Yeah, the idea for Timmy came about because when I was thinking about what kind of kids book I could do, I noticed there was whole genre of, you know, kids detective stories. I had certainly read a lot of them when I was younger, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew, and Encyclopedia Brown. And it seemed that they always had this one thing in common which is that the detective, the kid detective is always brilliant and he could solve anything.
Well when I read Encyclopedia Brown even at this age, you know, and the solutions are at the back of the chapter, I get maybe half of them. So I thought, well what if you had a kid who was a detective but he’s not smart? In fact, what if you had a kid who was a detective who was like the least smart person in the room but is simultaneously very arrogant about his skills? That sort of made me laugh. It’s sort of a theory I have about comedy which is the blind spot. Which is how a character perceives himself versus how others perceive him.
The wider the distance between those two things, the funnier the character if that makes sense. So my hero is this character named Ignatius Reilly, from a book called Confederacy of Dunces who thinks he’s this brilliant guy and really he’s just an unemployed slob. So another good example, a more modern example, would be Ricky Gervais’ character in The Office, the British Office. Thinks he’s a rock star, really he’s not. So that’s how I work, and that’s why I made him a detective, and that’s why I made him like he is.