Politics and fantasy: can you tell the difference?

by TCW | Jul 8, 2022 | Writing life

I’m not a big one for preparing my Friday blog posts ages in advance. I generally prefer to see what I can think of to write on the day or (as now) the day before.

This week I really wasn’t sure what to talk about. There seemed to be quite a lot going on in the world and posting pretty pictures from a weekend away didn’t seem appropriate. (Not that we’ve had a weekend away as my beloved and I have both been hit with covid.) But anything based on what was going on in the wider world seemed likely to be overtaken by events before Friday. Now our Prime Minister has announced that he is (more or less) on his way out and I feel safe making the odd comment about writing about politics.

There is actually a lot of politics in many of my books but, because they are mostly set a long time ago, I don’t have to worry too much about how things might change from day to day. When Karl Marx pops up in Back Home, I know that he will be around for a while. (I loved working Marx into my plot. The idea that he and his friends used to meet for drinks and political chat in Soho in 1859 – when the book is set – always fascinated me.)

Can’t swear this is the right pub but it’s certainly close

I have written a couple of contemporary stories but they are fantasies featuring deals with the devil and vampires who dance tango. No particular problems with politics there.

But then I had to spoil it all by writing Eat the Poor. In Something Wicked, I introduced the detective odd-couple Galbraith and Pole. Galbraith is a traditional old-school Metropolitan Police detective and Pole is a vampire. The relationship seemed to work, both in terms of their forming a credible double act and allowing room for my sense of humour to tease both of them. People seemed to like them and suggested I write more. I decided not to do vampires again (Pole is enough vampire all by himself) so, after some thought, I came up with a werewolf. But if vampires dance tango (they really do) and spend a lot of time in self-improvement, what do werewolves do? Where would you come across them?

I ended up by having my werewolf hold down a day-job as an MP.

Maybe a good place to look for werewolves

Urban Fantasy (which is what fans call this genre) relies on having a realistic contemporary background, so my MP is an ambitious Conservative, anxious to get on in government. And that meant I had to write against the clock. The story would look a bit silly if it came out just as the Conservatives left government. And it rather relied on the party not noticing that they had a werewolf on the backbenches.

I’ve had a complaint that the whole thing is just an attack on the Conservatives, which it clearly isn’t. It’s a very tongue-in-cheek story about tracking down a mythical creature. But it works so much better with a particular approach to government in power at Number Ten. And now it looks as if that approach will be around for a few months yet.

Even once this government is gone, though, it has left a significant gift for Eat The Poor and any books like it. The idea that the House of Commons might be the site of a standoff between supernatural forces of Good and Evil once seemed to stretch the bounds of credibility. After what we’ve seen over the past week, though, nothing in my book seems impossible after all.

NEXT WEEK

Next week is the anniversary of the massacre of women and children at Cawnpore in 1857, so I’ll be writing about that. Plus, for that one day only, my book about 1857, Cawnpore, will be available FREE.

Eat the Poor

by TCW | May 13, 2022 | Uncategorized

Writers do pay a lot of attention to what readers say about their books. And what readers said about ‘Something Wicked‘, my police procedural with tango-dancing vampires, was that they wanted more. So I have taken a break from my historical fiction series about James Burke to produce another Urban Fantasy featuring old-school detective Chief Inspector Galbraith and Chief Inspector Pole, a vampire from the mysterious Section S.

A quick reminder of what ‘Something Wicked’ was about

The latest Galbraith & Pole adventure, ‘Eat the Poor’ sees our detective duo hunting down a werewolf that is killing on the streets of London. For Pole, as ever, the most important thing is to put a stop to the beast’s predations before people realise that it even is a werewolf. Once they begin to realise that werewolves are real, it’s only a matter of time before they begin wondering about vampires, and Pole has spent hundreds of years making sure people don’t think about vampires.

Galbraith doesn’t want people thinking about vampires either. Nor is he happy about the growing body-count in his city. Like Pole, he wants the crimes solved and the werewolf captured.

What neither of them know is that in his human form, the werewolf sits in Parliament.

When I started writing, the idea that you might have a werewolf in the Palace of Westminster seemed ridiculous, but I was happy to go for it in a tongue-in-cheek fantasy. Over the past few months, though, an MP turning into a wolf on the full moon is hardly worthy of note compared to some of the things that have been going on. And a werewolf is, arguably, far from the most evil creature stalking the corridors of power. So my story may now have slightly more of a satirical edge than it did when I started.

Satirical or not, the story is mostly about having fun with the history of werewolves (I had to bone up on my 16th century French to read one early account), and following the growing relationship between my two heroes. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

‘Eat the Poor’ is published next week at £3.99 on Kindle and £6.99 in paperback. You can pre-order it now at mybook.to/EatThePoor.