Michael Carroll is old enough to know better, but still young enough to think he can get away with it. He is the author of fourteen published novels, many of which have sold in embarrassingly large numbers (the others have sold in embarrassingly small numbers), and quite a few award-winning short stories.

Among his books are four romance novels published under the name Jaye Carroll, and his latest series, The New Heroes, which has been thrilling young readers throughout the world since its debut in January 2006.

Like all the very best writers, he is losing his hair and wears glasses.

Michael lives in Dublin with his lovely wife Leonia, and they have two pets: a cat called Gul, and an unnamed spider who resides in the passenger-side wing-mirror of his car.

Favourite book from childhood:
A lot of books made a huge impression on me, so it's hard to single one out... But I can pick an entire series: the Three Investigators books! Or, as they were originally called, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in...

I'm still not entirely sure what the great movie director was thinking when he allowed his name to be used in connection with a series of young adult mystery novels. I remember them as being great books, though. Each one would present a mystery that had to be solved by the three protagonists: Jupiter Jones (the clever one), Pete Crenshaw (the athletic one) and Bob Andrews (the other one).

I was also very fond of the Doctor Who books of the early 1970s. These were novelisations of the TV series. Some of them were kind of scary so I had to read them from behind the sofa.

Book I didn't make it through:
Gaah! There are too many! I've got a stack this high of books that I've started but not finished. Some people think that it's a shame not to finish a book you've started, but I think it's a shame to put yourself through the pain of finishing a book you're not enjoying.

Secret reading vice:
Well, I'm not sure you can call it a vice... You know the way some people read the last few pages of a book first, so they can check whether it has a happy ending? Well, my vice is quite the opposite... I never, ever read the blurb on the back of a book. Unlike the last-few-pages skip-aheaders, I absolutely do not want to know anything about a book before I read it.

My other vice: At the weekends I read in bed, and quite often I'll keep reading until I finish the book. Even if that means reading all through the night and well into the next day. You know you've got it bad when you can no longer turn the pages because your hands are numb from the cold...

Oh, and I do have another "vice": Comics! Yes, I'm not ashamed to admit that I read comics. I love superheroes (as readers of my New Heroes series can probably tell), and thoroughly enjoyed Marvel's big cross-over event Civil War (but not as much as I enjoyed their very overlooked Planet Hulk series – now that was good story-telling!)

Most under-rated book:
Another tough question! I've got a whole list of books that I absolute adore but no one else ever gets. This is actually a pretty cool thing, because sometimes it seems like those books were written specially for me...! Picking one at random: Bugs, by the late John Sladek. It's one of the funniest and most inventive novels I've ever read, yet very few people – even among dedicated science fiction readers – seem to have even heard of it.

Most over-rated book:
The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien. Page after page after page of deathful prose... I read it when I was fourteen, and it took me two weeks. At that age I was reading at least one novel a day, so a whole fortnight of chirpy Hobbits and mopey Elves was almost too much to take.
This is how the book should have been:
"Frodo, you must take a terribly arduous journey across Middle-Earth in order to cast this ring into the fires of Mount Doom."
"But Gandalf... You're a very powerful wizard. Can't you just, y'know, magic it there?"
"Oh. Yeah, that's not a bad idea."
"That's what you get for being out of your head on pipeweed the whole time."

Irish writer I always look for:
Michael Scott. Not just because he's a friend of mine, but because he's just about the only writer who can turn his hand to any genre. Romance, thrillers, horror, fantasy, science fiction... His newest book – The Alchemyst – is a masterpiece.

One book I'd love to have written:
The Gun Seller, by Hugh Laurie. Yes, that's the same Hugh Laurie, star of the hit TV show House and former comedy partner of Stephen Fry. A lot of comedians write novels, and most of them are mediocre at best, but The Gun Seller is an absolute gem, genuinely hilarious, very inventive and a darned good thriller. Apparently Mr Laurie submitted the book to his publisher anonymously, just to see whether it would be accepted on its own merits. And it was.

Who should write a book?
They say that everyone has a book inside them. I believe that to be true. But I also believe that for a lot of people that's where the book should stay!

That said, anyone who feels that they'd like to write a book should give it a go. Now, by "give it a go" I don't mean "endlessly talk about getting around to writing the book one day." I mean actually sit down write the thing. Your book might not be published, but it definitely won't be published if you don't write it.

The book I go back to time and again:
The Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison. The protagonist is "Slippery" Jim di Griz, a notorious – but ethical – con-artist and bank-robber in the far future. Early in the first novel di Griz is captured by a top-secret police organisation known as the Special Corps. But they don't arrest him: they offer him a job.

I discovered the books after the first novel was adapted in the comic 2000 AD. There are now ten books in the series, and every couple of years I re-read them all.

Five for a rainy day:
Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins
Even after twenty years, this is still the most influential graphic novel ever produced, and one of the best superhero tales ever written.

Rebel in Time by Harry Harrison
A simple idea, but remarkably well executed: a racist travels back in time to the American civil war with the plan to change the outcome of the war by arming the southern forces with machine guns (note: anything by Harry Harrison is worth a read!)

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Adams' two Dirk Gently books are always overshadowed by his Hitch-Hiker series, but in my opinion they're superior, especially the first: it's one of those books that reveals more each time you read it.

The Book of Ultimate Truths by Robert Rankin
I won't even attempt to summarise the plot of this one: just buy it and read it! It features the great mystic / charlatan / inventor Hugo Rune, a man with such an enormous ego that in the book he refuses to share his chapters with any of the other characters.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
The first (and by far the best) sequel to Card's acclaimed novel Ender's Game. Brilliant, brilliant stuff indeed. If I could go back in time and rip off one novel without getting found out, this would be it!

And the award for worst writing goes to:
I don't want to disparage my fellow writers (because, y'know, I might need them some day), so I won't pick on any single book. I will instead give you my guidelines for happy reading...

1. Always shun books written by people who are already famous for something else, like kicking a ball or appearing on a reality TV show. These people don't write the books themselves, and they are already wealthy and don't need the money as much as real writers (like me) do. Besides, you could just wait a couple of weeks and then get the books for a quid out of the bargain bin.

2. Beware of debut novels that mysteriously appear at the top of the best-seller lists before they've been published. That just means that the bookshops have bought lots of copies from the publisher, usually because the publisher has offered them a huge discount.

3. Still on the subject of debut novels, you can also ignore those that are well-publicised only because the author was paid a huge pile of money and the publishers are bricking it in case the book fails. These writers are almost never heard of again.

4. Avoid novels that are deliberately published outside their genre, like, say, The Time-Traveller's Wife or Timeline or The Handmaid's Tale. I don't care what the marketing people say, they're bog-standard science fiction stories! If they had been marketed honestly, they probably wouldn't have made the slightest blip on the sales charts. That's one of my pet hates, and it's cropping up more and more these days, like those infuriating TV reviewers who insist that the new Battlestar Galactica series isn't actually science fiction on the grounds that it's good.

5. Graphic novels are just comics printed on better paper. Ergo: just because a comic is published as a graphic novel doesn't mean it's going to be any good. Unless it has big stompy robots and flying cars – that's a recipe for an instant classic right there!

Interview originally published in Verbal Magazine #05 (May 29th 2007).