Go your Eoin way

Anyone who has read Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series of children’s books may be a little surprised by his latest offering. Plugged is a rollicking noir black comedy set in Cloisters, New Jersey. There’s a hard man, Daniel McEvoy, various small-time vicious criminals, corrupt cops and a lot of violence.

“I wanted to write a book that was enjoyable,” says Colfer. “I think it will be good for by the pool or on a plane. I want people just to have a laugh. When you write for kids you’re always asked, ‘What are you trying to do with this book?’ Well, this is just a book: you read it, you enjoy it.”
I’m curious to know what Colfer, having written for both young readers and adults, makes of the idea that it is easier to write for children.
“I wouldn’t say that at all. I found this easier. Well, not easier, but in a way you’re unfettering yourself. With a kids’ book, there’s a discipline that everything has to be appropriate. The words have to be words that are on a certain curriculum. You can put in other ones but you’re not going to write John Banville prose for 12-year-olds. There is a certain amount of discipline and self-censorship and I didn’t have that with this book. I really, really enjoyed writing it because nothing was off-limits.”
The subplot to Plugged revolves around hair plugs, which according to Colfer gave him the idea for the novel, in much the same way as a play on the word ‘leprechaun’ inspired the Artemis Fowl books.
“I saw it on the Late Late Show,” laughs Colfer. “Pat (Kenny) had a doctor from Blackrock and three of his patients on. My brain thought Plugged would be a great title because it means to shoot somebody, but also hair plugs and I wondered if there was anything I could do with that. When the doctor said you may need two sessions I thought, ‘Oh what if you had one session and your surgeon went missing?’ I built the whole thing up around the name.”
Hair plugs are not only a crucial plot point, but without giving the story away, they are a necessary part in a resolution as well. Is hair really that important?
“Well, it is to these guys. I think all guys, myself included, do check the mirror to see if it’s getting thinner. I think men who read it won’t ask that question.”
Colfer has a fine head of hair. “It’s all real!” he laughs.
Although Plugged is fairly violent with an impressive body count, as the hair plugs subplot suggests, Colfer’s humour is very in evidence.
“I realised when I was planning the book that this was outrageous and that it would be hard to set it in a really gritty noir world because it’s so ridiculous – the plot is held together by coincidence and very slim threads. But I love that, because it’s ramshackle and almost like a dream. I thought: the only way I can hold this together is if I can make the central character Daniel an everyman who expresses what you think. He’s thinking, ‘This is ridiculous, this is insane’ and when he’s thinking that, you’re thinking that too so you go along with him. Not consciously, but you’re prepared to suspend disbelief.”
However, there are serious elements too. Dan McEvoy is a former peacekeeper who is haunted by his past in The Lebanon.
“I wanted to be respectful to the guys who were there,” says Colfer. “I didn’t want to turn that into a joke.”
Plugged would not have come about without the support of Ken Bruen, who originally challenged Colfer to write a story for his anthology Dublin Noir a few years back.
“I was going to New York and I bought one of Ken’s books The Guards. I was expecting a pretty straightforward crime book but what I got was this amazing noir poetry and for the first time in my life I wrote a fan letter. I was 36 at the time and I’d never written to any writer or pop star. The first thing you have to do is convince the person you’re not a crazy stalker. Then he e-mailed me saying he’d been reading my books to his daughter. A bond was formed and we met up and became friends. He kept saying, ‘You should write a crime book’. I was resisting because I think it was lack of confidence. But then he said to me, ‘If you take away the leprechauns, it’s crime’ and he was right.”
Talking of stalkers, Colfer has had a few himself.
“I got one guy who was an adult but put his letters in little pink envelopes with pony stickers so the publishers thought it was from a little girl and sent it on. I didn’t answer him because he struck me as a little weird. He then sent me a photo. He was bare-chested holding two swords and he had a tattoo saying ‘God Bless America’. I wrote him a very nice letter telling him I couldn’t get into personal correspondence and was careful not to put in anything he could decode, but I suppose he could find a code in it if he wanted to.
“Another guy found my email and sent me a long, coded email. He asked me if I had decoded it and I hadn’t, so he told me it said, ‘You have found out the truth about the fairies and must die!’”
Colfer actually ran into this character at a reading in New York. “He came up and asked if I remembered the emails. Then he said, ‘I’m an actor. That’s my way of auditioning for the movie. I hope I didn’t scare you’. That’s just very, very weird.”

Plugged is out now, published by Headline.