Matt Whyman: The deathly glamour of guns

Matt Whyman, who combines a writing career with life as an agony uncle (for Bliss magazine and the AOL website), has written a hard-hitting novel for teenagers about Shorty, a young boy who gets involved with gun crime in the Colombian city of Medellin.

"The idea of a child with a gun is quite an obscene image. You see it in the newspapers all the time as a kind of shorthand for the horrors of war, and it's something that has interested me for a long time. As I read about what's been happening in Colombia, it screamed out to me as a very, very simple story which I wanted to tell as honestly as I could from the point of view of an 11-year-old boy.

"There's a situation in Colombia that has allowed children to be hired by gangs as killers because they will not be prosecuted. It started with the best of intentions: because so many children were involved with crime and given no hope for the future, the government announced that you wouldn't be prosecuted for a major criminal offence until you were 18. Instead if you were 15 and murdered someone, you would go to a rehabilitation centre and not to jail.

"From what I understand, the trouble was that there were not enough rehabilitation centres, so if a child committed a murder, nothing could be done. The drug gangs realised that if they wanted to kill off an enemy, they could just hire a child.

"While I was writing this book, the new year shootings in Birmingham took place, and there was a lot of talk about youth and guns in this country. I thought, 'Actually, although this book is set on the other side of the world, everything to do with the process you go through when you pick up a gun is universal--you could be in Colombia, you could be in Crouch End.'

"A lot of people who haven't read the book say, 'It must glamorise violence.' From the point of view of an 11-year-old, guns are glamorous. They are cool and powerful. If you are a kid who has no status, who is in an abusive family situation and who has no future to speak of, and suddenly because you have a gun you are getting respect, then from the point of view of that child it gives you status and power.

"But the way I see it is that once you pick up a gun it is very difficult to put it down again. It's almost like a terminal disease - you just live with it as best you can. Shorty is not particularly sorry for what he does - I didn't think he would be. But I think he's obviously traumatised, because he gets more and more detached as the story progresses.

"Writing in the first person means that the reader gets much closer to him. I tried to focus on his home life - he's brutalised at home by his uncle. I did also want to show that he's pubescent, but that because he's quite brutalised by what he does, when he has a moment of intimacy with a girl he has feelings for - she hugs him - he can't deal with it, he runs away. I think it's another effect of guns - you have to shut down on so many levels in order to function."

Matt Whyman - Boy Kills Man (Hodder Children's Books, 18th March, h/b, £10.99, 0340881941)