Out In Taiwan!

Rivers of London Taiwanese Cover

Czech Covers

The Czech Cover.... I think.

I think it's fair to say that this is the most batshit insane covers so far, good, but totally batshit insane.

A Good Read

Rivers of London is a Good Read!

It must be true because Tom Robinson says so!

Tom Robinson, DJ, poet, writer, broadcaster and, most importantly to me, singer and composer of such anthems as Sing if you're Glad to be Gay and the Winter of 79 has appeared on BBC Radio Four's A Good Read on Tuesday 9th of June. For his book he chose Rivers of London.

You can listen to it on BBC iPlayer here.


Miranda chose The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion while the presenter Harriett Gilbert chose The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst.

Rivers of London Rap

Lyrics and Performed by: Ben Bailey Smith
Director: Matt Bloom
Producer and Composer: Mikis Michaelides
Visual FX: Sam Highfield
Executive Producer: Ben Aaronovitch

At Last The Truth! They Wrote What?

Readers often ask me whether such and such a book was an influence or not. Occasionally people can be quite insistent that obviously such and such a book was obviously an influence and can provide close textual analysis to back up their claim.

For my last blog about the influences on Rivers of London I thought I'd talk about those books that would have been an influence if only I'd read them before I wrote it.

Neverwhere (and Anansi Boys and American Gods)

Neil Gaiman is one of the writers most frequently attributed to me as an influence. Alas I'd caught about ten minutes of the original TV series back in the 1980s but I've never read the book. Like alot of books on this list I read Anansi Boys a while after I'd started writing Rivers of London after someone pointed out, in those fatal words - that's a bit like what your book sounds like innit?

Kraken
I had thought China Mieville had struck out for the more lucrative shores of literary fiction and the good opinion of the broadsheets but he surprised me by producing his own London based mystery - the bastard.

61 Nails

I was about halfway through the first draft of ROL when Mike Shevden came strolling into the Covent Garden branch of Waterstones, where I worked, bold as brass and slapped an ARC of 61 Nails down in front of me. 'Get a load of my new book,' he said. 'It's an urban fantasy set in Covent Garden and draws heavily, and rather brilliantly if I say so myself, on the mythology of London especially stuff you've never heard of because your research mojo is just that pathetic - I pity the poor sod that tries to follow in my footsteps for he shall be subject to much ridicule.'(1)

The Sweet Scent of Blood

I mean you wait ages for an urban fantasy centred around Covent Garden and then two come along at the same time. Suzanne McLeod was another of those reminders that however original you think you are somebody else has already arrived and grabbed all falafel off the buffet table. Although in Suzanne's case she ran off with the kitchen sink as well.

Bryant and May

Fortunately the Bryant and May books didn't register with me until after I'd finished the manuscript otherwise it might have been all over for yours truly's literary career.

Christopher Fowler's Roofworld was an important influence on Rivers of London but while I'd gone onto read Rune, his next book, I'd sort of lost track of him. I remember shelving the Bryant and May books and thinking I should get round to reading them but there's so many books, so little time. We share a similar obsession with the nooks, crannies and secrets of London but luckily a different approach to writing about them. well different enough anyway.

Street Magic
Obviously at some point in time, presumably a couple of years prior to me working in a bookshop, a memo had gone out suggesting that what the world needed were fantasy police procedurals set in London. Caitlin Kittredge hearkened to this call and produced the Black London series in order to throw me deep into a depression. Fortunately, just as with Bryant and May and Felix Castor, London is a diverse enough city for me to get away with being Johnny come lately.

The Wine of Angels

I heard about Phil Rickman's rural fantasy/mysteries when his agent rejected me and cited him as the reason. They said that they already had their supernatural mystery writer, thank you very much, and wouldn't be needing another. I immediately rushed over to the relevant shelf in my crime section and plucked the lone Phil Rickman that had been languishing there and read it. Then I ordered his back catalogue - they sold quite nicely as well.

The Atrocity Archive

This really would have been a seriously major influence had only I had heard of it in time. Charles Stross' fantastic mixture of office comedy, spy thriller and Lovecraftian horror is how I like to spend my afternoons.

(1) He didn't really say any of this because he is, in fact, a very nice gent but that's how it sounded to me.

Now Available in Brazilian Portuguese

Which I'm reliably told is different from Portuguese Portuguese.

The series is being called Enigma's of London and the first book is Spirits of the Thames (I think).

Blurb: E se a magia fosse real? E mais: e se ela fosse controlada por um departamento da polícia e utilizada para proteger as pessoas de espíritos mal intencionados e entidades maléficas?

Após descobrir que a única testemunha de um crime é na verdade um fantasma, Peter Grant torna-se aprendiz do enigmático inspetor Thomas Nightingale e logo aprende a controlar magias e feitiços que o ajudarão a resolver uma série de crimes.

Através dos olhos cínicos e sarcásticos do detetive recém-assumido, somos introduzidos aos seres sobrenaturais que habitam as partes soturnas da cidade de Londres, assim como às regras do submundo de trolls que vivem embaixo de pontes, famílias de vampiros, ninfas dos rios e guardiões do Tâmisa.

Com uma história repleta de mistério e humor, Espírito do Tâmisa é uma fantasia urbana em que o leitor ficará preso até o último minuto.

Gostaram?

 

Strangely the Diana Gabaldon quote seems to have cross fertislised with the iO9 quote from the American edition - not that I'm complaining you understand.

At Last The Truth! What Do You Mean I Don't Get a Bulk Discount?

I never intended this series of posts to be so long but the more I thought about the influences on Rivers of London the more I found. So relax, this is possibly the second from last in the Now At Last! series... unless I think of new stuff or just decide to ramble on indefinitely.

Making the World Work

The 87th Precinct Stories

Ed McBain's novels of the detectives of an imaginary precinct of an imaginary city serves as the elephant in the room for Peter Grant, Nightingale and all the other London flat-foots that populated my books. Not only to the blind men who take away different impressions of the beast but also because you just can't get that fridge door to close properly when he's in there.

In an essay at the start of my old edition of Cop Hater Ed McBain explains why he chose police detectives over lawyers, private eyes or little old lady amateur sleuths: Disbelief must be overcome, first by the author himself, then by the reader. This isn't the case with a police detective. He is supposed to investigate murders. 

It's also clear, from the same essay that the fictional city is as a lovingly wrought secondary world creation as any that has graced the pages of a three volume epic fantasy. The police procedure used by McBain's cops is closely modelled on actual American procedures (of the time) explaining why the city maintains a sense of reality despite being entirely imaginary.

The Curse of Chalion

Lois McMaster Bujold was careful to create a completely consistent theology to underpin this brilliant fantasy novel. The book itself can be read, if your feeling suddenly come over all English teacher, as an examination of what it would be like to be a saint in a universe where the gods were real and yet strangely powerless in the face of free will. 

What's impressive is the amount of effort Bujold has taken to think through the consequences of her world building and the subtle way she shows the separation between the practicalities of everyday religion, the rarefied theories of the professional theologians and the hard grind, uncertainty and stark existential terror of trying to do your god's bidding.

Heroes who work for a living

The Sweeney

Or the series that launched a thousand 'guvs'. When a police officer calls his senior officer 'guv' it is as likely to be because he grew up watching The Sweeney as to any long tradition in the Metropolitan Police.

The Sweeney, created by Ian Kennedy Martin, not only invented the 'guv' it was the first British policier which gloried in the working class culture of the police. Dixon had always been annoying differential and the boys in the Z-Cars knew their place but give Reagan and Carter some lip and it didn't matter who you thought you were - you was in trouble. There's more than a hint of Regan and Carter in Peter Grant, some of hidden under a respectable 21st Century vaneer and some of it proudly displayed. Because you're going to make something of that? Are you? Are you? Didn't think so?

The Ipcress File

The thing I've always liked about Len Deighton's heroes is their air of understated competence. Even when they do something extraordinary, such as snatch a threatening gun out of the hands of an opponent it's described in the same tones that a professional blacksmith would apply to bending metal. I'm probably misquoting but I remember a sequence that goes:- he was standing too close to me, within the range where it becomes possible to take weapon out of someone's hands before they can fire. The clue is the name given to the skill-set required by a professional spy - trade-craft.

It's by making the extraordinary skills of a spy ordinary that Deighton highlights what we often overlook - how extraordinarily skilled many of the people around us our. Not just the obvious candidates, the doctors, nurses, electricians but the less obvious geniuses like crane drivers and health inspectors. I wanted Peter to be like a Deighton spy, competent (most of the time) in an understated way.


Honourable Mentions

There are still a couple of influences that have as yet gone unlisted. Because there has to be a finite limit even to my capacity to waffle I thought I'd give them a quick mention before moving on to the final part of At Last The Truth! They Wrote What?

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
The role of this book must be fairly self explanatory.


Randall and Hopkirk: Deceased

Created by Dennis Spooner this was one of a number of supernatural/SF shows of the late 1960s early 1970s, Jason King and UFO being two others, that I grew up watching live or in later repeats.

Widows and Prime Suspect by Lynda La Plante

Lynda La Plante redefined the British crime thriller in the 1980s by taking it away from the boys (mostly the Kennedy Martin brothers) and letting the women step up to their rightful place in the genre. 

In Widows those belligerent but cowed working class women, previously only seen timidly opening the front door to the policeman de jour, finally get out of the kitchen to seize the plot, the moment and the loot. 

Prime Suspect gave UK TV its first credible female murder detective as the fallible yet determined DCI Tennison got the job sorted in the teeth of institutional sexism.

At Last The Truth! We're Going To Need a Bigger Truck!

I tried being carefree but all that resulted was a list of influences in no particular order - those halcyon days are over, ORDER must be imposed.

N.K. Jemison recently asked: But, but, but — WHY does magic have to make sense? To which the answer, of course, is that the magic works the way that the magic needs to work to further the aims of your story. Genre is a description not a prescription and in the final analysis the trappings of a story are not what sets the good stuff apart from the bad.

 In Rivers of London I decided that while I understood the way magic worked, I am the creator after all, the practitioners of magic both Newtonian and natural, had to work within an incomplete and, in some cases, erroneous theoretical base. 

It's still possible to achieve great things with an erroneous theory. Bazalgette's sewer system in London was built on the understanding that bad smells caused disease but still had the required effect of ridding the city of cholera. And bad smells as well.

But these ideas didn't just pop into my head like a slightly irritating know-it-all prophecy or the warrior in Jet and Gold they were influenced by the work of the giants(1) that came before me.

Making Magic Work

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke(2)

The Incomplete Enchanter

L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's 1941 book of magic and dimension hopping was the first time I was exposed to the idea that magic might be determined by the underlying rules of the universe.

In the first novella 'The Roaring Trumpet' our hero, transported to a world of Nordic myth, confidently steps forward to slay a dragon with his pistol only to find that it doesn't work. There's nothing mechanically wrong with his gun it's just that in this particular universe the chemical reactions that facilitate firearms don't work.

When you're 11 years old this is heady stuff but more importantly it teaches you to think critically about how magic will fit into your world. 

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin once said in an interview that she wrote A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) because she'd always wondered where all the wizards that populated fantasy actually learnt their magic. The answer is the school on Roke which is, as far as I know, the first wizarding school in fiction.

As Jemison points out in her blog that the magic they learn at Roke is more than memorising the true names of things and that being both conditional and situational was much more an art than a science. And while it's explicit that 'rules change in the reaches' I always got the impression that Ursula knew why(3).

Ars Magica 

It's been just under thirty years since I played an RPG in earnest and yet I still have several shelves full of them. I can claim a certain utilitarian value for things like the GURPS historical source books and Call of Cthulhu supplements and some of them are beautiful artefacts just in themselves.

But the truth is that you'd be hard pressed to find a more concentrated form of ideas anywhere else. For writers of a certain bent they are the crack cocaine of research materials. You know it might be bad for you but the hit is so...so... fast.

It was Ars Magica's use of Latin words to describe the building blocks of Hermetic magic was a direct inspiration for the formae Nightingale teaches Peter in Rivers of London. This set me thinking about what exactly is it you are doing in your brain when you speak a magic spell and the idea that the words were abstract labels, like musical notes, whose purpose was to regulate the way you formed the shapes in your mind.

The Science of Discworld II
The founding of the Folly and the codification of magic by Isaac Newton owes itself to a throwaway remark in this book. In it they discuss Newton's interest in religious philosophy and alchemy, which the writers make clear is a waste of Newton's time, one of them, in the footnote, does point out that if anyone in the history of science was going to discover the principles of magic it was Isaac Newton.

A light-bulb went off in my head and voila. The moral is be careful what you say in your footnotes lest some jobbing writer rebuild his entire career on the basis for your throwaway remark.

Making Magic Wild

     Madouc performed a prim curtsey, and Shimrod bowed. ‘It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I do not meet princesses every day!’
      Madouc gave a rueful grimace. ‘I had rather be a magician, and see through walls. Is it difficult to learn?’
       ‘Quite difficult, but much depends upon the student. I have tried to teach Dhrun a sleight or two, but with only fair success.’
    ‘My mind is not flexible,’ said Dhrun. ‘I cannot think so many thoughts at once.’
     'That is the way of it, more often than not, and luckily so,’ said Shimrod. ‘Otherwise, everyone would be a magician and the world would be an extraordinary place.’
       Madouc considered. ‘Sometimes I think as many as seventeen thoughts all together.’

Lyonesse III: Madouc

Magic in Jack Vance's fantasy has always been exotic, extraordinary and deliberately obtuse. Vance makes it clear that magic has rules, lots and lots of rules, it's just that they are as vague, contrary and fantastical as the strange beings that practise it. 

As with much else in  a Vance novel success in magic is as much a question of negotiation and verbal dexterity as it is adherence to formulas. From Vance I not only took the notion that the magic of the genius loci, and others, was wilder and more fabulous than the structured magic of the newtonians but also a looseness of definition to avoid that 'got it out of the monster manual' feel.

The Lord of the Rings 

By some Oxford professor whose name escapes me(4). The magic in Tolkien's work is subtle and often works at an intangible, spiritual level. As when the Black Riders are driven into the river by Glorfindel(5) despite there being no physical battle as such or the lack of distinction by the elves between 'craft' and 'magic'. 

I drew upon both aspects for Rivers of London where craft lies at the heart of human magic and the power of the Rivers is often intangible and difficult to distinguish from the natural world.

Before anyone asks I have no intention of explaining that in any more detail - spoilers. Let's just say that human agency and activity is a key part of the way magic is produced.

Quatermass and the Pit 

By Nigel Kneale. Some of you are no doubt saying - 'But Ben, surely this is science fiction not fantasy?' Which is what makes it interesting. In this story of man's discovery that his evolution has been shaped by aliens some three million years before the release of Ridley Scott's Prometheus  Kneale artfully weaves together science and folklore in a way far beyond that of your purveyor of tired second hand tropes(6).

At one point the legend of the wild hunt is explicitly linked to the culls of ancient Mars and then to the increasing mob violence of an overpopulated contemporary Earth. In this instance science (or rather biology) becomes the instigator of the wild magic itself.

Once again this blog has got too long and will be continued in next weeks instalment - Now At Last! I Can't Believe I Don't Get A Bulk Discount.

(1) They weren't all giants. The best that could be said of some of them was that they were dwarves with step ladders but they tried hard and that's the main thing.

(2) The corollary; that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology, was coined independently by me in 1988 for the Doctor Who story Battlefield - only it got cut from the broadcast version and I can't find my scripts. You're just going to have to take my word for it.
(3) In fiction it is entirely sufficient for an author to give an impression that they know what  what they're doing regardless of of whether they do or not - the exact opposite of Engineering. 
(4) Definitely not the one who wrote the Narnia books though. 
(5) I can't believe his name was preprogrammed into my factory standard spell checker. 
(6) However beautiful it looks.

At Last The Truth! The Back Of The Lorry...

Where All The Ideas Were Nicked From
The Influences on Magic Cops Rivers of London
Here are a selection of my stock answers to the number one question I get asked:

Where do your ideas come from?

Everywhere.
I buy them on the internet.
Tell me more about this thing you earth people call ideas?
Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Bananas!
Ideas? I've got your ideas RIGHT HERE!

This is a continuation of the blog started here and continued here.

First the Fallacy of the Media Specific Influence

A common mistake amongst critics and commentators is to narrowly attribute influence primarily within the media of the work they are looking at. Thus novels are usually cited as the influence for novels, films for films and graphic novels for graphic novels. This is, of course, a total absurdity - a writer is no more constricted in his influences than anybody else. Rivers of London was as much influenced by Ars Magica, a role playing game, as it was by any single work of fiction.

Second the Fallacy of the Most Similar Influence

Another mistake is to rank influences by how similar they are to the finished work. Thus it's often assumed that The Dresden Files, Neverwhere and the Felix Castor novels were strong influences whereas I actually came across them once Rivers of London was already conceptually developed. Some of the strongest influences came from works far outside the Urban Fantasy genre.

Third the Fallacy of the Three Part List

Sometimes I can't think of a third thing.

Is there any chance of us moving on to some influences at any point?

Okay, okay. In no particular order here are some of the main influences on the Rivers of London series.

Rentaghost

If your mansion house needs haunting just call Rentaghost... (1976)

For those of you raised in a cultural wasteland or born after the fall of the Berlin Wall Rentaghost was a BBC Children's series about a company which hired out ghosts to people that might need one. Its influence lies in the casual way the fantastic is treated by both the ordinary people running the company and the ghosts who make up its staff. There's also the technological and social culture clash humour of some of the ghosts as they try to cope with the modern world. The theme song is one of the worst ear worms ever composed which is why I haven't included it in this blog.

Jerry Cornelius

 It was a world ruled these days by the gun, the guitar, and the needle, sexier than sex... (1969)

Michael Moorcock's hipster agent of Entropy Jerry Cornelius exerts an insidious influence over the Rivers of London books, so subtle is it that it wasn't until I picked up my copy of The Final Programme that I realised its extent. Sometimes when I'm turning one of my books over in my mind I catch a glimpse of a figure in harlequin's motley capering through the dust sheeted rooms of my memory. I can't say for sure whether J.C. was a direct inspiration for Punch's role in Rivers of London but I strongly suspect he's responsible for blowing the head off the Hare Krishna guy.

The Doubtful Guest

It joined them at breakfast and presently ate, all the syrup and toast, and part of the plate. (1957)

This was one of those books that impinged upon my childhood by dint of lying around the house and then exerting a strange fascination on me when I was barely able to read. This is something we may lose as books shift into the electronic cloud - that wet afternoon discovery that intrigues despite our inability to understand it. Edward Gorey's Doubtful Guest radiates a wonderful melancholy humour as the Doubtful Guest imposes itself on a grand Edwardian family whose good manners prevent them from throwing it out. The Edwardian tone, the palpable sense of menace, the silence - now who does that remind me of....

Roofworld

The author realised that a quote would have to wait until he unpacked his copy from that pile of boxes...

Christopher Fowler's 1988 novel is probably the first modern Urban Fantasy novel that I read that didn't involve Vampires moping around Paris. The authors detailed description of a secret society living in parallel with our own is an obvious influence but unique, I think, in that it takes place at roof level rather than under ground. I found Fowler's next novel, Rune, less satisfying perhaps because I'm less interested in horror than fantasy but having recently discovered his blog I think I may have been missing out.

Mona Lisa Overdrive

Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all but unreadable DNA of commerce and empire. (1988)

There's a whole London sequence in the third of William Gibson's sprawl trilogy that has stuck with me ever since I read it. I like the sense of bustle, of an alien city giving up secrets, of its exoticism - made all the more sweeter because it's talking about my home town. That snow smothered landscape returned to me when London got its first proper snow in years and fed through into several sequences in Whispers Under Ground.

Jazz

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the sorrowful women. (1992)

Toni Morrison's novel is set in Chicago just after the First World War but its roots lie in the tangled history of the characters as they form part of the great Black migration from the south. Like Mona Lisa Overdrive this book is an influence through the subtle arts of mood, phrase and metre.

The Owl Service

"No. It's something trying to get out, the scratching's a bit louder each night..." (1967)

Alan Garner weaves layer upon layer into this tale of old myth reiterating itself through the lives of three children on holiday in a Welsh valley. Garner gradually allows information from the past to seep into his narrative so that like a man asleep in a sinking boat we wake from a troubling dream to find ourselves half drowned already. I've tried to take two things away from the Owl Service and Alan Garner's other work, the notion that you can leave things unsaid and unarticulated and that the readers will respond to them subconsciously and that it's better, where possible, to use real myths and real names.

This post has got way longer than I planned for so tune in next week for At Last The Truth! We're Going To Need A Bigger Truck!

At Last The Truth! The Curiously Unavoidable Harry Potter

Last week I blogged about Magic Cops the TV concept that laid the foundations for Rivers of London but there were other projects that contributed to the final book. I say contributed but what I really mean is cannibalised because if there's one thing I hate more than celery it's a good bit of writing going to waste.

A habit I, and I suspect other writers(1), have is idly playing with ideas. Often you're on a bus or a train or a walk and you have an idea which you then prod or invert or try to hammer into the wrong shaped hole. Often your not planning to do anything serious with it it's a more a form of mental exercise(2). Occasionally one of these idle thoughts will join up with another idea or accrete substance in the same manner a small child accretes dirt and suspiciously old boiled sweets. One of these metaphorically sticky children started with the idea of 'what if there was a Comprehensive(3) version of Hogwarts(4)'. This project never even had a working title as such it always existed in my mind as...

The Harry Potter Goes To Comprehensive School...thingy

The basic story idea, such as it was, followed a posh guy, who I'm going to call James, whose father is done for embezzlement and is taken out of his posh life and forced to live in his granny's council flat in East London. Once there a social worker turns up and says he has to go to a special school which turns out to be a state day school catering to the magically gifted. You can tell this is a basic TV idea because it's made out of clichés bolted together.

What Magic School (well I've got to call it something) did generate were a number of ideas that made it into Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho.

The first concerns the social worker who arrives to tell James he has to go to school, I made her an authoritative Nigerian woman but because this was a story about magic I wanted to give her an unconventional background. That's when I decided that she was the spirit of a small river in Nigeria who had emigrated to the UK and having found the Thames abandoned by its native spirits had moved into that niche. The parallel to the many immigrant groups who moved into London and took over small businesses, corner shops and food outlets is obvious(5). She moved over into Magic Cops relatively unchanged but when I came to write her in the book she became a proper Mama Benz(6) -  grander and much more formidable. This was because in the book I wasn't constrained by casting limits (TV executives get nervous if there are more than 3 non-white characters in a series) and once you have Lady Ty, Fleet, Effra and Beverley Brook Mama herself becomes the matriarch of a large and powerful family.

More surprisingly was the effect on Nightingale's background. In Magic School the headmaster had once been the head of a posh boarding school where the British wizarding elite sent their sons to be raised to take their place in the magical establishment. Only World War Two had destroyed that generation and left him mourning a 'lost' Britain. Some of those characteristics were eventually blended into Nightingale's background and a scene where the Headmaster takes James to the old school, now defunct, and shows him the wall of the honoured dead turns up in Moon Over Soho.

Now some of you are thinking, Magic Cops, Magic School you were seriously on a magic jag back in 2005 but these were not the only speculative projects I was working on at the time. There was Arthur Returns in which King Arthur wakes up in modern times; A Lethal Education which was a putative YA project which could be best described as Len Deighton for kids; Burning Cross a thriller about a serial killer who targets the white elite in a Southern Town during the 1960s; Primate City Blues a short story that I swear I will get round to writing about a bug (think Starship Troopers) detective sent to investigate why a colony is getting weird; Owen the Librarian a swashbuckling fantasy in which our hero is kidnapped by flying pirates and used in their quest for a macguffin; Space Princess which was my attempt to cash in on Disney's obsession with high schools and teenage princesses(7) and finally The Nerd which was my autistic detective show.

On top of that there were all the other notions that bounced around in my brain during that period, some of it fruitful most of it... less so. And that brings us neatly to :- One of the questions in a recent German email interview I had recently was: What do you reply when people say that Constable Peter Grant was a Sherlock Homes in the costume of Harry Potter?

My answer to that question and questions of a similar ilk is: you guys need to get out more! Next week we shall have a look at where the ideas come from in an instalment I like to call: At Last The Truth! The Back Of The Lorry.

(1) You never know with writers though so it's best to add some caveats when making generalisations.

(2) That is to say 'procrastination'.
(3) A Comprehensive is a non selective state school and is where most British people go to school - although not all to the same school... that would silly... obviously.

(4) Inverting an idea like that is always a fun first thing to do it's like upending a shoplifter - you never know what's going to drop out of their pockets.

(5) When I was at school you went to the Chinese chippy, there were four within walking distance of my house and my favourite was the Sun Do who did chips covered in barbecue sauce. Last time I looked the chip shops were all run by Kurds but it might have changed again by now.

(6) Mama Benz is a West African term for successful market women and traders - the Benz part comes from their supposed penchant for buying Mercedes.
(7) My favourite line from that came near the end;
Teenage Protagonist: It's all right for you you're like Queen of the Galaxy.
Space Princess: The Empire's only three percent of the inhabited galaxy, that less than eleven hundred planets and barely sixty three trillion citizens. When are you people going to learn to put things in perspective.

At Last The Truth! Where the Story Really Starts

It is an epic tale of one man's quest to feed his family(1) and restart his career no matter what the odds. It all starts back in the far of days of 2005 when I still thought I had a career in scriptwriting(2). There will be spoilers for both Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho so if you're spoiler averse look away now....

Magic Cops - Does what it says on the tin.

Memory is the weirdest thing. For the longest time I thought that I'd got the initial idea from an early Sci Fi Channel promo for The Dresden Files TV series. But looking at my diary the other day I saw that I was working on the idea as far back as 2005. In fact I a couple of sample scenes written and the start of an outline blue tacked to my walls. Since the series didn't air until 2007 I've had to go rummaging around in the carelessly stuffed spare room of my memory and my best reconstruction is simply this...

Prime Suspect meets Ars Magica - now there's a pitch you couldn't make to a British producer. In this version Peter was a black woman with Jamaican parents but Lesley and Nightingale were pretty much how they ended up in the books. There was going to be a whole team of wizards in the classic ensemble cop show style including a new age witch and someone practising a Non-European tradition from China or India.

At one point I toyed with the the idea of Simone (Peter as was) discovering or, more precisely, being afflicted by an ancestral spirit - that bit was strongly influenced by Due South particularly the episode where Constable Fraser opens his cupboard to find that his dead father and a bunch of Native Canadian elders have taken it over as a sweat lodge. I liked that intrusion of the fantastic into the mundane - I also liked Fraser's matter-of-fact acceptance of the situation.

When I start a project I often find myself with a few scenes or sequences that are, for want of a better term, vivid. Moments of narrative in which I can almost see, taste and smell what's going on. It's easy enough to take a concept, turn it into a pitch and then mechanically spin it out into a plot but unless you have these brilliant beads to hang on that thread you can never be sure the book, series or film is going to live. Magic Cops had several such moments right from the start - some of which survived all the way to Rivers of London.

Moshi Moshi

Simone trying to take a witness statement from a ghost while guarding a crime scene. Not in Covent Garden, because producers hate central London locations, but in Worship Street near Liverpool Street Station. This scene, even down to the "Pisst, guv, I saw the whole thing," line was consistent all the way through to Rivers of London.

Another survivor was Nightingale 'recruiting' Simone in a Japanese restaurant - although the restaurant in question was the Moshi Moshi in Liverpool Street Station. 

You can't see it from the picture but the Moshi Moshi is essentially a Sushi Bar inside a transparent perspex box suspended ten metres above the platforms of Liverpool Street station. If you can imagine Paul McGann in there talking about ghosts and werewolves to a black Londoner with the 19th Century roof vaulting overhead while thousands of commuters stream past oblivious to the strangeness - then you can imagine why I thought that was a visually arresting scene(3).

While not a set piece another thing that survived all the way to Rivers of London was Lesley May as golden girl and apple of the police forces' eye. In fact not changing Lesley to male when I switched Simone would lead to some very interesting meta-thematic confusion amongst my editors and many of my readers. 

While Magic Cops is definitely the seed that led to Rivers of London its roots spread out further to another project which I will discuss in next week's exciting(4) instalment 'The Curiously Unavoidable Harry Potter.'

(1) Well just the Evil Monster Boy really but trust me - that was expensive enough.

(2) My career had been effectively dead since 1997 but it's amazing how far you can go on hope and a stubborn refusal to face reality. 
(3) If you can't then you're probably a gibbon.
(4) Well probably not exciting per se but interesting...to me at least.

Les Rivières de Londres - On Sale Today

The three of you who read this blog have probably noticed a French theme creeping in the last couple of weeks. This is not a coincidence. Because Les Rivières de Londres, which means Rivers of London in your actual French, is now available to buy in all good Francophone book shops.

I'd like to thank my editor at J'ai Lu, Thibaud Eliroff and the translator Benoît Domis for giving me this opportunity to inflict my work on an unsuspecting nation.

I Fiumi Di Londra

I Fiumi Di Londra - otherwise known as Rivers of London will be published in translation by Silvia Tiles by Fanucci on the 19th January 2012.

This follows hard on the heels of the German edition and means, once the French edition is released this spring, that not speaking English will cease to be an excuse for not buying my book across a large swathe of Europe.

I'm told that Spanish and Hungarian editions are also in the works.

Die Flusse von London

You can now download a sample of the German text of Rivers of London (Midnight Riot) at the DTV website here.

The sample is a pdf accessed by clicking on Druckansicht (PDF) near the bottom of the page. Also available is a flyer for impressing your German friends with and a big image of the cover which I think is rather splendid.

According to the website publication is January 2012 which I shall confirm when DTV give me a firm date.

I wanted to be a Paperback Writer

At last the thing that was previously released big is now being released small - with a slightly different cover(1)

For months now people have been coming up to me in the street and saying: "I'd really like to buy your book if only it was smaller and cheaper." Well WISH GRANTED! From today the travel sized version of Rivers of London is available from WH Smith, Waterstones, the non-snobby branches of Daunts, a nice bookshop I just discovered in England's Lane and many other worthy outlets.

(1) Obviously it's been small in America for some time.

Mein Name ist Peter Grant.

Rivers of London is being published in Germany by DTV, here is their cover and here is their blurb...

»Können Sie beweisen, dass Sie tot sind?«

Peter Grant ist Police Constable in London mit einer ausgeprägten Begabung fürs Magische. Was seinen Vorgesetzten nicht entgeht. Auftritt Thomas Nightingale, Polizeiinspektor und außerdem der letzte Zauberer Englands. Er wird Peter in den Grundlagen der Magie ausbilden. Ein Mord in Covent Garden führt den frischgebackenen Zauberlehrling Peter auf die Spur eines Schauspielers, der vor 200 Jahren an dieser Stelle den Tod fand.

»Mein Name ist Peter Grant. Ich bin seit Neuestem Police Constable und Zauberlehrling, der erste seit fünfzig Jahren. Mein Leben ist dadurch um einiges komplizierter geworden. Jetzt muss ich mich mit einem Nest von Vampiren in Purley herumschlagen, einen Waffenstillstand zwischen Themsegott und Themsegöttin herbeiführen, Leichen in Covent Garden ausgraben. Ziemlich anstrengend, kann ich Ihnen sagen - und der Papierkram!«

The strapline at the top translates as, I think, "Can your prove that you are dead?" which is not bad at all and very funny. I also like the cry of '...and the paperwork' »...und der Papierkram!«

My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels

According to my agent my munificent ocelot is to be translated into Hungarian for the delight of its inhabitants. In tribute to this, no doubt, epic task I provide the following Monty Python sketch...

The Hungarian publisher is Agave who don't seem to have a website I can locate. Still I'd just like to say that my nipples are exploding with delight.

Online Review Round Up: The Mega Remix

"I think it is a pretty damn good book." - Book Monkeys

"I loved Midnight Riot" - Noobling Nest

"...strikingly original, exceedingly clever, and at times, pleasingly grim." - Rob Will Review

"...entertaining, clever, innovative and compellingly readable." - Bookface

"...assured, witty and great fun to read." - Floor To Ceiling Books

"Peter Grant is a much more active and likeable protagonist... " - Sophia McDougall

"...a great start to what will hopefully be a long series of adventures." - SFRevu

"...the sights and smells of London just ooze out from between the pages." - Love Vampires

"...an extremely fun experience." - The Book Smugglers

"Aaronovitch has captured that magical essence of London and bottled it so we can get that full undiluted flavour." - Greame's Fantasy Book Review

"...a page-turning, relentlessly entertaining novel which injects some vigour into the urban fantasy subgenre." - The Wertzone

"...the most satisfying fantasy thriller to hit bookshelves in quite some time." - SFX Magazine

"...a fun and fast read." - The Ranting Dragon

"...a superb paranormal fantasy that will charm both genre fans and mystery readers alike." - Grasping For The Wind

"...an easy book to pick up and a near-impossible one to put down." - Pornokitsch

"With vivid characters, a plot that is paced very well and a mixture of humour, darkness and detailed observations of police procedure and of London itself the book is compelling and charming." - Bullshit From A Geek

"...a strong, funny and engaging series opener..." - Total Sci-Fi Online

"...sweet relief for readers allergic to cliché." - Locus Magazine

"...an immersive and extremely funny fantasy that is as believable as it is entertaining. " - The Ultimate Book Guide