Joanne Harris discusses English public schools and her latest novel

What is it about schools and socks? As a teacher at Leeds Grammar School, Joanne Harris found that boys rarely wore the uniform socks, sporting instead the kind with cartoon characters. But it wasn't these minor acts of transgression which irked her, rather the sticklers who "wasted hours every day" checking hosiery. The afternoon we meet she is laughing about the warning her 12-year-old daughter has just received — label her school gym socks or else...

Unlikely as it seems, regulation socks — or the lack of them — also find their way into Harris' new novel, Gentlemen & Players (Doubleday, $36.95). Anyone expecting the sugary aroma of her mega-sellers Chocolat and Coastliners should prepare for the reek of boiled cabbage. Harris, best known for her particular view of France, has turned her attention to that quintessentially English institution, the minor public school.

The action takes place in St Oswald's. With its mellow stone, tower and cricket pitches, it's a locale visited already by Harris in her short stories. "There was going to be a St Oswald's book at one point or another," she explains, sitting in her book-lined study in Yorkshire.

It takes Harris between 18 months and seven years to produce a novel. "My publishers have very cleverly maintained this illusion that I write a book a year," she says. "The truth is that they bring out a book a year, which is slightly different."

Harris juggles several manuscripts at a time, writing and revising in parallel.

Gentlemen & Players has been gestating for some time. Harris couldn't tackle the subject of teaching until she had quit the profession. That happened five years ago. "I have never been entirely comfortable writing about what is under my nose, which is possibly one of the reasons I wrote about France."

Since Chocolat was unwrapped in 1999, Harris' sales have been formidable — more than four million books in Britain alone. She is translated into more than 30 languages and is hugely popular in Italy, Spain and Croatia. Sales in France, however, are slower. This isn't entirely surprising. Hers is an emotional rather than realistic portrayal: France filtered through memories of happy childhood summers spent with her Breton family off the Vendee coast. "I wouldn't be able to set a story in a place I disliked," she says. "To me the whole business of writing a story is to open up a doorway to somewhere I want to be."

It has led to accusations of a cosily sentimental vision: "Some people have been terribly offended that I have dared to write about certain aspects of France while missing others out, as if I had a responsibility somehow to show a clear and unbiased vista. I don't do unbiased," says Harris crisply. She knows about the France of nuclear plants and McDonald's franchises but, as she says, "That's the great thing about being a writer — you can choose and pick what you want."

Harris' French novels are rural, celebratory, affectionate, often with a fairy-tale element. But if they share Jacques Tati's archetypal Gallic charm, Gentlemen & Players conforms to the world of Ealing comedy. A dark light read — excuse the oxymoron — it's fun with a neat twist.

Harris doesn't have time for anyone who feels that "just reading a book for fun is somehow trivial". In fact, she looks as if she's itching to hand out a C minus. It's an attitude she comes across frequently in America where book groups seem especially eager to be told what to think. A man stood up in one of her lectures and asked what he was supposed to come away with from her novels. "I said: 'Sir, I'm not here to tell you what you're supposed to come away with. You don't go into a restaurant, order a steak and then go into the kitchen and ask the chef what it was supposed to taste like!"'

Combining elements of both Gothic novel and murder mystery, Gentlemen & Players spins on a dual narrative. Roy Straitley is an elderly, pedantic Latin master who still wears a gown. Snyde is the interloper who plans to destroy the bastion of tradition.

Harris loved teaching and wanted to write "something that was not entirely serious, but would fit my feelings of slight nostalgia while encompassing the terrific humour you get in a school situation".

She had noted several newspaper stories regarding impostors in academia but points out that the book isn't based on fact. In her years of teaching she came across her fair share of peculiar incidents, and thriller writers have spotted the horrible possibilities offered by the happiest days of our lives. "A school is a wonderful setting for a story of revenge and intrigue. It's a very energetic community because it's full of young people, and young people have tremendous untapped potential for good and evil."

Gentlemen & Players harks back to events from 15 years earlier, when the miserable Snyde becomes friends with charismatic, manipulative Leon. "Leon is a loathsome little boy," says Harris. "He's very recognisable. No proper role model or guidance, and far too smart for his own good. It's always the poor patsy next in line who gets into trouble."

Then there's the unfortunate Knight, a lazy, spoilt ninny, whose parents see money as a substitute for attention. Doesn't Harris feel sorry for him? "No I don't," she says briskly. "Knight is a nasty piece of work. He definitely had to go."

Harris doesn't view Gentlemen & Players as a shift in her writing. Her first two published novels were set in England and all her works have aspects in common. Plots hinge on a secret and the action takes place within a small community — a village, a convent, an island. Clattering corridors and chalk-dust can be as evocative as any French village square, and school presents another microcosm. "In all my books you get somebody in conflict with a group or an institution. What I like exploring is this perpetual dynamic between individuals in a community under pressure."

Harris once described herself as walking the line between two worlds. Her mother didn't speak English when she married, so Harris spoke only French until she went to school. The bilingual Harris was tackling Proust by the age of 12. "My French teacher laboured under the misapprehension that if she ignored me, I wouldn't cause any trouble. This was quite wrong. I caused as much trouble as I possibly could because I was thoroughly bored. I veered from shouting out the answers to making lists of all the pronunciation and spelling mistakes she made during the lesson. I was a terrible child," she says, laughing.

When I remark how my friends and relatives who became teachers were the most rebellious schoolchildren, she nods. "It helps to know the enemy. It gives a fundamental understanding of why pupils misbehave, which is one of the shortcuts to stopping them doing it."

- INDEPENDENT