Derek Landy

Derek Landy is an Irish author and screenwriter, born in 1974 in Lusk, County Dublin, who worked on his family's vegetable farm and studied animation before breaking into film: he wrote the IFTA-winning Dead Bodies and the IFTA-nominated Boy Eats Girl, starring Samantha Mumba. Frustrated with how much collaborative compromise filmmaking demanded, he turned to prose fiction and created Skulduggery Pleasant (2007), the wisecracking reanimated-skeleton detective who teams up with young sorceress Valkyrie Cain to investigate a hidden magical Ireland. HarperCollins paid a headline-making sum for the rights, and the series has since grown to eighteen novels across three story phases, known for rapid-fire banter that gives way, especially from the back half onward, to real darkness and stakes. Landy also writes darker, gorier YA horror as a change of pace: the Demon Road trilogy (2015-2016) follows a teenage girl fleeing across America after learning her parents are demons who plan to eat her. New readers should start with Skulduggery Pleasant itself; Phase I's nine books form a complete, satisfying story on their own before the series continues. Landy has also written comic book series for Marvel since 2018. There is no major screen adaptation of Skulduggery Pleasant to date, despite the character's obvious cinematic pedigree.