Q and A

Where did you get the idea for Wounds of Honour from?

The starting point for the novel "Wounds of Honour" came to me as the result of a holiday visit to Housesteads fort on Hadrian's Wall. Standing in rain that was almost horizontal - in the middle of August - I marvelled at what it must have been like to serve in the occupying army if you were accustomed to a warmer climate. Once we were home, and much to everyone's disgust, I immediately settled down in front of a computer to write down the story that had come to me.

How long did it take you to write?

About 6 months for the first draft. When I started "Wounds of Honour" I knew how the story started but had very little idea as to how it might end. The words just came to me night after night when I sat down in front of my laptop. Sometimes I had a fair idea of what I would write in the time I could spare, although there were occasions where my idea for the evening's word quota were rudely dragged off in quite another direction by one of my characters doing or saying something quite unexpected. The first time this happened came as a bit of a shock, but I look forward to those rare moments of inspiration as one of the most enjoyable parts of the writing task.

So why 182 a.d.?

When I first struck on the idea of writing a book set on Hadrian's Wall during the Roman occupation, my first step was to find an emperor with a sufficiently poor reputation to be believable in subjecting Marcus's family to the violent liquidation that seems to have been a depressingly routine part of imperial power struggles. More than that, the emperor in question had to have been on the throne after the Wall's construction in early 2nd century, which locked my timeframe away from the classic "bad" emperors of popular history, Nero and Caligula.

Leafing through Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" I came across the perfect candidate - Commodus. Son of the last of the relatively beneficent rulers of the 2nd century who chose their successors through a process which, no matter how flawed, was at least immune to the tyranny of simple genetics and the rule of three generations (one generation builds the enterprise, the next maintains it, and the third destroys it), he was clearly perfect for my purpose. Having been put on the throne by his father Marcus Aurelius the young emperor, so memorably portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in the film "Gladiator", proceeded to make an almighty mess of his reign. I recommend that you read the books, Gladiator didn't tell the half of it; it's quite amazing how far the empire fell from the standards that had been maintained throughout most of the second century.

Marcus's story coalesced for me the moment I read about the fate of the Quintilii brothers, distinguished senators with war service murdered to silence an opposition that seems to have been largely imagined, and which had far more to do with their country estate which was, naturally, promptly confiscated by the throne. This was the back story I had been looking for. Of course Ridley Scott got to Commodus before the long gestation of Wounds of Honour bore any fruit - spare a moment to imagine me sitting in my local cinema and whispering furiously to my long suffering partner "he's stolen my bloody villain!".

How many more stories do you plan to write about Marcus and the Tungrians?

The simple answer is "a lot". Marcus has the questionable fortune to occupy a thirty year span during which there was almost non-stop conflict across the empire, all of which is attested to by the histories. There were tribal uprisings, bands of deserters and brigands roaming the continent, border wars with most of the usual suspects, and the vicious tri-partite civil war of the 190's that resulted in the emperor Septimius Serverus coming to the throne. Once he had seen off his challengers, in a series of titanic battles across the breadth of the known world from Parthia to Gaul, the new emperor set about securing the borders of the empire with yet more wars of conquest which continued until he died in York 14 years later, still campaigning Marcus will be there every step of the way, fighting to clear his father's name and to defend the empire to which he owes his loyalty despite the gross injustice his family has suffered.

Where do you write?

I may be one of the best travelled novelists in the country! Whilst "Wounds of Honour" was initially written in my front room at home, the final re-write, and the writing of the entire "Arrows of Fury" manuscript, took place in a variety of foreign countries or on occasion (and to be completely accurate) in the air above them in a variety of airline seats. I used to need peace and quiet to turn out a book, or so I thought, but that's been proven wrong in the last year. Once I'm in a hotel room, or an airline lounge, or wherever I can tune out my surroundings with a little bit of music, I can turn out my routine 500 words a night without too much trouble. Mind you, that doesn't mean it doesn't take some editing to make sense of it later on.

Speaking of 500 words a night, I read a long time ago that the only way to write a novel is to simply get on with it. It takes some discipline, especially when there's social activity beckoning in the evening, but hammering out those precious words generates a creativity all of its own, as my subconscious mind works overtime to replace the words I've just taken away from it. At least it seems to work for me...

Where do you get you characters from?

They're nearly all people I've known, or amalgamations of a few characters. Not that I know many of the kind of people that would fight to the death on an ancient battlefield - although one or two might surprise themselves! It's more about the way a person carries themselves or they way that they speak, their sense of humour or just what I see in their eyes that will make me file them away for future reference. Funnily enough, the only exception to that seems to be Marcus. If I've ever met the perfect Marcus then I've long since forgotten that person, although I do know exactly what he looks like.

Did the Tungrians really exist?

Yes, both the 1st cohort (Marcus's adopted home) and their sister unit the 2nd. The difficult relationship between the two cohorts is, of course, entirely my invention, but anyone who's ever served in the armed forces knows that servicemen reserve a special disdain for their nearest competitors. Every Roman unit and fort in the Empire series can be proved to have existed, and every unit named served in the locations I've put them in during the period in question, even if the precise timing is unknown. Indeed there's a Roman marching song that features a lonely Tungrian soldier...

Here the winds blow over the waste land with chill showers.
Already my tunic is filthy with lice; my nose is running.
Daily the savage tempest soaks me with hail storms.
Why? Because it is my job to protect the frontiers of Britain.
Everywhere the mist shrouds the grey rocks in darkness,
My dear girl is in Tungria: always I sleep alone.
The pledge of love she gave me has been lost at the dice board.
Alas! I dearly want my girl and I want my pay

Historical accuracy isn't the be all and end all in my writing, and I've taken the odd liberty with a piece of ground that I want to use in a battle scene, but I like to make my stories as true to history as they possibly can be. And yes, I do scout the ground for my battlefields before I write the battles. This has meant quite a lot of holidays on Hadrian's Wall of late, but the later books in the series are going to take me to some amazing places!

How much does the 21st century shape your writing?

It would be almost impossible for the modern world not to have some effect, and people that know me tell me that my own verbal style tends to come out in the banter between the soldiers. I compensate as much as I can by trying to imagine the world around my characters when I put dialogue in their mouths. As for the plots and the human stories within them, I believe that once technology and culture are stripped away the base human material left behind responds to the kind of situations I write about in pretty much the same way now as would have been the case two thousand years ago. I always make a point of imagining my characters' detailed situations as they would have been, and have them react to that reality in the way that any man or woman would, given the circumstances. Only you can say if it works for you in the way that it does for me.

What are your favourite books?

It's a bit of a mish mash really. I love great historical novels, unsurprisingly, with the inevitable Patrick O'Brien pretty much at the top of the pile, although I rate the work of Steven Pressfield enormously, and I'm also enjoying the "Soldier of Rome" series by Harry Sidebottom at the moment. Anything with good battle scenes has me hooked without having to do very much more to entertain me, but these three write some of the best historical fiction I've had the pleasure to read.

Sci-fi takes up a lot of my reading time, although I doubt I could write it myself. An early infatuation with Robert Heinlein after reading "Starship Troopers" - so much better than the film - soon gave way to the "Dune" series, but my favourite author is Iain M. Banks for the sheer depth of his vision (and his great space battles), with Richard Morgan only a hair's breadth behind him for the genius of his Takeshi Kovacs novels. I just hope he has some more of them in him... I don't read fantasy, although I'll immediately contradict that by naming the book that was by my bed for most of my later childhood, "The Lord of the Rings". I also have a weak spot for the Black Library and its panoply of stories from the Warhammer 40k universe. They're better written than the Games Workshop image might lead one to expect, they're fun to read and the detail of the back story is awe inspiring. Dan Abnett, Graham McNeill, et al, just keep it coming please, you are my guilty pleasure.

In contemporary fiction - always thrillers - I read Adam Hall's Quiller books voraciously as a teenager, and while they've become inevitably dated I'll never tire of his razor sharp storylines. Anything with a lone hero who goes up against the odds and finds a way to fight or finesse his way through them - and I really don't mind whether it's brains or brawn - does it for me. My favourites are Stephen Hunter and Lee Child, if only for the sheer indestructibility of their heroes.

Lastly, I read military history voraciously - well, I have got a degree in the subject - and anything that looks capable of illustrating the plight of soldiers in a time of war gets me interested. I'm currently reading Allesandro Barbero's "The Battle", quite possibly the finest book on Waterloo that I've seen to date. This book does exactly what I want from military history, it tells me what happened in graphic detail, but achieves this trick while focusing both on the men that fought and died and those whose courage failed them. As the son of a armoured warfare veteran of the 1944-45 European campaign and the grandson of an infantryman who fought at Passchendaele and lived to tell the story (like Harry Patch, his key to survival was being entrusted with the platoon's Lewis gun), I no longer go anywhere near the "grand strategy" and "inevitable march of technology" ends of the market. War is still ultimately about the men who inevitably end up facing each other at close range, and whilst technology might have changed the nature of that confrontation it will never replace the courage and staying power of the individual soldier.

I'd like to talk to your representatives - who are they?

If you'd like to make a commercial enquiry, please contact my agent, Robin Wade at Wade and Docherty Literary Agents (http://www.rwla.com)

If you'd like to talk publicity with Hodder and Stoughton, please talk to Katie Davison (katie.davison@hodder.co.uk), my Press Officer.