James Swallow will be a familiar name to Sci-Fi Bulletin readers, for his work on Doctor Who and Star Trek tie-ins, among many others. Rogue, his latest original thriller out from Zaffre this week, is his fifth to feature the exploits of Marc Dane, and shortly after lockdown, he chatted with Paul Simpson…

 

This is the fifth book in the series. When you came up with the idea of the character of Marc Dane and the set up we discover in Nomad, did you have an idea of where he and it were going to go or has each book been very much a) dealing with the consequences of the previous and b) a new stand alone plot?

It’s all of the above really. When I first started writing Nomad I wanted to do something that would have legs so that it would be an ongoing series. I thought I’d put something out that’s obviously fun for me to write, that I would enjoy the process of writing. But in the back of my head, in quite an honestly commercial mercenary kind of way, I thought, ‘Oh I want this to be a success – and if it’s a success I want to build something that will continue to keep growing. I can keep telling these stories because I enjoy writing them and hopefully people will enjoy reading them.’ I built that into the DNA of it.

One of the fundamental elements you need for these kind of thrillers is a villain with a really interesting plan. Most good action thriller stories are a hero reacting to a villain’s plan. Die Hard’s a great example of that. The hero doesn’t go into that story wanting to stop the bad guys. He has a completely different agenda when the story begins but the villain has a really good plan and the hero has to stop it.

Goldfinger is another great example: James Bond doesn’t go into it knowing what Goldfinger’s going to do by blowing up a nuclear bomb in Fort Knox right? He’s reacting to the fact that this guy has this plan and the hero has to fight against it.

I wanted to continue with that idea. That’s something that happens in every one of these books: there’s always a villain with a plan and it’s always our hero trying to say, ‘Well I’m not going to let you do that, I’m going to stop you by any means necessary’.

As the books developed I realised that I wanted to build an arc story, to have a larger threat force, not just the villain of the week as it were, in each book. I wanted to have a larger set of bad guys who were operating above that, and of course you can’t continue to do that sort of arc storytelling without paying it off.

How many times have you watched TV shows and you can see they’re hinting at an arc narrative and then it never goes anywhere? That just really pisses me off. I thought if I’m going to do an arc narrative I’m going to pay it off and I’m not going to wait to book 20 before I get around to doing it. I thought that’s just not fair, because if I was reading these books I wouldn’t be happy about having to wait that long. I started to parcel out this narrative and now we’re getting to book five, I’ve written enough material that the narrative can stand up under its own weight.

What I did for the fifth novel, for Rogue, is I tried to create a story that if you’re somebody who started at the very first novel and you followed these all the way through, all of that attention that you paid, all of the stories that you read, your attention will be rewarded. All these elements that you’ve seen in the earlier books, all that stuff’s going to pay off. But also at the same time, I tried to create a story that if someone comes to it fresh and new, there’s still enough narrative in there to carry you along if you’ve never heard of these characters and you didn’t know what the situation was.

One of the publishers actually said to me ‘it’s kind of like Avengers Infinity War and Avengers End Game’ – those are two different stories but they’re connected. In a way Rogue is my Infinity War story because all these things that have been ticking over start to pay off.

Essentially the core of the story is the arc villains have had enough of our heroes and they decide ‘You’ve been messing with our plans for the last 4 novels and we’re done with guys, we’re going to rub you out’ and it’s our heroes losing everything. All through the previous book they’ve had cool hardware, they’ve had a secret headquarters and they’ve all these nifty toys… Now all those toys get taken away from them and they lose absolutely everything – and the body count is quite high. I go through everything I’ve created with a hammer, basically, in this book and smash all that stuff to bits, and put all my heroes in the completely opposite situation that they were in at the beginning of the novel.

It’s a lot of fun to build this house of cards and then bring it tumbling down, and also, focus that with the way the characters themselves are growing and have changed through the novels. Obviously the arc story of the bad guys has grown and evolved and I’ve tried to make sure that my main characters have grown and evolved as well, so they’re not static like you get with a lot of these sort of action thriller novels.

Jack Reacher is a really good example of this: Jack Reacher is pretty much the same guy at the beginning of each book as he is at the end. That’s the appeal of that sort of thing and I think that’s perfectly fine; those are great books but that’s not the kind of story that I want to tell. I want to write about characters who are being changed by the events that they’re going through. This felt, to me, like the time to bring all these threads together and to show that every choice the character has made up to this point has consequences and now those consequences are paying off. And not in a good way.

So have you left it that there’s elements to continue into book six?

Absolutely. Following that model, book six is going to be the End Game novel.

So, presumably then because you’re dealing with so much of what you’ve already written, writing this one must have presented different challenges from the previous ones in the series. What did you find the biggest challenge?

Definitely it was trying to strike a balance between putting enough material in there that people who’ve been following the series would feel that they were getting a payoff and writing a story that people who were new to the series could still enjoy and still connect with.

If you have a lot of continuity, you can find that if people come to it new they’re like, ‘I don’t know who this character is; why should I be emotionally invested in that person?’ whereas somebody who’s been reading the books for the last four novels is already emotionally invested in them.

That’s something I’ve found from the beginning writing these books: every novel is somebody’s first experience of these characters. You can’t guarantee that someone’s going to start at book one and read two, three, four and five. Someone’s going to come in at book three or book two and every time that person picks a book, you don’t want that person to read five or six pages and go ‘Well, I don’t know who these people are and you’re not explaining what’s going on…’ and they put down the book and don’t come back. You want to make sure that you create characters who are interesting enough that people will continue to read no matter what their entry point is into the series. That’s the continual challenge, to keep finding ways to refresh that. And not do it in a way that I’ve already done in a previous book.

You’ve done so much work on licenced books with all their constraints. But in many ways you seem to have constrained yourself almost, even though it’s original fiction. Do you feel that you’re more constrained now by what you’ve written?

No. It’s a tough question to answer. People often ask me, ‘How does it compare, writing in someone else’s world and then writing in your own one?’ The thing that you get when you write tie-in-fiction is there’s an immediate instant familiarity about the characters. If I’m writing a Star Trek or a Doctor Who novel I can say ‘The TARDIS landed’. I don’t have to spend a paragraph telling you what the TARDIS looks like. If I say ‘Captain Kirk walks onto the bridge and talks to Mr Spock’ I don’t have to spend half a page explaining what Captain Kirk looks like. You’re not creating a character completely fresh where people go ‘Well who is this Kirk guy? What does he look like? How does he stand? How does he dress?’ You can just say ‘Kirk walked onto the bridge’ and that would be enough because people are familiar with Star Trek. They know what those elements are and you can cut straight past all that stuff and get to the meat of the plot and characterize all of the other elements.

But obviously, if you’re creating stuff that’s completely new, people don’t know what Marc Dane looks like unless I tell them. I’m creating these characters and these worlds and environments completely out of whole cloth so I have to describe them in a way that is engaging and interesting to the reader – and you have to do that every time because you don’t know if somebody’s coming to these stories anew.

That’s something that I’ve found is the sort of marked difference but in terms of creating restrictions for myself? I think that’s true of anything. Once you create a world, once you create a set of characters, you’re building a lore in your head about that narrative and that environment and you have to set up rules for it. And once you’ve set those rules you have to stick to them. But I don’t consider it a restriction, it’s more like a set of guidelines.

Okay, so the corollary of that then is: are there things that you created in Nomad or the second or third book that have been a pain in your neck writing Rogue?

Not really. Looking back on it now, five books later, I did think to myself: how would this have played out if I had gone down the Jack Reacher route? Instead of creating an arc narrative, what if I’d done five stand alone novels that were not as closely connected, not as interthreaded as these novels are? Would it have been more or less of a success? And in the end, I don’t think I would have been as interested or as motivated to write it.

I like the idea of building this world, of growing these characters, as the story goes on, Marc Dane in Rogue… he’s not the same guy he was back in Nomad and that’s a deliberate choice because I wanted to show him becoming more of a hero as the books go on. He grows from being somebody who’s kind of reticent about going in harm’s way to somebody who’s a bit more confident, who’s a bit more willing to get into the fight.

He grows into the role of becoming an action hero and for me, that feels real. It feels like proper narrative character development.

I always say these are fast paced beach reads, pulpy kind of novels and often those skimp on that stuff. I thought ‘If I can put that in, why not put it in?’

There’s a great quote from Leslie Charteris about Simon Templar when he said he’d been trying to develop a portrait of a man developing, changing, maturing. He didn’t want the Simon of Meet the Tiger in 1928 to be the same Saint who went around the world in 1955 because it was pointless.

I’d agree with that completely. I wouldn’t want to write the same guy who’s trapped in amber like some of these characters are. To me there’s no development in that.

I often go back to talking about James Bond: in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Bond gets married and you see him go through that and change as a character. You can see who he is pre that story and post that story, the changes that have happened to him. To me that’s fascinating.

Even if we don’t get to see that stuff externalised, the idea of: what is ticking away? What wheels are turning inside that character’s head because they’ve gone through all these different changes? They’ve had all these things happen to them.

This is something that I always come back to, the idea of these Teflon coated superhero spy characters, espionage characters, action heroes, guys fighting terrorists, whatever sort of people you fit into this sort of box: often they glide through these stories and they’re challenged but they’re never touched by it. They come out the other end, brush the dust off and off they go to their next adventure – and it feels like, ’Did that ever actually affect you on some sort of deep level, some sort of emotional level? Have you become a better person or a worse person? How has your view of the world changed?’ That to me doesn’t feel real and one of the key things I wanted to do with Marc Dane is to try and make him have touchstones that make him feel like a real person.

A lot of the action that I do in the books is very heightened reality, it’s big and brassy –stuff blowing up and car chases and gun battles – and I love all that kind of stuff because it’s great fun. The way I try and balance things is I say, ‘Okay well, if the action and adventure stuff is larger than life, I try to make sure that the character stuff is true to life’ so that bit feels realistic and true. If I give you enough realism in that area then you’ll maybe let me off a little bit when I do an action sequence that’s a little unbelievable but cool.

Are you still doing a lot of other writing as well as Marc Dane or has that taken a back seat?

One thing I like about being a writer is that there’s lots of types of different writing to do. I think if I was just doing the same kind of writing over and over again I’d get bored. Part of the reason that I did the Marc Dane stuff was because I’d spent the last ten or fifteen years of my career writing licensed fiction and writing science fiction, and as much fun as that stuff is, I felt like I wanted to do something a little bit different. That’s why I plumbed for doing a modern day action thriller story.

But that doesn’t mean that I’ve just stopped. I’m still writing other stuff. I’m still doing some work in the video games industry. Last year I worked on a VR game called Phantom Covert Ops, a sort of Cold War action thriller game; it was fun to do because I’d never worked on a project where VR was the mechanism by which you play it. It was very interesting to get into how do you tell a story and reveal narrative when you can’t cut away and have cut scenes and reported dialogue. That was very interesting and a fun challenge.

I’m still doing the occasional tie-in project. There’s a lot of fun franchises out there, fictional worlds that have given me a lot of enjoyment over the years and when the opportunity comes up to work on them, it’s like, ‘Who would not want to contribute a little something to the great tapestry of those fictional universes?’

I’m always spinning a bunch of plates. I love bouncing around with stuff like that because I think it keeps you fresh as a writer. I often talk about the metaphorical writer’s toolbox and it’s like: if the only tool you have is a hammer, after a while everything looks like a nail. But if you’re writing short fiction you’re using this tool, if you’re writing a script you’re using this tool, you’re writing a long form narrative, use this tool. I think it’s important that you do these different kinds of things as a writer because the skills you learn from, say, doing a short story will fold back into, say, working on a video game later on. They’re all transferable skills and make you a better writer. I think it just keeps us interested and it keeps the job fascinating.

Rogue by James Swallow. Published by Zaffre, 28 May 2020 Hardback, and eBook. Click here to order from Amazon.co.uk

Thanks to Ellen Turner for assistance in arranging this interview