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 Chris Wraight about Bloodlines, his latest novel and the first book to be released under the brand new Warhammer Crime imprint. It’s available to pre-order right now, and should provide a fascinating opportunity to dig into a slightly different angle on Warhammer 40,000 than what we’ve seen before.
Over to Chris for some thoughts on what to expect from Bloodlines, and from Warhammer Crime as a whole…
ToW: Bloodlines is the first Black Library novel to be published as Warhammer Crime – what does that label mean, for you as an author and for Black Library fans?
Chris Wraight: There’s always been room in Black Library novels for different kinds of story, from all-action war fiction to intrigue-filled political drama. Some of my own books, like the Vaults of Terra series, have dabbled with trying out a procedural-style detective slant on the Inquisition. The new line, though, is a chance to concentrate fully on crime stories within the Warhammer 40k universe, making no compromises and having the space to explore the way crime and punishment work in the grim darkness of the far future. I’m hugely excited about it, and hope that both existing Warhammer fans and new readers will enjoy the books.
ToW: With that in mind, what can you tell us about Bloodlines?
CW: Bloodlines is the first full-length novel in the new line. It follows a Probator (the ‘detective’ rank in the planet’s Enforcer organisation) on the trail of a missing heir to a powerful industrial group. As you’d expect, the trail leads to all sorts of dark places, and we discover plenty about the ruthless and secretive underbelly that underpins Varangantua’s high spires.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
CW: The lead character is a man called Agusto Zidarov. He’s married to a senior medicae official called Milija, and they have a daughter called Alessinaxa. He’s a middle-ranking Probator, just at the stage in life when he’s beginning to wonder if the chance to make something of himself has passed him by. He’s not the most honest, but neither is he the most corrupt; not the most acute, but still pretty sharp. He’s definitely an everyman, rather than the superhumans I’m accustomed to writing about, someone who could easily end up dead in an alley with few questions asked. If he has any heroic aspect, it’s probably the fact that he keeps on turning up to work everyday, with his meagre stipend and a flak jacket. It’s largely due to people like him that the city functions at all, though they get little thanks for it and take on plenty of danger.
ToW: Unlike Warhammer Horror, the Warhammer Crime titles are all 40k stories and all set in the same city. Can you talk a bit about Varangantua, and what sort of setting it provides?
CW: Yes, the idea is that all the books will be set within this one city. The place has been fleshed out in tremendous detail, with things like currency, religion, culture, etc, fully realised. The various stories under the Warhammer Crime label will no doubt vary enormously, but the background to them all will remain constant, giving all sorts of opportunities to make linkages and bounce ideas around. In case that sounds limiting, it’s worth adding that Varangantua is absolutely gigantic – it covers different climatic zones, and is home to billions of citizens. Aside from a thin veneer of uniformity at the top, there’s all sorts of subcultures and factions, some of which will be recognisably Imperial, some of which aren’t at all.
ToW: Does this link in with any other Black Library stories you’ve previously written, or is it totally standalone (within the context of 40k)?
CW: No, this one has no links to anything written by me, or anyone else. And that’s partly the idea. Varangantua is the capital city of a world that’s far from the big war-zones. Its inhabitants have never seen a Space Marine, and know nothing about the state of the galaxy at large. Xenos are a rumour to them – most remain convinced that they don’t even exist – and virtually none of them will ever get off-world, let alone go on a warp-capable ship. We’re constantly told, in the lore, about the great mass of Imperial worlds that exist for millennia as part of the creaking day-to-day functioning of the Imperium, and this is one of them. The entire place could be destroyed tomorrow, or go on forever, and virtually no one on Terra would ever blink. That’s the beauty of this setting, for me – it’s proper Warhammer, but it’s also something that a reader could get into without knowing much or anything about the ‘top-level’ events in the galaxy at large.
ToW: Crime writing can cover lots of different styles – what sort of crime novel would you say this is?
CW: Bloodlines is a fairly traditional procedural, I’d say, taking its cues from the usual suspects. There’s an element of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy in the broad strokes of the setting, I guess, but not too much – it’s not a parody of the genre, but an attempt to tell contemporary, hard-hitting stories that have a style all of their own.
ToW: When you set out to plan and write a 40k-set crime novel, what made you choose these characters and this particular story?
CW: It was a challenging process, since I didn’t have a shopping list of character types laid out for me. If you’re writing a book like, say, The Lords of Silence, you can go to the Death Guard Codex and find character-types that sound cool to explore. The more things you find, the more a story starts to suggest itself. That’s the beauty of working in such a rich setting. In this case, though, we’d created the entire backdrop to the series ourselves (by ‘we’, I mean series editor Nick Kyme, myself, and a number of other authors with upcoming stories in the line). That gave us huge freedom, and also created its own kind of headaches, mostly over which part of the setting to concentrate on. Should I tell a tale from the perspective of those who break the law, or those who enforce it? At the bottom of the pile, or at the top? Should it be an action-oriented tale, or a cerebral one? I hope the choices I came up with are enjoyed by people – I came to like the characters very much, and would love Bloodlines to be the first of more books with them in.
ToW: You’ve written quite a lot of Inquisition stories set in 40k, which could be described as crime fiction – how does Bloodlines compare in tone and style to those previous stories?
CW: It’s more down-to-earth. An Inquisitor is an extremely powerful person, who knows plenty of the deep dark truths of the Warhammer universe. The protagonists of Bloodlines are nothing of the sort. They’re extremely expendable, overworked, poorly resourced, and range from decent strivers to thoroughly corrupt brutes. They’re not free to pursue their own missions or quests, but take orders and have to fill quotas. On the flip side, they’re also free to be a bit more normal – they have relationships, families, can enjoy a drink, and so on. In short, they’re more human, less extreme.
ToW: What do you hope 40k fans will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?
CW: I hope that they enjoy seeing a different side to 40k. Like I say, we’ve worked very hard to create something new, with a flavour and possibilities all of its own. There’s nothing in the Warhammer Crime books that contradicts the 40k that fans already enjoy, but they do zero in on a small part of it that we never normally see in such detail.
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Many thanks as always to Chris for taking the time to answer these questions, and let us know a bit about what to expect from Bloodlines. I’m certainly looking forward to reading the first ever Warhammer Crime novel! Make sure you check out this interview with Alec Worley about his Warhammer Crime audio drama Dredge Runners as well.
Pre-order Bloodlines – also available as an audiobook.
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.