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Artemis Fowl returns to foil evil fairy’s plans
REBECCA YOUNG; The News Tribune
April 26th, 2005

The book covers are shiny and slick, like graphics from a state-of-the-art video game. The hero is a 12-year-old millionaire criminal mastermind. The humor is abundant and wicked. The action is fast and furious. The gadgets would make Q, the inventor of James Bond’s weapons, proud.

Most sixth-grade boys know what we’re talking about – the tremendously popular Artemis Fowl books, which might be described as science-fiction-cop-and-robber-fairy tales.

“Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception,” the fourth book in the series, has just been released, and it doesn’t disappoint.

In this book, Artemis, the wunderkind, is being pursued by a longtime fairy enemy, Opal Kobai. Artemis joins forces with Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon fairy police to try to foil Kobai’s evil plans.

Complicating matters is the fact that at the end of the third book, “Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code,” the boy’s memory of the fairy world was wiped clean by magic.

Author Eoin (pronounced Owen) Colfer traveled from his native Ireland to Seattle last week on the first stop of a U.S. book tour. He said Artemis, who was completely self-interested and greedy in the first book, has gradually become a more decent person over the course of the series.

“But his memory was wiped, so he’s back to square one,” Colfer said. “In this book, he’s being pursued by an old fairy enemy. But he has no idea who’s chasing him, why they’re chasing him or what species they are. It’s a confusing cat-and-mouse situation.”

Colfer said his latest offering, like all the Artemis Fowl books, contains many subplots.

“Two or three strands come together in the center, with the villainess trying to lead a team of scientists to the center of the Earth,” he said.

Humans – called Mud Men – generally aren’t the most positive characters in the Fowl series.

“The humans do get a bad deal, but it’s that kind of book. Everyone’s quirky. There’s really only one real sort of straightforward hero, and that’s the Holly character. And everybody else is a little bit weird,” he said.

Colfer says he put a good human scientist in this book as a result of comments by his New York editor about the negative portrayal of Italians, or Sicilians, as Mafioso in the second book, “Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident.”

“I decided the next Sicilian guy is going to be a good Sicilian. Professor Zito is pro-environment. He’s trying to find ways to make clean energy. His brain gets hijacked, but he’s basically a good guy,” Colfer said.

The Artemis Fowl books particularly appeal to boys from about fourth grade through middle school, in part because of the technology and the gross humor.

One character, a dwarf named Mulch Diggums, makes tunnels by unhinging his jaw, ingesting mass quantities of dirt and blowing it out his other end in a smelly mess. Colfer said the boy-appeal is intentional.

Before he started writing full time, Colfer was a teacher, and he saw firsthand how hard it is to get many boys to read for pleasure.

“One of my goals when I started writing books was to do something that boys were going to really like,” he said. “Girls do read them. They show up in droves at the signings. But I do think it’s the kind of book that a boy who has not read before could be sucked in.”

Now, the answers to two burning questions:

 • What of the long-rumored Artemis Fowl movie? It’s still in the works. Colfer had a meeting set with his film agent and a Miramax executive on Saturday.

“So it seems like something is up,” he said. “But it’s a long process. It’s amazing anything ever gets made. I try not to worry about that. I try just to worry about the books.”

He has seen the first draft of the script, and it’s “very, very good.”

 • And will there be another Artemis Fowl book?

Yes, at least one more, probably in 2007, with the tentative title “Artemis Fowl: The Last Colony.” Colfer said the book was to be the first in a new series, but as he wrote, he realized the main character was much like Artemis.

“I realized the first thing people would say when this comes out is that well, all he did was change Artemis’ name. When I put Artemis in it, the whole thing just made 10 times more sense,” he said.

“What I like about it is that because it was originally a different book it is completely a different kind of story. It will be something fresh and new for the readers.”

He offered a plot preview.

“It’s about an eighth family of fairies who, when humans drove the fairies underground, they decided they didn’t want to go, so they lifted their island out of time,” Colfer said.

“And now the spell is wearing off, and they’re coming back. They’re popping up all over the world for a few seconds. Artemis Fowl is the only one who can predict, and he’s waiting for them.”

Next year, Colfer has a different sort of book coming out.

To be titled “Half-Moon Detective Agency,” it’s about 12-year-old Fletcher Moon, who has become certified as a private investigator through an Internet detective course.

He uses a fake ID to get jobs for which he’s paid “with chocolate, or CDs or whatever.”

One day a girl asks him to find a stolen photograph of herself and two friends. Each had a copy of the photo, and they were all stolen on the same day.

“He’s intrigued by this,” Colfer said. ‘He goes looking for the photograph, and it leads to a series of escalating adventures. … I’m very excited by it. It’s very different and very funny. He’s a good little character. I hope it does well. I’d like to have a series.”