This was posted on The Age but the article has since disappeared. An archived copy appears on the Internet Wayback Machine, at this page.

Send in the elves
By STEPHANIE BUNBURY
Monday 28 May 2001

See if you can believe in this story. In the first chapter, our hero Eoin Colfer is a plain primary school teacher in the Irish seaside town of Wexford. Small town, wife and son, the usual money worries of middle-class people who live from cheque to cheque, but a happy man nonetheless.

By day, he encourages children to read; in the  evening, he writes them stories. He has already had five published. Some are Irish bestsellers, but they still don't make much money. Artemis Fowl is his latest, a rollicking yarn about a 12-year-old criminal mastermind who finds himself at war with the fairies. And this time, he's got himself an agent.

Now turn to the last chapter. Who could believe it? After just one week of adventures that have taken him from Hollywood to Frankfurt, Colfer has sold Artemis Fowl to 19 publishers. Miramax, after optioning the book in a six-figure deal, is already at work on the movie.

Eoin (pronounced Owen) Colfer, for one, is finding his life story a bit hard to swallow. "That was a life-changing week for me," he says. "The film deal and all these publishers ... My life has gone off in another direction now because of that week." This is about the closest a grown-up gets to slipping through the back of a wardrobe. And now, in the inevitable sequel, here he is in London, sitting in a plush hotel doing interviews. "I'm Batman at the moment, but I'll be back beside the sea shortly. I don't think of this as my life."

Colfer is not, indeed, the sort of fellow you expect to be at the centre of million-dollar deals. After two days in London he just wants to go home to his wife Jackie and three-year-old son Finn. "I think I spend more money on the phone than I do on the actual hotel, because I'm on the phone home twice a day or three times a day. If Jackie was here it would make everything much better for me. It's selfish, really, to want your wife and family with you."

He has known Jackie since he was 16. He has four brothers; Jackie, too, is one of five children. "We only have one boy ourselves now, but all our families live in the town and we all live very closely together and see each other every day. It's a great support network.

"Like, my brother Niall plays in a band and when he's playing we all go. The family makes up half the crowd, which is good, you know."

Colfer and his wife have taught in Italy and Tunisia, where Eoin wrote his first prize-winning children's novel, Benny and Omar. When you're young, the 36-year-old says, everywhere else seems more exotic and you feel you will be transformed by travel. "But when you're away, you realise it's just you somewhere else." It made him appreciate home.

Wexford, he says, is small but literary, in that careless Irish way; novelist John Banville came from there, he tells me, and the town is full of aspiring writers. He is not out of place in the town, even with the smell of the mega-deal hanging about him.

"People were giving me looks in the pub and the supermarket," Colfer says, "but it's really back to normal now. And it's the same with my family. You know, you still have to pick up Finn and you still have to do the ironing."

Of course, Colfer knows as well as anyone that his success is linked to Harry Potter fever. Every children's publisher is on the hunt for another J.K. Rowling; a writer of fantasies with attitude, anything that can hold a candle to Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, that can cut it with Potter fans without looking like plagiarism.

"It's nice to be thought of as going to have some of that measure of success," says Colfer. "But I don't think there is going to be another J.K. Rowling. I'm not putting myself up there, but I haven't done one interview where Harry Potter wasn't mentioned. I'm waiting for the day someone's going to come in and say, 'Harry Potter's great and you're not.' As if I'd engineered the whole thing."

Artemis Fowl is not, in fact, much like Harry Potter at all. Fowl isn't a benign ugly duckling like Harry, for starters; he is an antihero, despite his loneliness and insecurity, a genius gone bad in a room full of computers. It was fun, Colfer says, to put the baddie centre-stage. He always liked Professor Moriarty more than Sherlock Holmes, Dr No more than James Bond. Hannibal Lecter. "If there's a good baddie," he says, "I think it makes the film or book.

So I wanted one of those, except pint-sized."

Colfer's fairies are also a new breed: high-tech, armed to their pointed ears, only a metre tall but full of the ass-kicking zeal of Bruce Willis at his die-hardest. Artemis captures one of them, a feisty little pixie called Holly, and holds out for a ransom of the fabled fairy gold. Fairy commandos, including a dirt-munching gnome of enormous colonic power, head for Artemis's Irish mansion to get her out. They even use the deadly explosive Semtex.

Despite the other-world setting, Artemis Fowl is more like Star Trek than Narnia. In Colfer's head, it is more like a graphic novel: "I like to think of it as a cartoon written down. Very sort of immediate and pacy. And I'm not trying to conform to the rules of life. Nothing was too wild for the story if I could make it fit."

He still expects, any day soon, that someone will call him up and say it was all a mistake. "Maybe I am a bit of a pessimist, but when you're thrust into this other world, you always feel some elastic is going to snap you back. That you'll go back through the wormhole and into, I don't know, obscurity. Although obscurity's not bad. I don't mind it at all. I want to be a success - I think that's something inside everybody - and I achieved that."

Since he was six, Eoin Colfer has been a comic collector, a walker of other worlds. Maybe this is the exact flipside of his life in the expansive bosom of his family in Wexford; his mind zips between places in his imagination so readily that he doesn't need to go anywhere.

His plots, certainly, are always with him. "It's the last thing before you go to sleep," he says. "Thinking, where can he go from here? How can I get him out of this snowstorm? And then when you wake up, you're thinking about it."

He loves how each morning he pours the ideas that have built up overnight into the computer. At that moment, he says, he feels free.

But only for a moment, I'd guess, because out there in the gloaming are hordes of genre fans, waiting as patiently as zombies to see how his dungeons, dragons and demons measure up against the huge archive of fantasies past. He knows this because he is one of them.

The true fans comb books for errors, inconsistencies and anything stolen from elsewhere. One reader wrote to chide him for using a sidewinder missile - an air-to-surface missile - when a surface-to-air type should have been used in the particular circumstance. He amended it, of course. "You have to be sure you get it right. You just don't think people will read your books like that - mine, it's just a story, but to them this is part three of whatever chronicles and it must be perfect. You know?"

I don't, actually. What I do know is that the only time Colfer really relaxes in these great plush chairs, forgetting himself entirely, is when I mention that I'll be seeing Peter Jackson's new Lord of the Rings film in Cannes. In fact, he suddenly bounces out of his seat.

"I cannot wait!" he exclaims. "Don't start me. I saw the trailers. From what I've seen it's just going to blow everybody away."

He plans to visit some of the locations when he goes to New Zealand. Surely, he says with conviction, they will become tourist attractions in their own right. "It's great for the whole place, isn't it? Especially when it's a local film and it's going to take over the world."

For Colfer, the sale of the film rights to Miramax and Tribeca, Robert De Niro's production company, was the most remarkable event in his remarkable week. He was expecting his agent to go to Frankfurt and sell the book to publishers; he wasn't expecting her to send the book to Hollywood first. Jackie got the news and rang him at school. It was lunchtime and he was on playground duty. "I was in the infant yard as well," he recalls, "which is really chaotic - infants everywhere, lots of runny noses and bottoms hanging out of the toilets, and then the principal came out with the phone.

"It was Jackie saying there were three companies bidding for the option rights. I was very happy! Kids could have been abseiling from the roof, saying, 'Can I jump off next?' and I'd be saying, 'Yeah, go ahead, up you go.'

I was in a total state of shock, really."

The film version of Artemis Fowl, like Lord of the Rings, will be shot with real people and a lot of computer effects. He hopes they'll make the film in Ireland. The Count of Monte Cristo was shot across the bay, he reasons; Braveheart was filmed just up the road. "I told them it's a real area for that," he says with assurance, "and hopefully they'll come and do it." On his home turf, where the little people dance in the moonlight.

Is that what he thinks? Of course not. He would like, he says patiently, to believe in fairies. "If a leprechaun walked in I'd be delighted. Or if aliens landed. But I'm afraid I'm a cynical grown-up. Although there's a part of me that would love magic to be visited on me." And, in a sense, that's exactly what has happened.