Fiction based on fiction

British writer Charles Elton. Photo / Supplied

If you look for The Hayseed Chronicles in any shop, you will come away empty-handed.

Links to the Chronicles in an advertisement in the Times in London recently claimed to be placed by the family of the late author Arthur Hayman. But the "cult children's series" does not actually exist. It is a fictional creation that lies at the heart of Mr Toppit, the much-hyped debut novel from television producer Charles Elton.

"Treating the books as if they're real was entirely my publisher's idea, but I loved it because I love literary spoofs," says the 55-year-old Hampstead resident. "I've always loved merchandising. When my kids were small they were dressed head to foot in things like 101 Dalmatians pyjamas."

Elton is used to media attention, having worked as a literary agent specialising in film before moving into television drama. His recent credits include Andrew Davies' 2007 adaptation of Northanger Abbey and the 2000 remake of The Railway Children.

"The only thing I know anything about in life is show business and even as a child, I saw 100 films a year," he recalls. "I'm a terribly sad show business junkie and I have a Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man-like thing for showbiz facts. I could reel off the names of the cameramen on the last 10 Clint Eastwood movies."

Elton took 15 years to complete the novel, which was bought by Penguin for a reported six-figure sum after a fierce bidding war. "I'm not really a writer," he says, almost apologetically.

"I wrote the book because I felt like writing it. I never necessarily thought I'd end up finishing it or that at the end of the process someone would want to publish it."

Even though the vast - and fictional - multimedia empire that builds up around The Hayseed Chronicles brings to mind the phenomenon of Harry Potter, the rise of J.K. Rowling's boy wizard did not influence Elton.

Instead, he took inspiration from the success of earlier children's classics like Winnie the Pooh and The Chronicles of Narnia after working on the estates of their late authors A.A. Milne and C.S. Lewis during his publishing days. "Harry Potter came along while I was writing the book, which was lucky more than anything else," he says.

"What people don't realise is that things that were big in the 1920s and 1930s were huge. They didn't have internet or television but Winnie the Pooh and the Narnia books were big international bestsellers." Mr Toppit centres around Arthur Hayman's son Luke, who lends his name to The Hayseed Chronicles' main protagonist Luke Hayseed, only to have his identity subsumed by his fictional counterpart after the books become famous.

"I'm interested in the weird dysfunctional legacy of people who are used in children's books," says Elton, referring specifically to Milne's son Christopher Robin, who shared his name with Winnie the Pooh's young companion. "I never met him but I heard that it ruined his life." He also drew on his own life, basing Arthur's untimely demise by getting run over on the death of his mother - who was knocked down by a concrete truck. "It was painful at the time but like a lot of things every cloud has a silver lining. When I started writing the book, I just wrote whatever came out of my head and followed up on it later.

In the first section, I mentioned Arthur's strange death but when I first wrote it I didn't know how he died. Then my mother died and I had it. She would have been delighted that I'd used it in a book. But it wasn't like I was using it to exorcise my pain, it was more like a little gift that I'd been given."

Elton is no fan of children's fiction and the extracts from The Hayseed Chronicles that appear throughout the novel are deliberately vague. He also has no interest in expanding them into fully fledged books in their own right but would be happy for another author to take on the task. "Quite a few people have asked that but I don't think I would do them well. I don't want to write children's stories. I wouldn't be very good at it and it would be like going backwards. But maybe like the estates of A.A. Milne and J.M. Barrie with Peter Pan, we could hire someone else to write them.

I'd much prefer that, as long as I had a bit of quality control." He would rather concentrate on his next novel, which will explore similar themes. "I don't think I'm capable of going in a different direction," laughs Elton.

"It's not like I'm writing The Da Vinci Code. The next book is about another dysfunctional family, a dynasty of songwriters, protest singers and political activists. It's about children making sense of their parents' lives and there's death, lesbians and drugs. I'm writing about the same kinds of things all over again but it is different."

* Mr Toppit is reviewed opposite.