Faced with spending an hour on the telephone with Peter Ackroyd, I brace myself. For one, Ackroyd is a legendary binge-drinker. Profiles ritually chart his transformation during the course of a lunch from uncooperative taciturnity to outrageousness as the bar tab rises.
I'm stuck with him sober - which means his answers are near-monosyllabic. Ackroyd claims he never reflects on himself and has no memories of his childhood or opinions about anything. To cap it all, he is a flamboyant fibber who once told a credulous reporter that he spends #100 (HK$1,100) a week on trips to the circus.
There is no point prodding him about growing up impoverished and fatherless, Catholic and gay - a background from which other authors can extract a slew of autobiographical novels, if not memoirs. None of these themes has ever interested Ackroyd or fed into his fiction.
Instead, he distinguished himself as a writer of literary historical adventure novels in the early 1980s, before the genre became fashionable. That made him a black sheep in literary London - not that Ackroyd, a workaholic who lives in happy isolation, ever complains.
He has earned more acclaim as a biographer, publishing works on Thomas More, Ezra Pound, Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Eliot, and netting eye-popping advances. Last year he was paid #3 million to write, in 12 years, a six-volume history of England.
Ackroyd will have you believe he already has forgotten his new novel, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. 'As soon as I've started work on another book, then the previous one evaporates,' he says in his plummy, lisping voice. 'I can never remember what happened.'
Ackroyd relocates the events of Mary Shelley's classic novel from 19th-century Oxford to London as Dr Frankenstein recruits grave-robbers to supply corpses for his experiments. Ackroyd had no high-minded rationale for retelling Shelley's tale, but 'just fit her plot in an entirely different context and used it for the hell of it'. The idea germinated when he re-read Frankenstein for a BBC television series on the Romantic period he was presenting.