Half Moon Investigations
Eoin Colfer - author
A primary school teacher in the Irish seaside town of Wexford, until he secured the largest ever advance for a children's novel by an unknown author in 2000, the creator of Half Moon Investigations, Eoin Colfer, hasn't looked back since.
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The award-winning author cast a spell on the publishing world with his stories of Artemis Fowl, and a film of the novel is due to go into production next year.
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Sales of the titles exceed 18 million worldwide and his work is published in 44 countries. He has achieved international critical acclaim and is now one of the UK’s most popular and best-selling children’s authors.
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Half Moon Investigations is the first of his novels to reach the screen, and says Eoin fulfills a childhood ambition.
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"Of all my characters, Half Moon is based most closely on me. I was that little person who wanted to be a detective.
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"I have always had a soft spot for detective books, I loved Three Investigators and The Hardy Boys and I then thought what could make a difference is if my detective had an actual qualification. Fletcher is able to use forensic equipment because he has been trained.
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"The best thing about writing books when you use yourself as one of the characters is that you can make yourself a little smarter, and a little better looking. Fletcher is also a lot more driven than I was."
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The character of "Half" Moon is played by 13-year-old Scottish actor Rory Elrick and says Eoin:
"Rory even looks a little bit like me when I was a kid – although he probably won’t be too happy to hear that.
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"As a child I had loads of dark hair and I was quite short – in fact Rory is taller than I was. I was freakishly short – but Rory has that glint in his eye and he is celtic like me – so he is spot on.
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"It is really exciting to have some of my writing being filmed for the first time and I’m thrilled that it is the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, because of their great reputation.
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"I admit that, having sold all my books to various television and film companies over the years, it wasn't until I saw some footage of the first episodes that I said, oh my, you are actually making this and I started to get very excited then.
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"Half Moon Investigations was an opportunity to see how many jokes I could pack into one book. But I also wanted it to be a good mystery. The best mysteries are the ones where you work it out maybe two lines before the truth is revealed.
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"I would love to write a sequel. Now that I have laid the ground work I could get straight into the adventure on the first page."
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Half Moon Investigations is set at St Jerome's, a fictional school in a non-specific geographic location. Eoin has drawn on not only his own childhood but also his experience working as a teacher. As well as teaching in Ireland for nine years, he has taught in Saudi Arabia, Italy and North Africa.
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Says Eoin: "I was a teacher for 15 years, teaching everything from junior infants to adult education. I spent most time in the middle grade with 10-12 year-olds. Generally children, within a safe environment, are not dissimilar. I enjoyed it a lot, but it is a really tough job, much tougher than writing.
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"People often comment that I must get tired writing all the time and I say are you kidding? You try teaching 12-year-olds on a Friday before the holidays. Writing is a lovely soft job.
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"A lot of the characters in the book are taken from kids I taught so they are real kids. The Pinks were a group of girls who liked to give the appearance of being lovely and harmless to the teachers, but they were the toughest bunch and they used to terrorise the poor boys!"
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And Eoin is clearly at ease writing from a young person's point of view.
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"I think often when people try to write as a child, they think I'll just pretend to be stupid. They write very simple stuff, very patronising. I don't really change it that much, there’s not much to change, and I think when you are working with kids all the time it makes it a lot easier.
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"There is not much difference between a 15-year-old and a 30-year-old, really. I try to remember back to when I was 20, to be honest, and that more or less gets you in the mind of a 15-year-old boy. Obviously you have to think about your material and how suitable or appropriate it is.
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"I think Fletcher Moon is a mixture of Sherlock Holmes who used his powers of deduction and Philip Marlowe the tough talking private eye. Moon uses all the deduction powers, and he's trying to develop his one-liners because he thinks that's what he should do. But he’s really not very good at that.
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"But the main difference is that he is a kid, but he's not a kid playing at being a detective – he is an actual detective. And I think that's what makes him interesting that you have this pint-sized real life detective solving actual crimes."
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But does Eoin think he could have become a detective?
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"I would have been no good at basic training, so, unfortunately it wasn't for me, although I do feel I would have been very good at deducing things and solving crimes. But I only really wanted to work on glamorous crimes. I wasn't interested in boring crimes, or stuff like that. I wanted to go straight to Hollywood and find out who killed the Oscar winner, but I knew even then, that that possibly wouldn't be the way it would work!"
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Eoin recently received a call out of the blue, asking him to pick up where the late Douglas Adams left off with the hugely popular series of books, Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
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"It was a surreal call. I feel like I have agreed to run a marathon or jump out of an airplane. But it's brilliant, it's something that I really want to do. The other half of me is saying 'are you totally insane, this is ridiculous'. So I am running on nerves.
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"The story is something I had played out before because I knew it wasn't finished. For Douglas the plot was almost incidental to the characters – that's a bit like the way I work, which might be one of the reasons I was asked to do it. So I'm going to try and keep that spirit."
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Eoin is a recipient of a Herald Angel Award for Performance at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe (the first author to win such an award).
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In April 2006 Eoin took his one man show, Fairies, Fiends And Flatulence, an adrenaline-fuelled exposé of teenage criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl to theatres nationwide.
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Following the sell-out success of his regional UK tour, Eoin also made his West End debut at the Trafalgar Theatre in October 2006.
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Artemis Fowl won the WHSmith "People’s Choice" Children's Book of the Year Award 2002, The Children's Book of the Year at the British Book Awards and was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year 2001 and The Blue Peter Book Award 2002. Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident was shortlisted for the Red House Children's Book Award 2002.
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Eoin lives with his wife Jackie and their sons 11-year-old Finn, and Sean aged five.
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"Sean likes picture books and Finn is more into sport. But he likes Half Moon, that is one of my books which he has read and he told me he likes it! I am hoping that they will both enjoy reading books eventually.
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"Children write to me and say they have read the book 12 times and they are not kidding me. Adults don't tend to do that too much. Kids certainly read things more than once, and they can say categorically who their favourite author is and what their favourite book is. I get asked that a lot and it is so difficult to answer."
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But, if there is a sequel to Half Moon Investigations, there will be no sneak previews: "I am very secretive with my stuff until it is finished, I don't show it to anybody. My wife Jackie will read it when I'm finished in manuscript form, but she's the only one, nobody else."
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