Neil Gaiman: literary biped

“I just tweeted absolute nonsense to the universe” says Neil Gaiman by way of an apology. For the next sixty seconds he’s absorbed in his phone, correcting a garbled online account of a frustrating half-hour in which he discovered Edinburgh taxi drivers’ capacity to develop a collective blind-spot for customers who are being rained on. After twenty minutes of waiting, he went back into his hotel to complain to his girlfriend, the Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer, who accompanied him back out into what had miraculously turned into “this” - he waves a hand to indicate the glorious, fleeting Charlotte Square sunshine. With the rain gone, the cabs deigned to put their lights on, and one stopped as soon as Palmer flagged one down.

“It’s not fair” he grumbles, concluding his tweet. He’s dressed in a black leather jacket, black jeans and black biker’s boots. Anything else would have been a surprise – this is his standard uniform, at least for public appearances. He’s young for his 48 years, with just a few grey strands in his unruly black hair, and his eyes are startlingly green. His uniform makes him look a little like the victim of a mid-life crisis, someone who had just dealt with some setback by buying a Harley Davidson.

Except that the middle of Gaiman’s professional life has not seen anything approaching a crisis. He’s doing staggeringly well. His second novel for children, The Graveyard Book, a resetting of Kipling’s classic children’s stories in which a boy is raised by ghosts, recently won the coveted Newbery medal for children's writing, adding to a trophy cabinet that already contains numerous Hugos and Nebulas. A little research reveals a bewildering number of film projects in the pipeline; his novels sell fabulously. He enjoys a privileged status in the world of graphic novels—or, as he unpretentiously calls them, “comics”—thanks largely to his Sandman series, one of the best-selling graphic novels, and arguably the most influential work in this young artform.

In light of this versatility I ask what he considers himself at heart – novelist, comic-writer, or what?

“Storyteller” he declares, his manner ever-so-slightly like that of another leather-clad fantasist - Garth Marenghi, the horror writer and self-described “dream-weaver” invented by comedian Richard Holness.

“If I say I’m a novelist then I feel I’m skipping off if I go and make a film; if I thought of myself as a comics writer then God knows what I’ve been doing for the last few years. And if I was a children’s writer I wouldn’t be able to write stuff with people being eaten by vaginas.”

In any case, I suggest, he must be able to do pretty much whatever he wants nowadays. A Cheshire Cat gin broadens on his face. “Yeah. It’s awesome.” He tells me that after his stay in Edinburgh he’s going to London to work on an eight-minute silent film “about the secret life of human statues".

"I looked around and realised I hadn’t directed anything in ages.” He talks about this project like an experiment: “What happens when you do something without dialogue?” he had wondered, and decided to find out.

Determined to find some down-side to his enviable position, I ask whether he frets in the knowledge that the majority of his ideas will surely never reach fruition. “No,” he replies simply. He’s not worried about sealing his reputation “before the long dark”.

This is partly down to confidence that “stuff that I’ve done has got a fair crack at being around until I die and beyond…I’ve done enough interesting stuff to feel I’ve written my name on the wall somewhere. Possibly not in huge letters or terribly high up, but my name’s on the wall and it’ll be around for a while”.

He pronounces this simply, without smugness, exhibiting a serene common-sense about the mysterious qualities which confer staying power on a lucky minority of books: “There’s no bargaining with posterity, and any artist working for posterity … is probably going to produce something that’s a giant wank.”

As well as riches and this admirably straightforward attitude, Gaiman’s success has left him with a devoted fan-base, of which he is understandably fond. He defends them—and, hence, I suppose, himself—against accusations of geekiness. The last time he was in Edinburgh, a journalist had made some snooty remark along the lines of “Neil Gaiman did the biggest signing at the festival, how weird it must have been to see Charlotte Square filled with Goths in black”. He recalls how grumpy this presumption made him, gesturing at the throng taking advantage of the sun in Charlotte Square to indicate the kind of normal people that read his books. “They’re just bipeds - literate bipeds.”

Gaiman undeniably inspires a fanatical devotion among his fans, however. Hundreds of people queue to meet him at signings – yesterday he signed for 500 people in three hours, and the queue was so long Ian Rankin’s appearance had to be delayed. There are stories about teenage girls fainting when they meet him.

Gaiman himself might have been the kind of child to go to book signings. A precocious reader, he was “frisked for books before family functions because I’d find myself in a corner and settle back down.” He came to his obsession with mythology—his fiction is peopled with ancient gods transplanted into modern environments—aged about seven, after encountering the norse gods in Stan Lee’s comic, Thor. From comics he progressed to Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Norsemen, which in turn led to Tales of Ancient Egypt; Zelazny’s Lord of Light opened up the world of Hindu mythology, and soon he was reading the religious books themselves, not just the modern fantasy that sprang from them. He knew even at this age that he would be a fantasy writer; he “never had a fallback profession”.

He finds it hard to read fiction now, “in the way that a professional magician probably finds it hard to attend magic shows – you may admire how something’s done, but you’re never sitting there going ‘oh my god, they’re going to cut that poor woman in half!’” At the moment he’s reading Steven King, apparently one of the few novelists that can still make Gaiman fear for the safety of the magician's glamorous assistant.

Gaiman used to be more or less nocturnal – the blurb for Good Omens, written with Terry Pratchett, an early-riser, claimed that the book was produced in “the few hours when they both were awake”. But after he quit smoking he could no longer revive himself in the small hours with cigarettes and coffee; an attempt to write through the night now leaves him “looking up from my keyboard to find I’ve typed 200 pages of the letter M”.

His more sedate sleeping-patterns fit what sounds like an idyllic domestic lifestyle in Minneapolis, where he will stay at least until his youngest daughter graduates from high school. He lives in a “big old Addams family house,” and keeps bees. “Mornings tend to be email and emergencies, afternoons tend to be writing”. And in the evenings there’s twitter: “some time before the end of this week I will hit a million followers,” he predicts excitedly about his online legion.

With a whole world of artistic endeavour apparently his oyster, his initials inscribed modestly on literature’s wall of fame, and a twitter army that outnumbers the population of Detroit, it’s a good time to be Neil Gaiman. A few hours after our brief interview ends, I see the queue for the talk he’s giving with Ian Rankin. It winds around Charlotte Square and disappears into a tent on the other side, and I wander over to see if Gaiman fans are as unremarkable a bunch as he claims. It seems fair to assume that the few leather trenchcoat wearers are there for the fantasy author, not the crime writer, but these are a minority. As he says, his readers are just literate bipeds – lots of them. He’s lucky to have them.