Meet the parallel Swindon - where the County Ground is a croquet club and airships abound. And it is all a figment of Jasper Fforde's imagination as DOMINIC PONSFORD reports.

JASPER FFORDE is an internationally best-selling fantasy novelist - his books have been compared to the likes of JK Rowling, Philip Pullman and Douglas Adams.

And they are all set in Swindon.

Fforde's books track the fortunes of a literary detective called Thursday Next who lives in a parallel universe version of Swindon set in the mid-1980s.

It is a world where the Crimean War never ended and where Wales is a socialist republic.

Cheese is subject to an 83 per cent tax and most long-distance travel is by airship.

In Fforde's first novel - The Eyre Affair - Thursday Next is charged with chasing down criminal mastermind Acheron Hades who has kidnapped Jane Eyre from the novel of the same name.

For such an outlandish story the location is curiously ordinary.

So, why Swindon?

Before becoming a full-time writer Jasper Fforde was a film cameraman working on adverts and films including Entrapment, the Mask of Zorro and Goldeneye.

In 1982 he was working as a runner on Champions, about jockey Bob Champion, and stayed in Swindon for three weeks while filming took place on Lambourne Downs.

He said: "I had always wanted to write a story in a place where no-one else had set a story.

"I didn't think many people would write a story that was set in Swindon that was the appeal.

"In the early 1980s Swindon was a lot worse and that was part of it.

"Now I've come back and Swindon is no better or worse than many British provincial towns there isn't that shabbiness that first appealed to me.

"From memory, there were a lot more closed shops back then and it did seem a lot shabbier.

"There were a lot of car parks and dead spaces and that's what I remember.

"I thought I'd take a little town like Swindon where no-one usually goes. It is a place where absolutely anything can happen."

Fforde, 41, was born in London and went to school in Devon.

He lived near Malborough for most of the 1990s and is now based in Brecon.

It took 10 years of writing, and six novels, before he was taken on by publisher Hodder and Stoughton.

He said: "People just rejected the whole concept.

"A literary detective who is trying to stop a master criminal kidnapping people from fiction they said this is just too odd.

"In the back of my mind I thought that one day I would be picked up.

"I was really doing it because I enjoyed it even if I'd written 15 books and none of them were published it would have been an achievement."

So far his two books have sold 250,000 copies in Britain and the United States.

The third is due out this summer and the fourth Thursday Next novel, as yet unwritten, is to be called A Town Like Swindon.

It will be set entirely in Swindon and will come to a conclusion next to the Magic Roundabout at the town's fictional croquet stadium.

The books are peppered with local references to a town, which is at the same time similar and very different to the one we live in.

Fforde said: "I wanted somebody who lived in Swindon to recognise it as a Swindon but not necessarily their Swindon.

"Every now and then I put in local road names, there's an airship field where the current Honda factory is, I refer to people driving through the Stratton bypass and talk about the Old Town and things like that.

"There's enough in there for people to recognise it has a form of Swindon. It would be nice if Thursday Next became to Swindon what Morse is to Oxford."

If the Thursday Next novels sound bizarre, Fforde's other as yet unpublished books are even more surreal.

He has written two whodunit-style stories set in Reading which he describes as "police procedural but with nursery rhyme characters".

Another book is set in Chippenham and is about a sofa possessed by an evil demon.

For those concerned that Jasper Fforde is, to put it politely, taking the mickey out of Swindon he maintains that this is not the case.

Though he confessed to being slightly concerned when he was approached by a group of Swindonians at an event he was recently attending in London. "They said, 'We don't like people making jokes about Swindon'.

"But that they had read the book and realised I had been to Swindon and I knew Swindon."

He added: "I have a great fondness for it in strange sort of way."

Jasper Fforde is appearing at the Arts Centre, on Devizes Road, at 8.45pm on Wednesday, May 7, as part of the 2003 Swindon Festival of Literature.

To book a ticket call (01793) 614837.

www.jasperfforde.com