Welcome to this instalment of Rapid Fire, my ongoing series of quick interviews with authors talking about their new releases. These are short and sweet interviews, with the idea being that each author will answer (more or less) the same questions – by the end of each interview I hope you will have a good idea of what the new book (or audio drama) is about, what inspired it and why you might want to read or listen to it.
In this instalment I spoke to Black Library author Alec Worley about his latest audio drama, Dredge Runners, which is one of the first ever releases under the brand new Warhammer Crime imprint. It’s available to pre-order right now, and promises to be a brilliant introduction to the style and setting of this new brand of Warhammer stories.
Over to Alec for some thoughts on what to expect from Warhammer Crime and this new audio drama in particular…
Track of Words: Dredge Runners is the first Black Library audio drama to be published as a Warhammer Crime story – what does that label mean, for you as an author and for Black Library fans?
Alec Worley: For me, Warhammer Crime (like Warhammer Horror) is about focusing on the small-scale, in this case the corrupt laws by which the Imperium of Man operates. The stories are all about broken thinking, religious fervor, corrupt systems and the greasy operations that keep everything wheezing along. Draw back the veil on all those glorious battles and grand ‘For the Emperor’ speeches and this is the system that drives it all into being.
The vast megalopolis of Varangantua – in which all the stories are set – is like a miniature Imperium (albeit a very, very, very big miniature). It gives you a space to zero in on how the Imperium works and how regular people struggle to survive within it.
Or maybe I’m overthinking. I dunno.
ToW: With that in mind, what can you tell us about Dredge Runners?
AW: Okay, so you have to read this as if you’re doing the voiceover for a 1940s movie trailer like Asphault Jungle. Here’s a video so you can get some practice:
Okay, you ready…?
BAGGIT! He’s the fast-talking ratling sniper with an eye for the big score!
CLODDE! He’s the ogryn, the muscle, the hooligan with a heart of gold and a head full of dreams!
Abhuman soldiers turned THIEVES, surviving in a city where only GUTS will get you through!
When they land in the pocket of a savage crime lord BAGGIT AND CLODDE are sent to spy on the cleanest Sanctioner in town.
Together they uncover a scam that threatens to shake the city to the core!
Now there’s innocent lives at stake, as well as a fortune that could finally buy the boys a ticket out of the gutter!
Baggit and Clodde must think fast and hustle hard, before death points a laspistol in their direction!
ToW: Without spoiling anything, what else do we need to know about Baggit and Clodde?
AW: Baggit and his sidekick Clodde are a pair of ex-Auxilla soldiers turned small-time hustlers. They survive by muscle and wits in the cutthroat commercial district known as the Dredge. It’s here that they’ve finally won their freedom from the Imperium, although that freedom still involves fighting for their lives on a daily basis.
Baggit’s the brains of the operation – or so he thinks – he’s this irresistibly charismatic, fast-talking and eternally cheerful little bastard. His unshakable optimism and self-belief border on lunacy, defying all the Dredge can throw at him.
As an ex-sniper he has a genius for calculating the angles and is always looking for that long-shot money-making scheme that could win an easier life for himself and his best mate. He’s the little guy who dreams big! He’s seen his fair share of horrors in the Guard and nothing in the city seems to scare him.
His pal Clodde survived a gunshot wound to the head. (It was actually Baggit who shot him, but that’s another story…) The bullet’s still lodged in Clodde’s brain, which has altered his thought patterns and left him in a permanent state of Zen-like serenity. When all three of his neurons fire just right, he’s capable of astonishing eloquence and intellectual insight, though he can never quite grasp the meaning of what he’s just said. He still an idiot, but an idiot who’s quietly aware of his own idiocy.
He takes a thoughtful, sensitive approach to life, even when engaged in typical ogryn pursuits such as shooting things, blowing stuff up and punching holes in people. If he could, he’d probably write you a poem about it.
Alec has written two excellent audio dramas for Warhammer Horror as well, including Perdition’s Flame
ToW: It sounds like, unlike Warhammer Horror, the Warhammer Crime titles are all 40k stories and all set in the same city. Can you talk a bit about how you see Varangantua, and what sort of setting it provides?
AW: I worked really closely with Nick [Kyme, Black Library Managing Editor] on this one, and he’d already started compiling a world bible that me and the other authors were adding to as the stories were getting put together. So I had a pretty good idea of everything in terms of commerce, culture, law-enforcement procedures, i.e. all the laws that are going to be broken by criminal activity. But there was still a lot of back and forth in terms of exactly how everything worked.
Varangantua is this continent-sized hive city on an industrial world in Segmentum Tempestus. It’s everything you’d expect from being a product of the Imperium: decaying grandeur, industrial murk, religious mania, everything riddled with moral squalor and corruption. Nice!
Given the religious aspect and this almost dreamlike sense of scale it’s more like Gormenghast than Gotham. More like some surreal Stalinist nightmare than the American-dream-gone-berserk of Mega-City One. I tried to emphasize those differences throughout, so you get a proper feeling that this is a unique setting.
ToW: Crime writing can cover lots of different styles – what sort of crime story would you say this is?
AW: It’s definitely of the criminal-as-protagonist subgenre like Brighton Rock or Elmore Leonard’s Swag. I guess I’m aping the sort of pulpy crime stories that I enjoy. Stuff like Chester Himes or Joe Lansdale: colourful dialogue, big characters, crazy twists of fate and lots of underworld scuzz.
Dredge Runners is about these two guys who aren’t really criminals by choice. They’re really just soldiers thrown into a criminal situation, using their talents to survive.
ToW: How did you go about making sure this felt different to a ‘normal’ 40k story (i.e. ensure it’s a crime story set in the 41st millennium, rather than a 40k story which happened to feature crime)?
AW: The characters have a lot more freedom to maneuver; the plots are driven by characters using their wits rather than their guns. So the action’s less physical, but the characters get to spin the story in all kinds of crazy directions. But – a bit like Warhammer Horror – you get to see up-close what it’s like to actually live in the grimdark. The characters in Crime perhaps have more agency than in Horror, so you get to explore their morality too.
ToW: When you set out to plan and write a 40k-set crime story as an audio drama, what made you choose this particular story?
AW: I actually had Baggit and Clodde pop into my head years ago. I thought I’d use them in some regular 40k stories until Nick proposed we work on the Crime line, for which I thought they’d be a perfect fit.
It sounds corny but it really is all about the characters. The characters will give you the plot. It’s not really up to you. What I mean by that is that in developing these two, I asked questions about where and when they served in the Guard, what that must have done to them. How they feel about themselves as abhumans really flew out at me. They’ve been taught by the Imperium to hate themselves and now they get a chance to be who they want to be. That’s a great drama-engine right there.
ToW: Similarly, why pair up a ratling and an ogryn as your protagonists? Sounds like an interesting combination…
AW: I’m probably showing my age here, but I imagine that’s a Rogue Trader thing. Falling in love models like these in White Dwarf from back in the day…
But I’ve always liked big guy-little guy pairings from things like Asterix. Even things like Wallace and Gromit where the animal is actually the more heroic of the two and the human is kind of a dimwit. In this, I wanted Clodde to be the moral compass. He’s got the clearest vision out of the two, while Baggit’s motives are always clouded by greed and ego.
ToW: Are you a fan of crime fiction in general? Are there any writers or series which you took particular inspiration from for this?
AW: Aside from James Ellroy, I’ve probably got more crime books on my to-read pile than I’ve actually read. I’m a HUGE fan of Stephen Hunter. He’s like the poet laureate of machismo. Books like Dirty White Boys and Point of Impact (which I first read about in the letters page of an issue of Preacher) have had a massive influence on everything I’ve done.
Though I’m probably more influenced by movies than fiction. All the noirs and Tarantino, obviously, but also movies like The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing.
Since this was going to an audio, I really got into vintage radio drama like Gangbusters. Go listen to Vintage Radio Crime Time or Dragnet on Spotify.
I really love the old sponsorship promos they sometimes have on these shows. ‘Dragnet was brought to you today by Marlboro Cigarettes, for that smooth taste.’ – that sort of thing. So we have these religious broadcasts punctuating the story and pushing it along, so the listener feels like they’re part of that world.
ToW: What do you hope 40k fans will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?
AW: Again, sounds corny, but it would be great for 40k fans to feel like they’ve made a couple of new friends.
***
Huge thanks as always to Alec for taking the time to answer these questions, and with such style and humour too! I don’t know about you, but having read this interview and subsequently listened to Dredge Runners I was not disappointed – you can check out my review here.
See also: Chris Wraight Talks Bloodlines for more Warhammer Crime.
Click here if you fancy taking a look at some other Rapid Fire interviews. If you have any questions, comments or other thoughts please do let me know in the comments below, or find me on Twitter.
Paul Putner was brilliant in this, I do hope there’s more in the works
I thought the whole cast was excellent, absolutely. The almost total absence of audios from BL over the last year has been a bit worrying…fingers crossed they’ll return to the format at some point.