Eoin Colfer’s meteoric rise in the world of children’s fiction since the publication of the first best-selling Artemis Fowl adventure was published in 2001 surprises few who have read his work. The former primary school teacher from Wexford, Ireland combines the kind of high-concept ideas that are a staple of Hollywood thrillers with immense charm, talent and wit.

Now 39, he hit on the idea of the series, famously described as “Die Hard with fairies” as a result of his love of comic-books, pulp TV shows like Hill St. Blues and a deep knowledge of Irish folk-tales about the Little People. Colfer’s fairies, far from being the wispy type, are vastly more technologically advanced than Mud People (that’s us.) Much of their apparently magic powers such as invisibility or flight are due to technical ingenuity, and leprechauns are in fact part of “LEPrecon”, an elite police reconnaissance unit designed to prevent humans from discovering fairy existence deep in the earth’s core. Up against them is an anti-hero kids adore: the twelve-year-old Artemis Fowl. Brilliant, arrogant, coldly amoral and wickedly funny, Artemis is bent on restoring his family’s fortunes with the help of a devoted Oddjob-style butler and some technological wizardry of his own.

Artemis is slowly evolving into a warmer human being, but Colfer drew on his experiences during a year as an English teacher in a private school in Saudi Arabia for depicting the psychology of a rich kid with a bad attitude. He and his wife Jackie were teaching the children of the Saudi elite, including a couple of princes, and discovered that there, respect is only given to the rich. As teachers, he was, he says, “lower than a goldfish.” The boys would get pizzas delivered while in class, and still expect to be given As. Colfer failed many of them, to the dismay of the school principal and the delight of the parents. The “guilty pleasure of writing about a little bad guy” had its seeds sown then, although Colfer wrote four other children’s books before creating the very Irish Artemis, the first mortal to crack the fairy codebook in order to obtain the fabled crock of gold.

Like his other books, Artemis Fowl was written in the evenings after teaching at Coolcotts National School. This time, however, his wife Jackie told him he’d done something different. He sent the manuscript to Sophie Hicks at Ed Victor, not expecting it to sell any more than the 3,000 copies he was used to selling in Ireland. Colfer was on playground duty when he learnt that three Hollywood studios had bid for the rights – and that it had gone to Miramax for a sum rumoured to be a million dollars. With all the pace and inventiveness of a great Playstation game, his trilogy (a fourth is coming out this May) stands out because of the edgy relationships between its feisty fairy, Holly, the paranoid centaur-inventor Foaly, the irascible LEPrecon police commander Root – and Artemis, boy genius and criminal mastermind.

“When I started to write I had no intentions of making Artemis the central character, he was just the bad guy Holly was up against and that was it,” says Colfer. “My real anxiety was whether readers would want to go on reading about someone they were meant to hate. But then bits of myself started to go in, and he developed a conscience and it became a very interesting book to write. I’ve always liked the bad guys best in films.” Though banned, like JK Rowling and Philip Pullman, in American schools promoting fundamentalist Christianity, he is in fact an intensely moral writer.

Some adults object to the fast-paced action and knockabout violence of his tales, but Colfer’s Catholic upbringing is particularly evident in an early novel, The Wish List, about a teenaged girl who must atone for her sins on earth in order to join her dead mother in heaven. Less slap-stick than Roddy Doyle, Colfer shares his sense of family dynamics and shows Artemis’s arrogance as lonely and pitiable. The second of five children, all boys, Colfer was taught by his own father, who was an inspired teacher of the arts and understood the appeal of the quixotic and eccentric. He would not beat his pupils (a rarity in 1970s Ireland) and got his pupils to make a Viking longship, paraded through the town on St. Patrick’s Day. Both the Colfer parents were dynamic and artistic, and living in Wexford, with its internationally famous opera festival and stable of Irish novelists such as John Banville and Colm Toibin, made writing seem “like a good, honourable and normal thing to do.” The success of the three Artemis Fowl novels, has not changed Colfer, whose success came after ten years devoted to teaching in a local state primary school.

“I still walk down a street and pick up an interesting leaf for an art class,” he says, having only given up his teaching commitments four months ago. “It never leaves you.”

He continues to have a lot of contact with local schools, though international success has made it impossible to visit more widely. Like all modern parents, he now faces “the situation on which I spent years dishing out advice on –getting my own son to read rather than play on his beloved Gameboy.” The best method, he says, is to take turns reading a story, and the worst is forcing a child to read 20 pages before they’re allowed a treat, “like forcing them to eat vegetables”.

As a teacher of 10-12 year olds, Colfer took a keen interest in what his pupils would read, noting that they liked the Goosebumps series by RL Stine because they were short and very accessible. When he himself began to write a story about an Irish boy and a Tunisian, Danny and Omar (inspired by his time teaching in Tunisia) he took care to have a good vocabulary but also keep the first four chapters quick-moving to hook a bored or suspicious reader into the action. This structure continues, as the most recent Artemis Fowl book begins with a shoot-out in a posh restaurant, and The Supernaturalists, a dystopian futuristic adventure published in 2004, has two “parentally challenged” orphan boys making a break for freedom from the nightmare orphanage which uses them to test out commercial products. As with all superior novels, there are a lot of ideas about art, communism, religion and physics subtly woven into the action, as well as a strong environmental consciousness.

It is Colfer’s sense of humour which, even more than his dazzlingly inventive imagination, has earned him a place in children’s hearts. Mulch Diggums, the dwarf who can unhinge his jaw to eat earth and expel it with devastating digestive force when his bum-flap is unbuttoned, is just one of the comic creations which make his novels must-reads.

“I’m delighted to be in Who’s Who, but for me, the big thing is being able to call myself a writer,” he says. “Before, it was just a hobby.”

The Times, January 2005