I was brought up just outside Lusk, in a market garden farm, on the main Dublin-Belfast road. This is before there was a motorway, and I remember if you needed to leave the yard to go anywhere, you would be stuck at our gate for three or four minutes, waiting for the gap in traffic.
We didn’t really have much in the way of neighbours. I adapted to enjoy my own company. I was very happy playing with Action Force toys on the floor of my bedroom. I think that has contributed to my becoming a writer.
I was never the best worker on the farm, as my father will attest. He still has stories of looking over at me in the middle of a field and knowing I’m daydreaming, not paying attention to what I’m doing.
I went to art college for a year and was kicked out. I spent the next 10 years, from ages 19 to 29, working on the farm. As a kid who had always hated working on the farm and who swore I would never do this, to suddenly spend 10 years looking down the barrel of a life spent farming was the spur I needed to knuckle down – to take something seriously, take writing seriously. While I was working on the farm, I was writing in my head. Every break time, every lunch after work, I would go straight to the page.
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I started out in screenplays. I was quite happy there, especially when I started to get movies made. To be writing in a vacuum without any idea if what you’re doing is any good is potentially soul destroying, but to suddenly have interest in the screenplays was hugely validating. I was hugely lucky that Dead Bodies and Boy Eats got made.
In summer 2005, I was in London to meet producers to try to get my next film made. I was in the only hotel I could afford in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. It was cheap, it was stiflingly hot. At about 10pm one night, the name Skulduggery Pleasant popped into my head. Two completely unconnected words arrived as a name. They told me everything about the main character – he’s a skeleton detective in a wonderful suit, he dresses like a 1940s Private Eye, he’s charming, he’s dangerous, he’s funny, he’s sarcastic.
All of this came about in an instant. In the moment before it popped into my head, if I had been remotely distracted by a car horn on the street or someone passing my hotel room door, that moment would have been lost. My life was completely turned around with the arrival of Skulduggery. Sometimes the trajectory of your life hinges on one single moment.
Within the first month of writing, in my bedroom, back in the family home, I had to make a decision about where it would be set. I knew theoretically that if I were to set it in London or New York, the audience would be bigger, because people are used to such things. But I looked at Harry Potter and thought, being distinctly British didn’t exactly hurt this. That was the permission I needed to give myself to make it distinctly Irish. What I’ve learned since then is readers around the world who have never been to Ireland, who don’t know anyone Irish, who have never thought about Ireland one way or the other, will respond to the story because of the reality of the world I’ve built. Because I made it distinctly Irish and because I made it with distinctly Irish mannerisms, colloquialisms, setting, they recognise a truth. It sounds kind of corny, but readers recognise when the writer is being real. My decision to set it very distinctly in Ireland with very distinctly Irish characters I think broadened its appeal instead of narrowing it.
We’ve gone from being a really conservative, closed-minded society to being more inclusive and progressive. I’m hugely optimistic about Ireland
My fiancee is English. She has been in Ireland for maybe five or six years. I keep expecting her to emerge from this rose-tinted view of the country. But the reason she loves it, she says, is because everyone is nice. People in general are friendlier than some places back home.
The friendliness of this country always makes me proud. However, as a culture, we have been corrupted by some of the same animosities and little hatreds and resentments that our bigger cousins have. When I was a kid, I thought that Ireland wasn’t one bit racist. As time has gone on, I think it kind of is. We are becoming more like everyone else in certain aspects of life and society. But on a one-to-one basis, if we can resist evolving into mobs, I think as a people we are fundamentally decent, and nice, and kind, and funny, and self-effacing and honourable.
When I was growing up in the mid-1980s, Ireland was still struggling to assert itself and find its feet and emerge from its little cocoon. As a people, I think we’ve evolved very quickly into the modern version of who we are. It’s like we’re correcting all the mistakes of the past as fast as possible. We’ve gone from being a really conservative, closed-minded society to being more inclusive and progressive. I’m hugely optimistic about Ireland.
In conversation with Niamh Donnelly. This interview is part of a series about well-known people’s lives and their relationship with Ireland. Skulduggery Pleasant: A Soul Full of Shadows by Derek Landy is published by HarperCollins
