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E-mailThe ‘Irish J.K Rowling’ hits it big with ‘Skulduggery Pleasant’
IrishCentral talks to bestselling Irish author Derek Landy
Some Irish boys are still living with their mammies by the age of 33. Their failure to launch can be caused by a crippling shyness, or from the uncertainty about which path to take in life, but the result is usually the same -- after your friends have forged their own trails, some boys are still left tooling around the old haunts, waiting for their lives to begin.
Bestselling Irish author Derek Landy, 37, knows all about it.
Sometimes called the Irish J.K Rowling, by the time Landy turned 30 there was a big question mark still hanging over him. His brothers and sisters had grown up and moved on to successful city careers while he was still pursuing his dream to become a screenwriter.
Screenwriting meant flying to London year after year to have discouraging meetings with disinterested producers. It meant staying in horrible, damp hotels waiting for a phone call that would never come.
His screenplay for an Irish zombie movie didn’t set the world on fire, and producers objected to his slasher thriller in which everybody dies. Things looked bleak.
But just as he reached his lowest ebb the tide suddenly turned.
The idea for Harry Potter, the boy wizard that made J.K. Rowling so rich that she is now said to possess more wealth than Queen Elizabeth II, reportedly just fell into the author’s head one day as she was taking a train journey across England.
For Landy the process was exactly the same. One day in 2005 he was over in London for a series of desultory film meetings that were dragging on and on. Then it happened.
“I had started writing movies that got made in 2003 and 2005,” Landy told sister publication of IrishCentral the Irish Voice. “But neither one made me a whole lot of money or got me to Hollywood or contributed to my actual career.
“So I was over in London meeting with various producers and I was in a really horrible hotel room when the name Skulduggery Pleasant came to me, and that was pretty much it.”
With the name came the fully-fledged character, including who he was and what he looked like.
“He told me he was a detective who was also a skeleton, and instantly I knew what he was like. But then I had to figure out if he was as interesting as I thought he would be, so I wrote a dialogue between him and an unnamed character where he explained what it was like to be a skeleton, what he missed about being alive, you know, just to see if he worked.”
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