The author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time asks me to look after his bag while he is having his photograph taken. By way of explanation, Mark Haddon adds that he has just begun to appreciate how much the laptop inside the bag is worth. I realise that it has most of his next novel on it, and begin to do the maths.

Curious Incident, the quirky detective tale told from the perspective of a teenager with Asperger’s syndrome, won more than 17 literary awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, sold more than 10 million copies and grossed £14 million in 2004 alone. If his new novel, A Spot of Bother, published this month, commands anything like that sort of interest, the small black and red bag at my feet must be worth £10 million easy.

A Spot of Bother may sound like Wallace & Gromit’s latest outing, but it’s a more overtly dark tale than its predecessor. It charts the nervous breakdown of George, a recently retired family man in nondescript Peterborough, while his wife embarks on an ultimately disastrous affair. The tragedy is laced with beautifully understated humour, but it can be tough reading; there is a gruelling scene in which an increasingly mentally unwell George uses scissors to remove a chunk of his upper thigh that he believes is afflicted with cancer. It’s actually eczema.

Haddon, 44, has an obvious interest in mental illness. George is also afflicted with a fear of flying, hypochondria and anxiety attacks relating to death. But though Haddon suggests that his own mental health hasn’t been entirely stable, he insists that this is not central to his work. By the end of the interview I realise that he’s desperate not to be pigeonholed as a writer about illness and disability: Curious may have made him, but he’s horribly aware that it could be a millstone for the rest of his creative days.

“The corner I kept on fighting over Christopher, the main character in Curious, who suffers from Asperger’s, is that he’s not ill; he just has a radically different view of the world. What I’m interested in is how the human mind works, and when we’re abnormal or going wrong people are much more fascinating. It’s a bit like if you’re interested in cars; you quite like it when there’s something wrong and you have to get the bonnet up. And if you’re interested in lives you also want to get the bonnet up. Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth are not interesting because they are healthy in their heads.”

He was puzzled by the response to Curious from some in the autism community. He turned down various invitations to become patrons of societies because, he says, he didn’t want to profess a knowledge that he didn’t have. Some people with Asperger’s loved the book; others hated it. But he also had letters from parents thanking him because it had finally helped them to understand what was going on in their autistic child’s head. “Those were a bit scary because on the one hand I was hugely flattered and moved, but I was also slightly saddened that it took a novel for someone to understand a member of their own family. And I couldn’t help thinking that they should have tried harder.”

What about his own mental health? Do the books reflect his experiences? After all, both George and Christopher show similar, and typically male, strategies for coping with emotional crises. An exasperated George, at one point in A Spot of Bother, says that all most men want to do is to tell you how to light a log fire and the route to Wisbech. Is that what he’s like? Haddon doesn’t want to reveal how much of him is in the books because “the novel’s balloon goes down slightly”. But he acknowledges that you can’t create a character unless you have some personal experience to draw on. “People divide into two camps,” he says. “There are plenty of people who take their mental health for granted and move from one day to the next seamlessly. And there are people for whom things aren’t so simple and sometimes see difficulties from one day to the next, and this is from the age of 4 upwards, I think.

“The people who find it easy run through their schooldays like gazelles across the veldt, and they get mopeds and girls with real breasts. And there are other people standing nervously on the side of the playground. And all writers are in that latter group.

“I don’t think that you ever become really creative until you’ve been genuinely bored and pissed off with things in your life. It’s what prompts you to say ‘once upon a time’ and enter this parallel universe, this fantastic faculty that human beings have. I don’t think you’d find any writer who has not suffered some dark times.”

His own dark times? He won’t go there. “I’m going to keep my dark times to myself and be mysterious.” The particular playground that Haddon skirted was at a boarding school in the Midlands called Uppingham, whose alumni include Stephen Fry, Johnny Vaughan and Boris Karloff. The son of an architect, Haddon excelled at maths but went on to read English at Oxford, and then became a carer for disabled people in Scotland before becoming a children’s writer and illustrator in London.

He lives in East Oxford with his wife Sos Eltis, an English Fellow at Brasenose College, and his two young sons. He doesn’t feel profoundly different from before the huge success of Curious, but he is relieved that he has finally achieved what, as a prolific artist and writer, he’d striven for over two decades.

“That grinding ambition to write a good book is less uncomfortable,” he says. And fatherhood has changed things for the better, too. In the past he admitted to writer’s block, but he says that sharing childcare with his wife he simply doesn’t have time for such indulgences. “It’s like, s***, I’ve got to write something in the next half hour because I’ve got to pick them up from nursery. And the amazing thing is, I realised that I could do it.”

He is naturally energetic, enjoying canoeing, cycling and running marathons until a prolapsed disc 18 months ago put paid (temporarily he hopes) to strenuous exertions. “My wife says I was a dog in a previous life. I have a very strong sense of smell and I need to be taken for a run every day. Or I get a bit grumpy.”

But I suspect that Haddon, for all his down-to-earth blokeishness, doesn’t want me to get the impression that he’s too earth-bound. He is, after all, an artist. “Writing is an eerily magical act and just sometimes when the writing works, or you read a book that really works, you can perform that same conjuring trick you did when you were 7 or 10 or 13 and you can leave your body behind. It’s sort of a religious thing.

“I’m a hardline atheist, but there’s something about making and reading books that puts you in touch with something far bigger than yourself. I think it’s extraordinary that the things we remember from 2,000 years ago are some things that people scribbled on paper. Just because they said something powerful enough that people had to keep copying it.”

And death? Some of the most vivid descriptions in A Spot of Bother are during George’s spiralling panic as his mortality hits him for the first time. “With blinding clarity he realised that everyone was frolicking in a summer meadow, surrounded by a dark and impenetrable forest, waiting for that grim day on which they were dragged into the dark beyond the trees and individually butchered.” Has he felt something approaching that fear? Once again Haddon suggests that it is the transforming act of the writer, not him, that we should be interested in. Perhaps then, like those rather obtuse parents of autistic children, we might learn something valuable that’s right under our noses.







Mark Haddon is appearing at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, October 15.



For tickets, call 01242 227979; www.cheltenhamfestivals.co.uk

A Spot of Bother (Random House, £17.99) is available from Books First at £16.99 (p&p free); 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy