Pointing the bone

A 400-year-old skeleton detective has ensured Derek Landy's literary success

A 400-year-old skeleton detective has ensured Derek Landy's literary success

SKULDUGGERY Pleasant: Irish writer Derek Landy, creator of the skeleton detective, deserved a three-book contract and a movie deal on the strength of the name alone. Teaming the bony hero with a bright, headstrong 12-year-old girl was another sure-fire winner, allowing endless latitude for action and banter. Hence the pound stg. 1 million ($1.7m) signing with HarperCollins in 2006 and the sale of film rights to Warner Bros Pictures. All justified: worldwide sales of the first three books have just topped a million, in more than 30 languages, with 130,000 copies sold in Australia. Book four, Dark Days, was published this week.

As Landy, who is also a screenwriter, tells it, Skulduggery sprang fully formed from his imagination one July evening in 2005, in a stinking hot and dismal hotel room in Piccadilly Circus. "I got the idea when I was over meeting with producers to try to get my next film made," he says.

It is 9.30pm in Dublin and Landy is heading into the writing part of his day, once he has finished this interview and played a computer game he is keen on.

"I was standing in my hotel room and the name `Skulduggery Pleasant' just popped into my head. The name told me instantly who he was -- a skeleton detective who is witty and urbane -- and suddenly I was writing a book."

Landy rushed immediately to write some dialogue, "just to be able to hear his voice and figure out who he was". The room had no desk, so he knelt by the bed and wrote, resting pen and paper on the coverlet. In case this all seems too easy -- apart from the kneeling on the floor -- it is important to know that Skulduggery, however sudden his appearance, is the fruit of an imagination exercised while its possessor worked for six years on his parents' vegetable farm outside Dublin. Landy discovered he was emphatically not a farmer and that he could never work for a boss. There had been an earlier intimation of this when, after a year at a Dublin art school, where he did no work, he was asked not to return. The success of Skulduggery allows Landy, 35, to be comfortably semi-nocturnal now. During his days on the farm he had started early, working while writing in his head, then bolting down lunch so he could dash to the computer and transcribe what he had plotted.

"The most valuable thing I got out of those six years was the fact that I was writing the whole time," he says.

"I figured my only shot at breaking out of a life I didn't want was to write my way out, so I taught myself to write screenplays, and managed to get two Irish films made, and then Skulduggery came along and finally rescued me."

In the films, Dead Bodies (2003) and Boy Eats Girl (2005), zombies and corpses figure prominently, reflecting Landy's love of ghoulies, ghosties and other dimensions. He is also an avid fan of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. He was unsurprised Skulduggery was a detective because he loves whodunits, too. "I just feel really comfortable in that kind of tough-talking world where all the dialogue is spoken impossibly fast and is impossibly funny. The fact that Skulduggery is, first and foremost, a detective, really allows me to get away with that kind of noir styling." Landy attributes his love of fast-talking to having developed a stutter at the age of three.

Although his experience was as a screenwriter, he knew Skulduggery was a book. He also knew it would be for children. "This was the first book I was going to write and I was determined to have the maximum amount of fun. I could see myself having fun writing a book for younger readers.

"And while they are a lot less forgiving than adults, at the same time they are more prepared to give you a chance and I thought that was what Skulduggery needed, the chance to be heard and to prove himself."

There was another practical reason. "It was because of J. K. Rowling. She opened the up this market. Before her, having a career as a children's book writer was not a feasible thing to do."

The Skulduggery series is on its way to nine books, at the rate of about one a year. "I'm pretty fast. My publisher's plan has always been at least one book a year and so far I'm managing it." Landy conceived of it as "three trilogies". As in Rowling's Potter series, the characters, or at least the human ones, will age with the readers. Stephanie, the heroine, who also takes the name Valkyrie, will turn 18 in the last book.

She is not yet a teenager when the first book opens, the surprise beneficiary of her late Uncle Gordon's enormous wealth. Skulduggery, dressed in trademark overcoat, broad-brimmed hat pulled low over a frizzy wig, scarf wound his lower face and enormous sunglasses, appears at the funeral. Later he rescues Stephanie when she is attacked while exploring her uncle's creaky old mansion.

The very cluey girl gets the truth out of the detective, that there is a another, largely unseen reality, where a great battle is about to be joined to prevent ancient bad guys who once ruled the world from making a comeback destined to cause the destruction of mankind.

Naturally, she wants in. And thus begins the relationship that is at the centre of the story, that is the story, really, Landy says. The Faceless Ones, the Cleavers and the Infected, the beautiful China Sorrows and the scary Mr Bliss are wonderful inventions, but they are in orbit around the odd couple.

When Landy hunched over the bed and wrote Skulduggery's first lines, "for some reason, the person he was talking to was a girl, and they fit together really well. Essentially, Stephanie-Valkyrie is based on a friend of mine, who I've known for years, and who I can ask absolutely anything and she is guaranteed to give me an honest answer. My friend is 22 now, but she is exactly who Valkyrie is: she's tall, slim, strong, dark-haired, highly intelligent, very funny and she doesn't respect anyone who hasn't earned her respect."

Landy admits to being "relatively single" and will not be drawn further. Whoever else might be in his life, the relationship with Valkyrie's model, Laura, is profound. All manuscripts go to her at the same time as to his agent, and nothing proceeds unless she approves what Stephanie says and does. Landy dedicates Dark Days to her, naming her as his best friend and his muse. Her latest gag has been to persuade her former karate teacher to adopt two old and arthritic Staffordshire bull terriers. "I have had to build ramps in my house," Landy groans. The dedication to her reads in part: "even though you refuse to recognise my comedy genius and you refuse to publicly admit how impressed you are by everything I do".

This is very much the relationship Skulduggery has with Stephanie.

"I like having someone follow me around like a puppy," he tells her in the first book.

"You are such a moron," she replies.

"Don't be jealous of my genius."

"Can you get over yourself for just a moment?"

But while Skulduggery, being dead, can concentrate on the cosmic-scale hostilities, Stephanie is trying to save the world, learn magic and also maintain a foothold in her normal life.

This is not as easy as it sounds, although Landy has of course found ways to help her. So, for example, when Stephanie goes adventuring, she is not obviously absent from school or family. Her reflection stands in for her and, when Stephanie returns, steps back into the mirror. The rub is that Stephanie spends so much time on assignment with Skulduggery that by the end of book three the reflection seems to be developing a personality of its own.

No wonder: in book two it is shot dead, although later revived, and in book three receives Stephanie's first kiss, both events that make the latter feel very strange indeed. There are enough of these sour notes and bleak moments, such as when Stephanie misses her parents, and regrets the secret she must keep from them, to show her struggles will only multiply as the story goes on.

Skulduggery, at 400 years old, is well used to complications, but his secrets, and those of centuries-old characters, will be revealed, Landy says, to the discredit of them all.

"I have fallen into the trap of every writer who has a children's series," he confesses. "We need to be taken seriously by our peers, so the series get darker. It's such a cliche and I have completely fallen into it."

He manages by having his cast wisecrack their way through whatever befalls. "You can get amazingly dark and the reader will absorb it, but not register it, because the characters are still joking, at the most inappropriate moments."

But there is no particular world view informing this work, he says, although he has a theory about his star misfits.

"Maybe being anti-authority? Because it's always these two people who are the strongest, the most noble and the most honourable in their own way. I might be turning an entire generation of kids into anarchists. I like that!"

Stephanie survives the first book with no worse injury than a broken leg, while the tone is set for the rest of the series with this exchange:

"For a guy with no internal organs, you've got quite the ego."

"And for a girl who can't stand up without falling over, you're quite the critic."

"My leg will be fine."

"And my ego will flourish. What a pair we are." Indeed.

Derek Landy will visit Australia later this month.