Novelist Melvin Burgess spotted a gap in the book market for teenagers and filled it with his controversial, attention-grabbing stories. As a new Burgess stage adaptation opens in York, the writer tells Charles Hutchinson why he is drawn to writing for young people.

MELVIN Burgess doesn't need the lupine contact lenses on the Bloodtide poster. His eyes fix you, his piratical gap tooth draws you in still more, and so too his sea-green coat and ruffled hair that suggest punk never died.

Like John Lydon, he gives off an air of imminent excitement, even danger, and as he waits in the York Theatre Royal foyer to talk about Pilot Theatre Company's new stage adaptation, he stands out from the afternoon tea crowd.

Born in Sussex of Irish stock, and now living in Manchester, Burgess writes for children and his "assaults on teenage morals" are deemed to be the next link in the reading chain to adulthood after J K Rowling and Philip Pullman.

He has sold more than 350,000 books since his first novel, The Cry Of The Wolf, was published in 1990 after he turned to writing full time at the age of 35, having earlier rejected journalism following his training at the Reading Evening Post.

Bloodtide is his story of betrayal, passion and the corrupting nature of power, a tale steeped in Norse myth but re-located to a futuristic England torn apart by gang-lord civil war.

"I was thinking of Blade Runner and Alien and all those movies when I wrote it, and it wasn't until Marcus Pilot Theatre's artistic director, Marcus Romer showed me all the projections that I understand what he was on about, putting it on stage," he says.

Yet Romer is not the first to see theatrical potential in Burgess's books. Junk, Burgess's 1997 story of teenage heroin addiction, was turned into a stage play by Oxford Stage Company, whose 1999 tour visited the Theatre Royal.

"When someone says they want to do something with your stuff on stage, it's pleasing, and even if it might be bad, I'm still happy for it to be in the theatre," he says.

Be assured, Junk was anything but junk, and Pilot Theatre, resident company at the Theatre Royal, has accrued a national reputation for its educational theatre for young audiences.

Burgess, however, does not write his books with an eye to adaptations. "I want to be truthful to the page," he says. "I'm not looking over my shoulder constantly to do adaptations, though I'm always open to integrating other media, such as the Alien movies and Blade Runner, and the Judge Dredd stories, 2000AD."

"Books for kids are a bit up their arse, and so I want to bring other things in, to make books more, not less. So that's why I'm looking to bring in other influences."

Indeed he wishes there could be more symbiosis between film and literature. "I did the book adaptation from the Billy Elliot film and it made me realise how much traffic there is from books to films," says Burgess, who would like that traffic to be more of a two-way street.

"I have a real thing about taking black-and-white films and doing novels from them. I would love to do The Night Of The Hunter and Eyes Without A Face, do something inspired by them, a homage to them or a modernisation, but to do a novel version of a classy Hitchcock film is just not done.

"Yet I don't see why films and computer games can't be influences on books. It's not copying, it's bringing in influences, and I'm very keen on cross-fertilisation. It's great to have an Icelandic myth, computer graphics and my story on stage in Pilot's production."

Why is the book world at large not so keen to draw on film culture? "Because books are up their...". Burgess is back on that track again.

He is not averse to controversy. While Junk won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Carnegie Medal, former Children's Laureate Anne Fine lambasted his latest book, Doing It - the one with a condom on the cover - for being grubby and demeaning to young women and young men alike.

Lady: My Life As A Bitch, meanwhile, was the story of a teenage girl on the eve of her GCSEs who drinks, smokes, has casual sex, takes drugs and then turns into a dog. To Burgess, this book was a "comic allegory about sex and life and all the really important things some people don't want teenagers to read about".

"With books, unfortunately you have books for children and books for adults, and teenage fiction has had to grow out of children's publishing, but although the youth market in TV, films and computers is the biggest market of all, it's not really there for books. Most books being written for teenagers were a joke, which is ridiculous when you think what they have access to," he says, going on to mock the 9pm television watershed.

Burgess would deny he has been opportunistic or cynical in spotting a gap in the publishing market. Instead, he argues that the gap needed filling.

"I started writing children's books, and even then I was told they were for 12 and 13 year olds and they were marketed for teens as it let the publishers off the hook because they considered the books to be edgy.

"Junk went down very well, which proved the point, and while I've had fun spotting a gap, I genuinely felt no one had written an authentic, entertaining honest story about drugs for younger people," he says.

"Bloodtide came about because I felt the type of movies that these people liked watching had themes of life and death, love, and violence, and they were all aimed at leading you to a particular conclusion that violence was a bad thing. I felt the young audience was more sophisticated than that and could 'contextualise' the story into their own situation. They know their fiction."

He finds a place, a context, for tragedy in young people's books that takes life forward from Disney's world of happy ever afters. "Tragedy went out of fashion even earlier than Victorian times, yet the Bible has some great tragic, dark stories," Burgess says. "What happened is that books were marketed through institutions and people tend to like happy endings.

"Tragedy comes from watching good things being trashed but for it to be a tragedy you have to have a sense of good things, and I've always found that thrilling," he says.

At present he is writing his sequel to Bloodtide, Bloodtide 2, the next-generation tale of Volsunga's Saga.

How come a man who turns 50 this year has an instinctive reach into the confused minds of troubled children and teenagers?

"It is the business of novelists to imagine different people, but I suppose the answer is 'I don't know'," he says . "I've got a long memory."

Pilot Theatre Company's production of Bloodtide runs at York Theatre Royal from tomorrow until February 21, then on tour. Box office: 01904 623568.

Melvin Burgess will sign copies of his novels at York Theatre Royal on Friday from 5.45pm to 7pm.

Updated: 09:21 Wednesday, February 11, 2004