Hello and welcome to this Track of Words author interview, where today I’m thrilled to welcome Peter McLean back to the site to talk about his brilliant fantasy series The War for the Rose Throne. The fourth and final book in the series – Priest of Crowns – is now out, and it brings the series to a brilliant conclusion, so I thought it was a good moment to chat to Peter and look back at the series now that it’s finished. We talked a little bit about what readers can expect from this final book, but the main focus of the interview is on the series as a whole, from planning and writing to characters and themes. There’s nothing particularly spoilery here, so whether you’ve been following the War for the Rose Throne from the beginning or you’re just about to take the plunge, check this out for a fascinating insight into one of the absolute best fantasy series of recent times!
Without further ado then, let’s get straight to the interview.
Track of Words: Congratulations on the publication of Priest of Crowns and the completion of the War for the Rose Throne series! To kick things off, what can readers expect from Priest of Crowns, the final book in the series?
Peter McLean: Thank you! As to what you can expect, well, endings mostly. Consequences. This is as you say the last book, and it’s all about the consequences of everything that has come before and everything that happens in the first 80% of this book. It’s all been building to a specific point, and now we’re finally there.
One of my bugbears in older genre fiction is those books where characters go on an epic quest, or fight in a huge battle and kill hundreds of people or whatever, and then go home for tea like nothing happened. Thankfully there’s less of that about these days, and I most certainly don’t do that. Actions have consequences. Violence has consequences, always. Tolkien knew that, Martin knows that, but there was definitely a period in between where it got kind of forgotten. I think that does a disservice to everyone who has been through traumatic events, and I was determined not to make that mistake. My characters are fundamentally broken from the start, from the war you don’t even see that happened before you meet them in Priest of Bones, but by the end of the series? Yeah. Consequences, as I say.
ToW: Looking back now that the series is completed, how do you feel? What are your overriding emotions about this as a single story?
PM: Not going to lie, I’m proud of it. I think it works. No, actually, I know it works. It’s basically all one long story rather than four separate books, in the style of the great dynastic family sagas. That’s what I was going for, and I think it sticks the landing. Sure it was originally supposed to be a trilogy and grew arms and legs and needed to become the quartet that it now is, but that was organic growth along the journey. I’ve always known where I was going, and in Priest of Crowns I finally got there.
ToW: From what you can remember of your original plan for Tomas’ arc across the whole series, have you stuck pretty close to that, or has it changed from how you originally envisioned it?
PM: Tomas’ arc is absolutely unchanged from my original plan. I’ve always known where he was going. I’ve said this before, but the archetypical gangster story only ends one of three ways: he gets gunned down, he turns snitch, or he goes into politics. I had written the last scene of Priest of Crowns before I’d completely finished writing Priest of Bones, and that was always how it was going to end. I wasn’t wholly sure how I was going to get there at that point, admittedly, but this thing has always been laser focused on the final ending. That ending is important to me, in a lot of ways.
I think, and I’m being careful of spoilers here, you can’t give a gangster story a completely happy ending. Gangsters are by definition awful people, after all, and Tomas Piety is definitely no saint of the temple. He may not be worse than many of his peers, and considerably better than some of them, but still. There’s really only so much that crime can be shown to pay, I think. A charming conman might be allowed to end the movie on a beach with a cocktail in his hand and a wink to the camera but Tomas is, and let’s not make any bones about this, a cold blooded murderer.
Yes you’ve spent four books rooting for him, but mostly because everyone else is even bloody worse than he is. And let’s not forget you’re reading his memoires here, written after the fact in his own words by his own hand. He may not have been entirely truthful with you about a thing or two along the way, don’t you think?
ToW: As the series has progressed from gangster drama to political thriller, did you find yourself preparing for each book differently, researching different things and so on…or did that all happen naturally?
PM: Like I say I always knew where I was going story-wise, but yeah the research had to change as the story progressed. It’s a thing I do, and the main reason that I write Fantasy not straight historical fiction, that you can be fairly time period fluid in Fantasy. Ellinburg is very much a Tudor setting, largely based on the Old Town of Edinburgh, with the overcrowding and the filth and poverty and everything else. I wanted Dannsburg, or at least the rich part of Dannsburg and the aristocracy, to feel very different. Like a world apart different, so in the posh parts of Dannsburg it’s basically the Regency period.
Technology hasn’t really changed much but manners, dress, architecture, food, all totally different. I wanted to really throw Tomas into that “fish out of water” scenario, and that’s something you can do with Fantasy. So yeah, having spent two years immersed in Tudor history and largely winging it in Priest of Lies I had to learn Regency pretty quick for the last two books. Of course it’s not historically accurate, it’s Fantasy so it doesn’t have to be, but I think I got the rough flavour down about right.
ToW: Tomas is a brilliant protagonist, not least because of the contrast between the different elements of his personality – he’s a total bastard, but also a family man, for example. Across the series as a whole, how did you find balancing his character to make him believably awful but also still relatable? Was that difficult to judge?
PM: A lot of it is in contrasts. Yes he is a total bastard, but then so is pretty much everyone else. Tomas has lines he won’t cross, even as a gangster. Due to his history of childhood abuse he won’t see children hurt, and through his reverence for his late (and largely imagined) mother he is very reluctant to hurt women unless they’re actively trying to kill him at the time. He doesn’t hold with rape, and doesn’t allow it in his crew. He’ll run brothels, but not sleep with a prostitute, and if his men want to he makes damn sure they pay the going rate. He actually respects sex workers, and sees that they’re kept safe while they’re working, albeit working for him.
He is completely a product of his lived experience; from his childhood abuse to the trauma of the war, Tomas is the man that he is. Although as he says in Priest of Gallows, “I haven’t got that bit.” Is he wired wrong in the head, as he thinks, or is that just more self-justification for his actions? Is the cold devil inside him a reason or an excuse?
That’s for the reader to decide. That’s between your and your conscience, because Our Lady only knows Tomas doesn’t have one. Or does he?
I think he actually does, to some extent. He showed it to you in Gallows when he rescued the pit fighters and took Beast in and gave him a job, but then Beast was useful to him. Would Tomas ever, ever admit it? Absolutely not.
ToW: Tomas refers to Bloody Anne multiple times as essentially being his conscience. Would you say there are any other characters who have similar importance, in their own ways?
PM: Oh yeah, absolutely. If Anne is what passes for Tomas’ conscience, then Jochan is his guilt. Tomas has never, ever forgiven himself for what happened to Jochan when they were children. He was only twelve then (almost a man grown, he keeps telling us) but he still thinks he should have stepped up and stopped it before he did. He blames himself completely for what his little brother went through, for all that he too was only a child then. That’s his guilt.
And then there’s Billy the Boy. He doesn’t really understand Billy, because who does, but in Billy he sees redemption. The chance to raise a son of his own better than he was raised, to be the father that his own da wasn’t. Billy is his hopes and dreams for the future.
ToW: As you built up the story throughout the series, exploring other cities and introducing characters like the various Queen’s Men, were you consciously fitting in foreshadowing and working towards an overall goal? How did that affect the planning and writing process?
PM: Oh yeah. I don’t think I had every character locked in from the beginning, but I certainly knew who Iagin was and what he was going to be from the first time you met him in Priest of Lies. The biggest change from the original plan was in Gallows, with the Duchess of Varnburg and young Marcus. She was just supposed to be scenery really, a walk-on part, but she absolutely Was Not Having That. As Lord Vogel himself says, “The woman is a pain in the arse.”
She most definitely is that, but she’s also such a strong, forceful character she had to have her moment in the sun. She gets that at last in Crowns, in a way at least.
ToW: On a similar note, you talked in a previous interview about the character of Mina not having been in your original plan, but ending up with an important role to play. Were there any other important characters over the course of the series who appeared in this manner?
PM: Sabine came in a bit from left field I must admit, just sort of introduced herself and said “I’m here, young man, and I have things to do.” And I love it when a character does that. With hindsight I wish I could have given her more page time really, she could be an absolutely fascinating character. I love the whole “murderous, manipulative grandma” thing. Can’t think why…
Beast was the same. I had the bathhouse scene mapped out, but again the freed slaves were sort of supposed to be window dressing. Just broken men and deserters who had fallen on hard times, but Beast just sort of rocked up with a full backstory and a set of very particular skills and said “I can do that, gizza job?”.
So I did.
ToW: One of the aspects of this series that I really love is the way that you’ve gone easy on the usual fantasy worldbuilding elements like magic and religion – they’re present, but largely in the background. Was that a deliberate choice, to avoid going into too much detail and not try to quantify those sorts of things?
PM: Eh, the religion is there if you look for it. Tomas is possibly the least religious priest you’ll ever meet, but then Our Lady is very light on doctrine and scripture so what does he have to go on? She’s the Death Goddess after all. I’ve seen a few people misinterpret the line from Priest of Bones that says “She was a goddess for soldiers and no mistake” to mean She’s the goddess of soldiers, but She is absolutely not that. Our Lady is the goddess of Death. Soldiers pray to Her to ask Her to spare their lives that day, and that’s it.
That said, Tomas does hold to some of what little of Her scripture there is. On the subject of intimate relations, Her view is “Lie with whom thou wilt, so long as both be willing.” And I stand by that, as does Tomas himself.
As regards magic, yes it was a totally deliberate choice not to explain it. Again, you’re reading Tomas’ memoires and he doesn’t know the first thing about magic, or the cunning. He fears it, he respects it, but he doesn’t understand it or remotely want to. Personally I’m violently allergic to “magic systems” in Fantasy books. To my mind if I know exactly how it works it’s not magic, it’s science. I can read SF for that.
ToW: Corruption, thirst for power and the levers that move people have been key themes throughout, especially as Tomas finds himself increasingly involved in politics in later books. How much of that was down to the nature of this sort of gangster story, and how much a conscious decision to add resonance with what’s happening in the real world?
PM: Oh, now there’s a question! It’s probably a bit of both, to be honest. As I said, the gangster genre can lead to the protagonist going into politics, and obviously if he does he’s going to be corrupt as all hell. Nature of the beast, and all that. But one of the things I was going for (and I’m trying hard not to talk about real world politics here, because that’s a hornet’s nest I don’t want to poke) is that politics of any flavour and organised crime have a hell of a lot more in common than most people would like to admit. Misinformation and propaganda are things I’ve had a lot of fun with in these books, and can you show me a political movement that doesn’t employ those?
ToW: Now that the War for the Rose Throne is finished, is there anything you can tell us about what you’re working on now or next?
PM: Oh, it’s early days yet. I finished Priest of Crowns about a year ago and yes I’ve written another book since then, but it’s very different. Think a supernatural gothic horror love story in the vein of The Sandman. I’m still editing it at the moment and I haven’t even shown it to my agent yet so the gods only know if it’s saleable, but we’ll see. I also have another more mainstream Fantasy novel on the back burner, so one way or another hopefully you haven’t seen the back of me yet.
ToW: Finally, if you were inducted into the Queen’s Men and given a name like Tomas’ Brother Blade or Ailsa’s Sister Deceit, what do you think it would be and why?
PM: I think I would have to be Iagin’s successor as the next Brother Truth. I work in Corporate Cyber InfoSec and am far too old to be stabbing people in alleys, but propaganda? Yeah, I can do that.
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I’d like to thank Peter for taking the time to write such thoughtful, fascinating answers! As always it was a great pleasure putting this interview together. If you haven’t already, make sure you check out my review of Priest of Crowns to go along with this – I loved it, and thought it was a powerful and fitting conclusion to an incredible series.
See also: all of the other reviews and interviews for War for the Rose Throne on Track of Words.
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Peter McLean was born near London in 1972, the son of a bank manager and an English teacher. He went to school in the shadow of Norwich Cathedral where he spent most of his time making up stories.
He has since grown up a bit, if not a lot, and spent 25 years working in corporate IT. He is married to Diane and is still making up stories.
He is the author of the War for the Rose Throne series, beginning with Priest of Bones.
Check out Peter’s website for more information.
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