But I imagine he has seldom encountered anyone who put him through it quite like Hank Sullivan. Sullivan was serving life for multiple murder, armed robbery, possession of explosives and much else; his sentence totalled 300 years. TONY PARKER has been asked to explain his remarkable interviewing style many times; he has also no doubt often been asked how well it pays. It’s never anything you can use.” On the other hand, perhaps Morpheus does have a soft spot for his principle chronicler.

“I very often go to bed not knowing what happens on the next page,” says Gaiman, “and wake up in the morning knowing exactly what comes next.”! `The Sandman’ is published by Titan Books at £9.99 `Mr Punch’ is available from Gollancz, price £8.99. It’s like going down into the ocean in a bathysphere and seeing all these weird fish that look like kites or inside-out glowing things. “I wanted to do a story about the strange double vision one has as a child,” he said. “A seven-year-old is always looking in the wrong direction.” Of all his works, it is the one that comes closest to expressing the mental images he started with.So what does Gaiman really think of dreams? “Delightful nonsense. “The world is always ending for someone.” The BBC’s Radio 3 is interested in turning it into a radio play.In Mr Punch, Gaiman’s latest comic, he tells a young boy’s story of family horror intertwined with the metaphor of a seaside Punch and Judy show.

Signal To Noise follows a dying film director as he struggles to script his final work, a movie about the last night of the first millennium. A piece on Caesar Augustus involved poring over primary Roman sources He draws on history, literature, mythology and fable. Calliope is the story of a modern author who imprisons the youngest of the nine Greek muses, raping her rather than wooing her Soft Places opens with Marco Polo lost in a desert. The Song of Orpheus retells the Greek myth of Morpheus’s son, with some added material from Robespierre’s Terror.Professor McConnell believes the best of Gaiman’s work is yet to come Two recent books point the way. One of his heroes is Charles Dickens, the first great serial author.

“Whenever I read him I go: `Cell mate across the ages, I know what you’re doing.’ “Some shadow-truths come straight from Gaiman’s imagination, such as the gruesomely banal convention of serial killers; other elements are backed by thorough research. The only example he gives is from Season of Mists, in which the Sandman plays host to ambassadors from other mythical realms who are vying for the keys to hell after the Devil has abdicated. Two humans in pyjamas make a brief appearance, waiting on tables, then disappear. “I always meant to tell their story one day, but I haven’t.”Despite working in a serial format, he eschews the more obvious tools like cliff-hanging endings “These aren’t soap operas,” he claims. By the time Gaiman gets to that point in one of his stories, chapter three has long since appeared in print.”I have to toss a lot of balls up in the air at the beginning and hope that I’ll be able to catch them all before the end,” he explains Sometimes he misses.