Philip Ardagh: Two metres of entertainment

Two years ago, Philip Ardagh branched out from an established career writing children's non-fiction to produce Awful End, the first story in a trilogy about hapless Victorian boy Eddie Dickens and his eccentric family. Ardagh's surreal comedy proved a big hit, and the book, as well as its sequel, were bestsellers. This autumn sees the third Eddie Dickens volume, Terrible Times. The Fall of Fergal, the first volume in another Ardagh fiction series, will also be out in paperback this autumn.

"I have a nephew who was at boarding school in England, and I'd been a victim of boarding school so I thought I'd send him some letters. I thought, 'I'll write him an adventure story.' So he'd get a letter which was a single episode with a cliffhanger-ish ending, and then two weeks later he'd get another one. I thought he was reading them under the bedclothes with a torch, but it turned out his housemaster would read out an episode to the whole house and they'd all want to know what was happening next.

"When my editor Suzy Jenvey said, 'You should write some children's fiction,' I said: 'Actually I've got some letters in my bottom drawer you might like.' I think she changed three or four words, and Faber took a risk and published it. And it sold and it sold and it sold.

"There are very clear rules in a children's book: you have to have a clear plot, you are not allowed to go off on tangents, and the children must be very much in charge. In the Eddie Dickens trilogy, I want to be saying 'You are reading a book' all the time, so the narrator is incredibly intrusive and I go off on terrible tangents. Also, Eddie's not in control, poor kid, because adults rule this world.

"When you are little you think your parents are normal, because they are your only perspective on the world. I had a friend whose father every Sunday night would throw a whole dead fish onto the welcome mat at the front door and during the week the cat would eat the fish, and then at the end of the week the father would pick up the bones and throw down another one. The older you get the more you realise that the people supposedly in control are bananas.

"In the back of all of my books I always say: 'Write and let me know what you think of it.' I get so many letters, and what I really enjoy is that about two-thirds of them are playing around in the style in which I write the books. Eddie's Mad Aunt Maud has a stuffed stoat called Malcolm that is drawn like a ferret, which is a running gag, and there is a joke in Awful End where Mad Uncle Jack believes that Malcolm is called Sally. And every child who writes to me and mentions Malcolm puts in brackets '(or Sally)'.

"When I do events, with adults or children, I take on the persona of someone who is very intrusive and larger than life, like the narrator in my books, and I become a kind of megalomaniac. I am larger than life--I'm two metres tall (six foot seven). When a child asks: 'What would you do if you weren't a writer?' I say: 'I quite like the idea of being a saint, because I think I have a number of qualities and would look good on a stained glass window.'"