Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s The Fallen Blade was one of my favourite novels last year, and definitely one of my favourite vampire novels ever. It was dark, original, and visceral, populated by engaging characters. The sequel, The Outcast Blade is out now in the US and imminent in the UK. In this post, he takes a look at what it means to write a character in a particular time period…
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“We know goblins don’t exist, but they don’t…”
In the beginning there was a bad man who met a girl who made him want to be less of a bad man and – if this was possible, and he wasn’t entirely sure – perhaps even a good man in time. And even if being bad was a hell of a lot more fun – for him and for the writer, which concerned him not at all – he still wanted to be good, because he’d done many bad things and the girl loved him and hey, he didn’t want to be bad anymore…
That, basically, is the template for a hundred novels and, with a couple of minor amendments, quite possibly, a thousand, if not ten thousand real lives. I was aware of the psychological profile we expect for a character moving from darkness to light, and the reading protocols, the expectations readers bring to different kinds of books when I set out to write Tycho. What I hadn’t factored in were the complications inherent in trying to place him in a historically realistic setting.
