For today’s Rapid Fire author interview I’m delighted to welcome the brilliant Alec Worley to talk about his new Warhammer Crime novel The Wraithbone Phoenix, which is out now from Black Library. If you enjoyed the audio drama Dredge Runners then you’ll be very happy to know that the odd-couple ratling/ogryn duo of Baggit and Clodde are back with a new adventure, but even if not there’s a lot to enjoy with this fun but deceptively dark new crime novel. I’ve read it, and can confirm that it’s brilliant! Read on to find out more about the story, the characters and some of the book’s key themes, along with some of the books, films and other visuals that had an influence on its creation – everything from Elmore Leonard to Wallace and Gromit!
Without further ado then, over to Alec.
ToW: To start things off, how would you describe The Wraithbone Phoenix, and what can readers expect from it?
Alec Worley: It’s an action-packed crime caper about a ratling sniper and an ogryn thug, two ex-Militarum Auxilla troopers turned freelance criminals. They’ve been reduced to hiding out in a naval salvage yard thanks to a crippling bounty placed on their heads. But the pair discover the location of a legendary artefact that might pay off their debts if they can get their hands on it. However, loose lips sink voidships and Baggit and Clodde soon learn that they’re not the only treasure-hunters in the game.
It’s a story for anyone who likes Tarantino movies and Elmore Leonard novels. Expect oddball characters, ultraviolence, shoot-outs, chases, double-crosses, twists of fate, and acts of calamitous idiocy.
It’s totally a caper story. I wanted to diversify a bit. The crime genre isn’t just about noir, after all. It encompasses police procedurals, amateur detectives, mafia sagas, whodunnits, serial killers, and so on. Wouldn’t it be great to see a 40k version of Miss Marple? How would that play out? Maybe a factorum worker trying to figure out a murder in her hab-block? It’s interesting to see how these sub-genres of crime would play out through the lens of grimdark sci-fi.
Wraithbone Phoenix is like a Carl Haaisen or Eddie Bunker book (I wish), in that it focuses entirely on the criminals and how they get by (or don’t). These are characters who operate so far off the grid that law-enforcement agents hardly feature at all!
ToW: Without spoiling anything, what do we need to know about the main characters of the book?
AW: Baggit and Clodde both served in the Militarum Auxilla (the abhuman division of the Guard) where Baggit was a grizzled sniper and Clodde was, well, Clodde. By hook or by crook these goons have wound up as free agents down here in the hive-city of Varangantua, specifically in the gloopy mercantile district known as the Dredge.
Baggit is a money-hungry little shit with a compulsion to steal anything that isn’t nailed down, and has turned his natural talents into a career as a professional thief, while Clodde serves as both muscle and Baggit’s moral compass.
As an ogryn, Clodde is a little… different. He was shot in the head while he was in the Guard (the result of a drunken bet) and still has bits of shrapnel rattling around inside his skull. It’s a brain-injury that has brought him to a permanent state of Zen-like serenity, so he’s often distracted by flights of whimsy and philosophical insight. No one – least of all Clodde – has any idea what he’s talking about. He still enjoys punching people through buildings, though.
ToW: Baggit and Clodde previously appeared in your audio drama Dredge Runners, which was tremendous fun. What is it about these characters that drew you back and inspired you to write a full novel about them and their adventures?
AW: They’re the kind of characters that come along once in a while, who bounce off each other so well that their antics end up dictating the direction of the story to a degree. It’s the kind of archetypal British working-class double-act you see in characters like Del and Rodney in Only Fools and Horses or Arthur Daley and Terry in Minder. I also really like the Wallace and Gromit angle where Gromit (the less intelligent of the two) is actually the brains of the partnership!
Initially, I wanted to put Baggit and Clodde in the kind of ‘Wacky Races’ scenario you see in movies like Smokin’ Aces or Bullet Train, where you have this cast of goofball freelancers and out-and-out maniacs, each with their own agenda and their own special set of skills, all trying to outsmart and outshoot each other as they go after the same thing.
Kinda like a scumbag Olympics or a criminal Cannonball Run!
So we’ve got Baggit and Clodde up against an ace thief, a serial killer, a feral monster, an ageing manhunter, mercenaries, cultists and… something else.
Everyone’s on their own journey and has their own reason to seize the trophy.
ToW: When we chatted about Dredge Runners in a previous interview you mentioned Baggit and Clodde having been taught to hate themselves. That’s something you explore in The Wraithbone Phoenix, but it’s a pretty dark theme – how did you find writing about that?
AW: I always think about prospective themes early on, and here I was trying to think about what this treasure hunt actually means to our focal character. What’s driving Baggit to complete this mission, beyond money? As with Dredge Runners, I thought through what it might actually be like for an abhuman to serve in the Militarum. The pecking order among the troopers, the attitude from the officers and the commissars. Ratlings and ogryns are considered an aberration within the Imperium, but an aberration that’s too useful to exterminate. They’re distrusted, despised, and live within a system that struggles to morally justify their continued existence. How could rage not be the thing that’s motivating Baggit here?
We’ve all been exploited or humiliated or mugged or abused in some way at some point in our lives, made to feel helpless or worthless. And the kind of anger that arises from that, from an incident that you can never go back and fix, can be a real motivating force for social or personal change. But how do you move on from that injustice? Can you move on? What do you do with that anger once you have it?
Ursula K Le Guin wrote an essay in 2014 called About Anger…
“Anger continued on past its usefulness becomes unjust, then dangerous. Nursed for its own sake, valued as an end in itself, it loses its goal. It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness. Corrosive, it feeds off itself, destroying its host in the process.”
This is what Baggit has to deal with. Anger as poison.
ToW: I enjoyed the way that you maintained some of the stylistic choices from Dredge Runners in The Wraithbone Phoenix, from the Imperial voxcasts to the fun back and forth dynamic in Baggit and Clodde’s dialogue. What were the challenges of doing that, and moving from audio to novel format?
AW: I read a LOT of Elmore Leonard! Swag, The Hunted, Mr Majestyk, 52 Pickup, Killshot… I’ve also been reading a lot of Hemingway over the last few years, and it’s clear to see the influence his famously sparse prose style has had on hardboiled thrillers over the last century. (I see it a lot in Dan Abnett’s First and Only and Horus Rising.) Given that this was my first novel – and I was scared as shit at first to write it – I was keen to pare down the prose as much as possible and keep the whole thing lean and fast, and to keep myself from over-thinking and over-describing.
Saying less actually lets the reader see more. It makes them a participant in the story, rather than a passive observer. Show don’t tell, right? Stephen King made the point somewhere that the more you describe, the more you shut out the reader. The more you describe your idea of an Italian restaurant, the more you dispel the reader’s idea of what that restaurant looks like.
Leonard (who was a disciple of Hemingway) tells his stories mainly through dialogue. His books are amazing that way. You can tell what the characters look like and how they think just from listening to the way they talk. So, it’s really not that far away from audio at all.
ToW: What do you think the appeal is of this sort of crime story – more of a caper than a procedural – both to you as a writer and to readers in general?
AW: I love the Swiss-watch plotting of caper movies like Snatch or Lock Stock. It’s like watching someone do a really amazing card trick and you’re just wowed by the magician’s dexterity. But often – certainly with those two movies – they’re completely devoid of character. They’re pure plot. They’re like fireworks that go off spectacularly then fizzle into nothing. But I really wanted readers to remember my characters after spending time with them.
I really wanted to tell, I guess, a working-class story too, away from the officer-classes who have more agency within Varangantua, and look instead at how people might exist and what ‘criminal’ sub-communities might have sprung up and thrived in the gutters of the Dredge. In my experience, working class lives are more communal, less isolated. There’s a sense of shared experience, of life finding a way, maybe, when people are thrown together in shitty circumstances, when the police and government and bureaucracy aren’t to be trusted, and everything outside of where you live is just this faraway, nebulous world that doesn’t know you exist.
Looking at how characters navigate all that, how they circumvent – and make mockery – of authority are what working class heroes like Del Boy are all about. From the Imperium’s point of view, Baggit and Clodde are criminals, but from their perspective, they’re just trying to survive.
They’re soldiers, too, trained killers, which brings yet another perspective to it all. The discipline and comradeship that kept them alive in the field, might not help them survive in the dog-eat-dog world of the Dredge.
ToW: What are the challenges of writing this sort of story, and in particular making sure it still fits tonally with the Warhammer Crime range? Did anything in particular stand out as you were working on this?
AW: A lot of this was fleshing out the Dredge, how it sat in relation to the other districts in the other books. I also had to figure out the various landmarks within the Dredge and the communities that lived there and the kind of slang they used. The district of Urgeyena in Chris Wraight’s Bloodlines felt to me quite stark and Soviet, so I wanted the Dredge to feel more gnarly and Dickensian. But I maintained a glossary and made sure to namecheck bits and pieces from Bloodlines and Guy Haley’s Flesh and Steel, so you get that sense of pieces of a larger world all coming together.
The word ‘Dredge’ makes me think of canals and industrial slag (or maybe I was just watching a lot of Peaky Blinders at the time). Everything’s half-drowned in fetid water, like everything’s sinking and everyone’s in danger of drowning in filth. You’d be lucky to ever see the sun and you get the feeling like you’re constantly looking up through the bars of a drain. I whipped up a Pinterest board (which you can see right here), but there’s an old John Blanche painting (I think it was for Book Two of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery set, Kharé: Cityport of Traps) that became a bit of a touchstone…
This pic captivated me as a kid. I love how it leads your eyes everywhere and there’s these weird little stories going on everywhere you look…
ToW: There are a lot of POV characters in The Wraithbone Phoenix, from Baggit and Clodde to all manner of ne’er-do-wells on the hunt for bounties – what techniques do you have for keeping on top of multiple POVs when you’re writing this sort of story?
AW: I mapped out the plot on a board, as I always do with bigger projects. I have the act-breaks down the left-hand side and the characters across the top. Then it’s just a case of weaving each strand together as you go down, throwing the worst possible situations at them the whole time, and trying to find the best ways for the characters to crash into each other.
I also watch a lot of movies when I’m planning a story, just to get an idea of structure and of possible pitfalls to avoid. For this one, I watched Smokin’ Aces again (reptilian trash, but so much fun), Trespass, Snatch and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (still the greatest treasure hunt movie ever made). I love the darkness of Treasure of Sierra Madre. It feels mythological, and I really wanted to root my story in that kind of elemental monstrousness, that kind of grotesque, gallows humour that 40k is so great at.
I had detailed character biographies, which helped keep track of everyone’s voices. A character’s voice comes out of their individual perspective, so I always feel like I need to settle into that mental cockpit before flying through a scene with them.
I always read out loud, doing the different voices. I must sound like a loon, but your ear will pick out things that your eye will miss. I learned from comics that you can really bring characters to life by tweaking turns of phrase, making speech sound formal or informal. I initially wanted our archeologist – the Madam-Archeor Fortunata Gallo – to sound like Mary Poppins, all prim and perfect, but she came off as sounding like an Inquisitor, which was weird. I went with ‘excited Edwardian schoolgirl’ instead.
Clodde’s voice is like that of Danny from Withnail & I. He’s completely blitzed and uses this weird mix of high and low English. For Baggit I carried on with the sturdy northern accent that actor Jon Rand used for the audio, which was terrific.
ToW: Could you give us an overview of your general writing process?
AW: This was a weird one, actually. We were bang in the middle of Covid. All my usual markets had shut up shop within the space of a week and I wasn’t quite sure where my money was going to come from next. It was pretty scary. Very fortunately, I had just enough to get me through writing this for several months, and it was a really happy experience, despite how much I was bricking it from the outset.
I work to fairly accurate metrics for various projects, having gathered a lot of work-data over the years. So I know roughly how long it’ll take me to complete a comic book or an audio script, etc. Then it’s just a case of making sure I fill six hours a day with writing. I did a fairly tight first draft. I’ve moved away from writing a ‘vomit pass’. If I’m racing through the story and not engaging with the scene then I’ve got nothing to edit at the end of it all. I just have to write it all again. I’d much rather figure out a tight synopsis, that everyone agrees on, and work from that. People say that it takes all the spontaneity out of writing, but that’s never been the case for me. I don’t know what the characters are going to do until I’ve actually put them in the scene and started writing. There were several instances here where the characters took an unplanned route to the end of the scene. Clodde had a complete meltdown at one point, which was totally unexpected!
ToW: Do you have any plans for more Baggit and Clodde stories? Where do you see these characters going?
AW: Next stop for Baggit and Clodde is an episode in the forthcoming Warhammer Crime portmanteau The Vorbis Conspiracy.
ToW: Lastly, if you lived in the Dredge, what do you think you would end up doing?
AW: Having no discernible skills, I would probably be a gong farmer. Either that or a cult leader that everyone ignores.
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Alec Worley is a well-known comics and science fiction and fantasy author with numerous publications to his name. He is an avid fan of Warhammer 40,000 and is the writer of the short stories Stormseeker, Whispers and Repentia, as well as the Warhammer Crime audio drama Dredge Runners. He has also forayed into Warhammer Horror with the audio drama Perdition’s Flame and his novella The Nothings, which featured in the anthology Maledictions. He lives and works in London.
Check out these links for more about Alec and The Wraithbone Phoenix:
- Alec’s personal Baggit and Clodde playlist on Spotify
- Follow Alec on Instagram
- Sign up for Alec’s free Substack newsletter ‘Agent of Weird’
- Check out what else Alec has been up to over on www.alecworley.com
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As ever, big thanks to Alec for agreeing to this interview, and for contributing these fantastic answers! Hopefully this has fired you up to read The Wraithbone Phoenix – I’ve read it, and it’s really good! Check out my review of The Wraithbone Phoenix AND all the other Alec Worley-related reviews and interviews on Track of Words.
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