12.05
Roderick Gordon writes the Tunnels series of books.
Born in 1960, Roderick grew up in Highgate, North London. Chronically shy throughout his childhood, he sought refuge in drawing and writing, and had his first story published in the school magazine at the age of twelve. He went on to Oundle School, then attended University College, London, where he read biology (specialising in genetics). It was here that he met his future writing partner on Tunnels, Brian Williams, who was at the Slade School of Fine Art. They became close friends in the summer of 1980, and kept in touch until they finally began to cooperate on their writing some two decades later.
After an unsuccessful attempt to transfer to medical school to train as a doctor, Roderick graduated from University College without any idea of what he wanted to do. For several years he wrote music and played in a number of bands, and also toyed with the idea of getting into the films (he was employed briefly by George Harrison’s Handmade Films), but eventually ended up in the City working in corporate finance.
In 2001, after a nine year stretch with an investment bank, Roderick was made redundant, something that he has described as a blessing in disguise. He was now able to meet more regularly with his old university friend, Brian Williams, and in 2003, they decided to start writing together. Their first project was a film screenplay for a crime thriller called “Second Face”, and they both found the process so rewarding they decided they would continue the collaboration and attempt a book for younger readers, a project first suggested by Roderick’s wife, Sophie.
Roderick had always been interested in archaeology and palaeontology. His great-great-grandfather William Buckland is widely recognised as one of the forefathers of geology, and in 1824 gave what is thought to be the first scientific lecture on the jaw bone of a dinosaur called the Megalosaurus, some twenty years before the word dinosaur itself was coined by Richard Owen. Roderick himself was fascinated by ‘what lies beneath’, and when he bought a sixteenth-century country house in Northamptonshire, and found that it was rumoured to have a secret passage beneath it, the germ of the idea for Tunnels was born.
All through late 2003 and the summer of 2004, Roderick and Brian wrote together, finally self-publishing their first novel in 2005 as The Highfield Mole. All the copies quickly sold out, attracting the attention of Barry Cunningham, J.K. Rowling’s original publisher and founder of The Chicken House, a publisher of children’s books. After a period of editing, Barry Cunningham republished The Highfield Mole in July 2007, re-titling it as Tunnels to reflect the fact that it had been changed.
After intense media interest around its launch, Tunnels was published in forty counties, and has achieved sales of more than a million copies worldwide. Shortly after publication, the film rights were purchased by the US production company Relativity Media, and shooting is expected to begin in 2010. A manga of the book has also been released in Japan. Tunnels has been followed by further books in the series, Deeper (2008) and Freefall (2009), and a fourth book, Closer, will be published in May 2010.
Roderick lives in North Norfolk with his wife and two sons, but is known to sneak back to London on a regular basis.
