Derek Landy

Derek Landy is an Irish author and screenwriter best known for creating the Skulduggery Pleasant and Demon Road book series. His work sits at the meeting point of film, fantasy, horror, and fast-moving dialogue, and his career has moved between screenplays, novels, television tie-in fiction, and comics. Since 2018, he has also written numerous comic book series for Marvel Comics.

Landy attended Drogheda Grammar School and later studied animation at Ballyfermot College. Before his contract with HarperCollins, he worked on his parents’ vegetable farm. He also holds a black belt in kenpo karate, a detail that fits neatly beside the action and dark comedy associated with much of his fiction. Since 2013, he has been dating Laura Jordan, a fellow writer from Sittingbourne, Kent; they are now engaged and live in Dublin with their dog and seven cats.

His early professional success came through film. Landy wrote two screenplays that were made into movies: Dead Bodies, which won an IFTA, and Boy Eats Girl, an IFTA-nominated film starring Samantha Mumba. Landy himself was nominated for an IFTA for Best Script for Dead Bodies. Yet the collaborative nature of filmmaking frustrated him, and that frustration helped push him toward fiction, where he could shape a story with more direct control.

That move led to Skulduggery Pleasant, published by HarperCollins after the company paid £1.8 million for the publishing rights. The original novel grew into a nine-book series, followed by a six-book sequel series, a spin-off, and a prequel, with a third three-book series in development. In 2007, Landy signed a deal with Warner Bros. worth an estimated US$1.1 million for film rights to the series, intending to adapt it himself. After his script was repeatedly rewritten, he bought the rights back. Later attempts with other companies did not reach production, and as of 2020 he was working on an adaptation with an undisclosed film company.

The work that shaped Landy’s imagination is clear from the stories and series he has admired. He is a fan of Joss Whedon’s work, especially Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. He is also a fan of Gilmore Girls and Doctor Who. In 2013, Puffin published his Tenth Doctor short story, “The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage,” as part of a collection marking the show’s 50th anniversary. He was later hired to write an episode for the second series of the Doctor Who spinoff Class, but the series was cancelled before his episode could be produced.

Readers have responded strongly to Landy’s pace, wit, and sense of the fantastic. Reviewing Skulduggery Pleasant in the Irish Independent, Sarah Webb wrote that it “is taut, full of zippy dialogue and fantastical visuals.” His awards reflect that response: in 2008 he won the Red House Children’s Book Award, and Playing with Fire, Mortal Coil, and Last Stand of Dead Men each won the senior Irish Children’s Book Award in 2009, 2010, and 2013. In 2010, Skulduggery Pleasant, also known as Sceptre of the Ancients, was voted Irish book of the decade. His words continue to matter to readers because they carry the snap of screen dialogue, the charge of fantasy, and the confidence of a writer who found his strongest form on the page.