The Stitcher and the Mute, the second book in the trilogy of fantasy crime novels by D.K. Fields– aka David Towsey and Katherine Stansfield – is out today from Head of Zeus, and here the authors talk about blending both talents and genres…

No-one said writing a book collaboratively was going to be easy, let alone a whole trilogy. We knew we’d have to take the rough with the smooth – and like true love, rarely does the course of the creative process run smooth. But one of the obvious benefits of two writers working together on something like a novel is the different experiences and expertise that they each bring to the project. In our case, that meant Kath came armed with a forensic working knowledge of crime fiction – not just as a writer but as an avid reader of the genre – whereas Dave has been a fan of SF/F since he was old enough to sit still long enough to read a book. Two genres, two writers, one project. What could possibly go wrong?

As is often the case with broad discussions of genre, there’s a huge amount of grey area and overlap and room for interpretation. There are many SF/F texts that feature strong crime plots at their core, or characters who could happily have stepped straight from the pages of crime – Joe Miller in Leviathan Wakes, Terry Pratchett’s Sam Vimes, and Lincoln Powell in Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man to name just a few examples. In this way, crime can often parachute into other genres and provide some very welcome narrative shape or drive. The setting, the time period, and the specific objects of the case can be as imaginative or as fantastical as you like, but mechanics of crime are likely to be just as recognisable as they are in an Agatha Christie novel: someone’s broken the law, more often than not resulting in a dead body, and someone else needs to find out how and why.

When writing Widow’s Welcome, the first in The Tales of Fenest trilogy, we had a really significant breakthrough when we realised our fantasy novel’s protagonist was actually a police detective in all but name. We initially had Cora Gorderheim pegged as a civil servant – that way we could have her right where the political action was. We had planned from the start to have politics as the main driver of this novel – and it’s still present in the trilogy thanks to the election and the storytellers. But when we initially set about writing Cora’s story, that political angle just wasn’t coming across. In the scenes we devised, Cora the civil servant kept sidestepping political drama and instead she was “investigating” every conversation and situation. We had a whole civil servant draft of the book that looked like it would need a complete overhaul, but because Cora was already acting the detective it turned out to be a fairly straightforward re-write.

So far so crime, but where did the fantasy element come from? And how does it blend with the crime? Well, as with a lot of things in this series, it’s not as big a stretch as you might think. The Tales of Fenest are set in a secondary fantasy world, with one or two key geographical features and a fairly unusual spin on how to govern a union of different peoples. Because that governance is so important to the novels, we found ourselves softening some of the more fantastical elements of this world.

Much like magic in A Song of Ice and Fire, magic is present in our world but it’s rare, and rarely in direct contact with our characters. For example, the idea of tornstone – a volcanic stone that the Torn people can manipulate in magical ways – has been part of this project from an early stage. At first we had a scene in which a Torn individual summoned a huge golem from the stuff, and it went crashing about in some archives. All very dramatic, but it stuck out like a sore thumb in our otherwise gritty, street-focused police investigation. Tornstone still features; unsurprisingly it’s in the Torn election story and their Hook (which is like a movie trailer for the story). It just needed to be adjusted not only in terms of content, but tone, to compliment the other creative decisions we made. To lose it completely would have been a shame, our world a little less rich – the Torn a little less interesting. The same is true for their ash beetles, and the Rustans’ hidesails, and the Lowlanders’ mostins, all of which have their part to play in the plots of these stories, but which don’t de-rail them.

There are always risks associated with blending genres, whether it’s in fiction or music or anything creative. But where there’s risk, there’s reward. We like to think we had the best of both worlds when writing books like The Stitcher and the Mute – a dynamic crime plot that propels our story forward, and a vibrant fantasy world that provides unusual and interesting clues, characters, and landscapes.

The Stitcher and the Mute is out now from Head of Zeus; click here to order from Amazon