt apology. He's 20 minutes late for our meeting, but I was prepared for it since the PR person had sent an alert well in advance that the best-selling author was stuck in Peddar Road traffic, which he reckons would put London to shame. Even after this ordeal, he reeks of enthusiasm. We're seated inside the Author's Lounge at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) for his first interview at Tata Literature Live! where he'll be participating in discussions and conducting a workshop. Time is only one of the many things, I begin to realise, that the novelist, screenwriter and journalist takes seriously.

We start by talking about a piece he wrote for a British publication on shopping for greeting cards in 2013, where on Valentine's Day, instead of buying his wife a card, he wrote her a sonnet. She hated it and he admitted that poetry wasn't his strongest suit. But what is it about poetry that unlike mystery, his forte, he doesn't understand? "I don't know the difference between a good poem and a bad one. So, when I read them, some poems come to my heart and they mean something to me. But I don't understand why that's so good," Horowitz answers. Then, from memory, he narrates a beloved Phillip Larkin poem: "This is the first thing that I have understood. Time is the echo of an axe within a wood." Although he gets the idea of the axe getting closer, he doesn't believe he could write that. "But if you ask me to write a mystery set in a wood in 10... 20... 30 thousand words, I can do that because I understand narrative, pace and suspense — all the mechanisms that make a novel work. Poetry to me is very mystical," he states.