Derek Landy suffered the kind of indignity you would not inflict on a cartoon cat. He was kicked out of animation studies at college and went to pick cauliflowers on a farm. His revenge was to dream up horror film scripts and devise a children's book series featuring a smartly-dressed skeleton detective and a 12-year-old girl.

With publishers eager to exploit the market pioneered by Harry Potter's adventures, Landy's work was greeted by Harper Collins with an advance of more than £1m.

His first work, Skulduggery Pleasant, appears in bookshops in Ireland and the UK on April 2.

The titles of the two films on which he was the screenwriter - Dead Bodies and Boy Eats Girl - are typical of his style of humorous dark fantasies. Both were low budget Irish movies and did not succeed at the box office.

Landy's publishing advance - said merely to be "in seven figures" - is one of the highest paid to an author of children's fiction and covers three books, aimed at children between eight and 13.

"It's horror with gothic sensibilities, fast talking characters and martial arts - all the things that are fun in life," he said.

The backdrop for the stories is Landy's native north County Dublin; he lives in Lusk just inland from the coast. His parent's farm, on which he picked vegetables after being thrown out of college, is nearby.