How cutting cabbages forged a future of fantastic proportions

Derek Landy, whose book ‘Skulduggery Pleasant’ has been voted Irish Book of the Decade, spent six years working on his family farm in north County Dublin before his writing career took off – an experience he says helped form him

DEREK LANDY is a karate black belt and has trained thousands of children to defend themselves in order, he says, to form a munchkin army to leap to his aid should enemies ever attack. (Or, in peacetime, vote for him in an online poll, perhaps).

On Monday his comic fantasy Skulduggery Pleasantwon the Irish Book of the Decade competition, topping an internet poll to decide the nation's favourite Irish book with 5,000 votes.

“The wonderful thing about this award is that it was open to every category, and so books for younger readers were as relevant as adult literary novels,” says Landy.

He was in a London hotel room, preparing to pitch his third comic horror screenplay, when the evocative oxymoron Skulduggery Pleasantpopped up in his head and inspiration struck.

As he sketched out the bare bones (ahem) of the story about an Irish skeleton detective with magical powers and his plucky schoolgirl sidekick, a cult figure in children's fiction was born. From that moment Killer Waves, his murder mystery about bumbling detectives investigating Irish surfers, was dead in the water.

While he knew he was on to something special, and took in his stride that he was writing a novel for children instead of another adult horror-film script, he was totally unprepared for the £1 million three-book deal HarperCollins offered.

Big advances generate demand but Skulduggeryhas made its own luck since. Dark Days, released in April, is the fourth bestseller in what is to be a nine-part series. The next comes out in September. Warners, meanwhile, pipped Fox and Spielberg's Dreamworks studio to the film rights.

Landy is stocky, sandy-haired and big into comics, but the discreet piercing in his eyebrow and affable charm make me think not of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsonsbut his cool rival voiced by Jack Black.

The many ingredients in Landy's cultural cauldron create the magic potion of Skulduggery's success. There is mystery and adventure (he grew up on the Hardy Boysand the Three investigators), horror (he loves old Hammer films, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and wisecracking dialogue (Bogart and Bacall, Grant and Hepburn are favourites too).

“It’s pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted to write about which is why I’m not getting bored. Every book I see with its own identity: the first is an adventure movie, the second is a monster movie, the third is a whodunnit, the fourth is a revenge flick.” If the rapid-fire dialogue of Hollywood classics was an inspiration, it was also a source of frustration for Landy, who found his own quick wit stifled by a stammer.

"Because Skulduggerycame to me as a fedora-wearing detective it was finally my chance to indulge myself in the kind of detective movies I used to watch, with Bogart and Bacall, where all the dialogue is rapid-fire, insanely smart and funny, combined with the screwball comedy and witty dialogue of Cary Grant and Hepburn. I've always adored really fast dialogue but my stammer stopped me from talking fast or from contributing to as many conversations as I would have liked to.

“You think of something funny to say and you’re not even going to bother trying. It’s because of the stammer that I really started to appreciate dialogue as a thing in itself. Since I couldn’t do it in real life this was my alternative.

"The stammer has been a problem in many ways, even getting on a bus and asking for a return to Drogheda. Meeting with the publishers, it was a question. What will happen when we send him out to schools and events, will he just stammer the whole way through? I do know how to stop it, that is to be more confident. That's been the nice thing about Skulduggery. It has reinforced my confidence to the point where I don't have to prove myself, so even if you stammer in a bar talking to a beautiful girl, [I can say] 'did you know I'm very, very rich?'"

Landy was born in 1974 and grew up in Lusk, north Co Dublin. His father John is a farmer and his mother, Barbara Hughes, lectures in English at Dún Laoghaire IADT. At Drogheda Grammar School he loved art and English and so went to Ballyfermot to study animation, but was expelled after a year. He just wasn’t good enough, he says.

He spent six years back on the farm, writing scenes in his head while he cut cabbages. It was soul-destroying but character-forming, so mind-numbingly boring it forced him to focus on forging a career and left his mind free to create. A colleague of his mother introduced him to the producers of his first film, Dead Bodies, an IFTA-winning black comedy starring Gerard McSorley and Seán McGinley, described as "a pauper's Shallow Grave". Two years later, his screenplay Boy Eats Girlwas turned into a film, starring Samantha Mumba.

Landy has no fears that he will end up slave to the market, completing the series out of a commercial imperative rather than a creative urge.

"When I started Skulduggery, I figured, this is possibly the best character I've ever come up with, so what if this is the only series of books I ever write?"

So he threw everything at it. “I thought, this isn’t one book, it isn’t three, my God, it isn’t even six, it’s nine because I’ve worked in practically every idea I’ve ever had.”

Given the body counts of previous works, how big a change was it to write for children? “I wasn’t prepared for such a big shift but it has been fine. I write just the same as I did for adults, I just don’t have any swearing or sex. Horrible things happen but I don’t dwell on it. If someone’s head explodes I say his head explodes, I don’t say his brains splattered. If the reader wants the gore his imagination can supply the details.”

DESPITE Skulduggery's fantastical underworld of portals and supernatural powers, it is grounded in familiar settings such as Grafton Street. "I figured being distinctly British didn't exactly hurt Harry Potter. The only way to get the fantastic to pop out at you is to surround it with reality. I took the decision, this is Irish and is going to be proud to be Irish."

Similarly, in Hollywood negotiations, he was adamant the film would be set in Ireland and Skulduggery's sidekick would remain a girl. That's why he went with Warners. "Money wasn't an issue once the price goes over a certain amount. It's the amount of control; as a writer you have precious little and we had to fight to get those guarantees."

Landy, movie buff and memorabilia collector, has Superman's cape in a glass case, a snip at €2,000, a gun from Aliensand a few lightsabres. "I was going to get a 10ft tall Alienmodel but that would have been silly. I see things in auctions but then I think, do I need it or will it just clutter up the house?"

A certain skeleton detective’s sharp suit and fedora will doubtless soon have pride of place.