Welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where today I’m welcoming the brilliant Robert Rath to the site to discuss the inspiration for his upcoming Black Library novel Assassinorum: Kingmaker. I’ve been a big fan of Rob’s writing since reading his debut BL short story, The Garden of Mortal Delights, and like a lot of people I was blown away by his novel The Infinite and the Divine! All three of his Assassinorum short stories have been fantastic, so I can’t wait to read Kingmaker and see more of the assassins in action. In this article Rob talks first about his early introduction to Imperial Assassins and then the spy novels that have particularly influenced Kingmaker, so read on and let’s start the hype building for the novel when it’s released sometime in 2022!
Over to Rob…
The Officio Assassinorum, strangely enough, always feels like Christmas to me.
On Boxing Day 1997, I walked into a nondescript model shop with a gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket. After staring at the shelves for forty minutes, listening to Christmas carols and deciding the best way to spend this block of captive currency, my finger ran across a blister pack of a guy with a visor and an enormous rifle.
I walked out with Vindicare, a Callidus, and a copy of Codex: Assassins. The last of which, I discovered years later, had probably been stripped from a White Dwarf and sold independently against Games Workshop’s directives. Even so, I still consider that codex the best $5 I’ve ever spent.
I got them knowing only that they looked cool. What I didn’t know is that I’d embarked on a minor obsession. By that night, I’d read the codex cover-to-cover at least twice.
Imperial Assassins merged two things I’d loved since childhood: espionage and monster movies.
The Officio Assassinorum, in my teenage mind, was what you’d get if you took the Universal Monsters and gave them James Bond’s license to kill. For years I’d use them without fail in every game of 40k, and passed time in more than a few math classes staring at the wall, wondering about the various functions of an Exitus Rifle. They were, and remain, my favorite single faction in Warhammer 40,000.
So when Black Library approached me to write an Assassin short for the 2019 Advent Calendar, it seemed somehow right. Of course I’d write an Assassin story for Christmas – because to me, they always had a whiff of fir trees and tinsel to them anyway.
The resulting short story, Assassinorum: Divine Sanction pitted the wily Callidus Assassin Sycorax against a heretic confessor and his retinue of penitent engines.
After that came Assassinorum: Iron Sight, in which Vindicare operative Absolom Raithe engages a Jackal Alphus in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse across a wasted landscape.
In 2020, Sycorax returned to the Advent Calendar in Assassinorum: Live Wire, infiltrating a snowbound arctic research station in order to kill a heretek magos and destroy his work.
Next year, Sycorax and Raithe will join forces in the novel Assassinorum: Kingmaker, as they try to infiltrate an Imperial Knight world on the brink of seceding from the Imperium.
There’s a very limited amount I can say about Kingmaker, but I can talk about some of the novels that influenced it. Books don’t come out of nowhere, after all, particularly when you’re writing in such a well-worn genre as espionage. And there were a few touchstone works I came back to again and again as I wrote both the short stories and Kingmaker.
The Day of the Jackal – Frederick Forsyth
The book that started the modern ‘realistic thriller’ genre, The Day of the Jackal opens with a historical event – the attempted assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle by a faction of rightwing paramilitaries. After that, it departs from reality, but retains the same tense journalistic voice.
The novel follows two men: first, the Jackal, a professional assassin hired by the paramilitaries to kill de Gaulle where their own team failed, and second, Claude Lebel, a deputy police commissioner trying to foil the assassin.
Forsyth’s days as a journalist pay huge dividends here. Most of the novel consists of the Jackal’s preparations, and we get detailed scenes about the intricacies of false passports, disguises, and evasion techniques. Lebel’s policework, by contrast, often involves complicated telephone messages and the logistics of running a countrywide manhunt. Yet the technical detail never becomes dull – every word of it remains tense and fascinating.
But the greatest thing about the book is the Jackal himself. Amoral, charming, intelligent, and utterly ruthless, I genuinely consider him one of the most chilling villains in literature – and he was one of the main inspirations for Absolom Raithe.
The Guns of Navarone – Alistair MacLean
Alistair MacLean is one of those writers who were huge bestsellers in their time, but gradually disappeared from public consciousness after their deaths. While people often recognize the Guns of Navarone from the 1961 film version, the 1957 novel kickstarted the ‘mismatched soldiers on a mission’ commando genre that would later be copied by later films like The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes and Von Ryan’s Express.
While the novel seems a little quaint and uncomplicated today, it’s still exciting as ever and the setup is pure adventure stuff. In it, a battery of heavily armored guns on a Greek island are keeping Royal Navy ships bottled up and unable to evacuate. Desperate, the Allies dispatch a multinational team of soldiers and resistance fighters who must infiltrate the island, climb a sheer cliff, cross rugged terrain and evade German patrols in order to sabotage the guns.
But while the sense of peril is great, what’s really fun is seeing soldiers of different nationalities, specialties, and ethical codes bounce off each other and fall into conflict. It’s a dynamic practically every ‘team must do a thing’ story has pulled from since, whether Guardians of the Galaxy or Gaunt’s Ghosts (it’s called The Guns of Tanith for a reason).
I’m not above that kind of joke myself, either. The heretek magos’ “Ice Station Zeta” in Assassinorum: Live Wire is a tribute to MacLean’s 1963 novel Ice Station Zebra.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – John Le Carré
While Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is his most famous work, Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is in some ways the thesis statement of the George Smiley series.
Like everyone who’s written a spy novel since Ian Fleming, Le Carré’s work started as a reaction against James Bond. Thinking Fleming got everything wrong, Le Carré’s world of espionage is decidedly unglamorous, often ugly, and never romantic. George Smiley is a short, poorly-dressed, bespectacled man often compared to a toad. He’s also brilliant, as much as that gets him.
What Le Carré captured in Spy, however, was the essentially amoral and nihilistic world in which spies operate. In it, a British agent is sent to East Germany with orders to pretend to defect, and during his debriefing, plant the idea that a powerful East German intelligence officer is actually a double agent for the British. The hope is that the East Germans will buy it, and remove or execute one of their most capable officials.
To say more would be almost criminal, but with a building sense of dread Le Carré raises the idea that British Intelligence – and western intelligence in general – cares little about what it must do or who it hurts provided the mission is a success. The ideals of democracy, rights of the individual, and even bonds of friendship are cast aside, with its own people used and sacrificed like pawns. In the end, British and Soviet intelligence seem to not so much be waging a moral or ideological war, as they are two sociopathic organizations struggling for an abstract victory that forever eludes them.
And honestly, I can’t think of a better model than that when I imagine the Assassinorum.
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Robert Rath is a freelance writer from Honolulu who is currently based in Hong Kong. He is the author of the Black Library novel The Infinite and the Divine, and its companion short story War in the Museum. His other short stories include The Freelancer, The Garden of Mortal Delights and the Assassinorum tales Divine Sanction, Live Wire and Iron Sight.
You can find Rob on Twitter.
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Big thanks to Rob for writing such an interesting, engaging article! I don’t know about you, but I’m incredibly tempted to read all three of those novels in preparation for Kingmaker coming out – they’re definitely going on the TBR list. I don’t know when Kingmaker is due out as it hasn’t had a confirmed release date from Black Library, but I certainly hope it won’t be too long!
See also: all of the Robert Rath-related interviews and reviews on Track of Words.
If you haven’t already read Rob’s Assassinorum short stories, check out the links below to buy* them and start getting to know Sycorax and Absolom Raithe!
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
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