IT IS the most hackneyed plot twist in publishing, but once again it’s come true. An obscure Irish writer has become an overnight literary sensation and is being paid a £1m (€1.45m) advance for his book after a bidding war between publishers.

Derek Landy, 31, from Lusk will now follow in the lucrative footsteps of Cecilia Ahern, John Connolly and Eoin Colfer after HarperCollins signed him up to write three children’s books.

The Dubliner, whose writing credits to date amount to two film scripts, plans a seven- or eight-book series of a comic-fantasy adventure, drawing inevitable comparisons with JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

The first book, Skulduggery Pleasant, will be published in 2007 and Landy is already writing the second. The series begins with a young girl teaming up with the wise-cracking skeleton of a dead magician to defeat an ancient evil. Landy is promising “sharply dressed skeleton detectives, feisty young heroines, scary monsters and super-creeps”.

He quipped: “I think my career-guidance teacher is spinning in her grave. Or she would be if she were dead.”

He already has gothic form. Landy wrote the script for Boy Eats Girl, starring Samantha Mumba, a comedy about teen zombies. He also penned the script of Dead Bodies, a 2003 film that was described as “a pauper’s Shallow Grave”.

The author was signed up by HarperCollins 10 days ago in London, and the company says its American division is equally “excited” about the trilogy. “Michael Stearns, our American editorial director, flew from New York to London and back in a day to meet Landy and his agent to convey Harper’s global enthusiasm for the series,” Sally Gritten, its British managing director, said.

“We always hope that the next big thing will come across our desks. Many wonderful manuscripts are submitted, but too often they are just not universal enough. Then one comes along that is so fresh, funny and magical that you know this is it.”

Susan Katz, president of HarperCollins children’s books in America, said successful publishing now demands a global vision and international reach. “We are always thrilled when we can team up with our colleagues (in Britain), especially for a book as drop-dead wonderful as Skulduggery Pleasant,” she said.

Acting on instructions from the publishers, Landy was declining interviews yesterday. “Seeing as this is my first book and so the first time all the attention is on me and not an entire film crew,” he said.

He confirmed, however, that he has been “lucky enough” never to have received rejection slips from publishers. He said his writing regime is to “get in a few hours in the afternoon, if I can, and then write all the way through the evening, up until about three or four in the morning. This regime changes, depending on my social life, if there’s anything good on television and whether or not my dog wants to attack my ankles. If this happens, hours of cuddling may ensue”.

Landy’s agents hope to sell foreign rights to the series at the London book fair this week and negotiations on film rights are expected to follow. While HarperCollins would not comment on the advance it paid, Landy’s agents said trade press speculation about £1m “is not wrong”. They say the Dubliner will continue with film projects even as he writes the books, which will be aimed at nine-year-olds and over.

Those who have seen Boy Eats Girl may have a foretaste of what’s in store. Landy wrote the original screenplay in two days, and titled it Zombie Love. It was a comic horror movie set in modern suburban Ireland with background themes of teenage love and secondary school mayhem.

“I like the idea of having different subjects — aliens, vampires, whatever, everything that Hollywood has, putting them in an Irish town and not making excuses for it,” he said at the time.

Ed Guiney, one of the film’s producers, said Landy “has a great facility for writing that kind of teenage world, a kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe”.

Landy’s advance is the biggest for a debut novel since Bertie Ahern’s daughter Cecilia got a seven-figure sum for PS I Love You, also bought by HarperCollins. Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney, bought American rights to two of her books for $1m. Like Landy, Cecilia Ahern is a northside Dubliner who likes to write into the small hours of the morning.

Ireland is already regarded as the home of chick-lit, with Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes and Cathy Kelly being among a number of women writers who sell extremely well in Britain. But in 1998, John Connolly became the first in a series of unknown writers to be snapped up by British publishers. The freelance journalist graduated from penning features in obscure supplements of The Irish Times to becoming a millionaire overnight after Simon & Schuster bought American rights for his first two crime thrillers for an estimated €1.5m.

Peter Sheridan, a Dublin playwright and brother of the film director Jim, also earned up to €1m for British, American and European rights for a memoir of his childhood in Dublin’s north inner city.

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