TH; First things first, I guess. K J Parker isn’t your real name.

KJP: No. Parker is, well, a pen name. I’d like to be able to say KJ stands for Kathleen Joanne, in honour of a writer I respect, admire and steal from. Unfortunately, I was KJP while JKR was still nursing a lukewarm latte in the coffee bars of Edinburgh.

TH: Why the secrecy? It’s not like you’re in danger of people stopping you in the street.

KJP: Well, for a start my regular name, which I hate, doesn’t have that ring, you know? It’s like Norma Jean Mortensen and Marilyn Monroe. I don’t think I could write under my own name. It wouldn’t feel right. When I write, I need to be somebody else.

TH: It’s not just the pseudonym, though.

KJP: I don’t do interviews or publicity stuff with, well, strangers, essentially. Not the world’s most articulate person, with people I don’t know. I guess that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write, never been any good at talking.

TH: We know each other, of course.

KJP: Well, yes.

TH: For the record, we’ve known each other for years, you showed me your first novel, I showed it to my agent, he sold it to Orbit. Is that about right?

KJP: Yes.

TH: OK. Now, what struck me most about your first novel, which eventually became Colours In the Steel, part one of the Fencer trilogy, was the absence of a villain. You don’t do bad guys, do you?

KJP: Well, my heroes are a pretty sick bunch. Actually, one of the reviews I treasure most was something some woman wrote on the Net about Belly of the Bow. She said it was the most horrific and nauseating thing she’d ever read. I venture to suggest she missed the point there. The point was, the really nasty thing that upset her so much was something the hero did to the villain.

TH: Is hero really the right term for Bardas Loredan?

KJP: Oh, you bet. In Colours In The Steel he was pretty close to a standard sword-and-sorcery hero, at least by my standards. The whole thing about him is, he’s got a sense of right and wrong. That’s what makes him do ghastly stuff. His brother Gorgas has no moral sense. He did one really bad thing - that’s how he sees it - when he was too young to know better, and he’s spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it. He sincerely believes that’s possible. But Bardas knows good from evil, he can’t get past what Gorgas did, and he ends up doing far worse. The really sick thing, much sicker than the stuff that ticked off my favourite reviewer, is that Gorgas forgives him.

TH: Because he’s amoral.

KJP: Because he believes there’s more important things than morality.

TH: That’s a theme you like to return to.

KJP: I guess you could say it’s my one big issue, right and wrong, good and evil. Actually, I got that from you. In one of your books, you make an interesting point about God and the Devil. Basically, the Devil works for God. The Devil is basically a franchisee, he runs Hell on God’s behalf, he’s answerable to Him, they work to the same rule book. In real terms, they’re on the same side. That resonated with me. It’s a valid point. I see good and evil as this incredibly fascinating and important grey area.

TH: Paved with good intentions?

KJP: You bet. Good intentions do as much harm as genuine evil, probably more. Good intentions have worse effects than evil, because you find it hard to persuade thousands of people to follow you if you’re offering a manifesto of pure evil. Hitler, Napoleon, Alexander the Great were all men with visions of a better world. Millions died. JFK risked the extinction of the human race over Cuba because he was convinced he was doing the right thing. Jack the Ripper barely made it into double figures.

TH: This sounds a bit like the doctrine of sides.

KJP: Oh, that. That’s in my next book.

TH: The Folding Knife

KJP: Basically, it’s what the good character comes up with after he’s been through hell in the war. There’s no good and evil, there’s just which side you’re on. It’s a twisted philosophy, of course, it’s meant to be, but it’s plausible enough for a smart guy like Bassano to allow himself to believe in it, when he’s right at the end of his rope. And there’s a degree of truth in it, too.

So many qualities we think of as virtues are only virtues if you’re on the winning side. Courage, loyalty, faith, perseverance, determination, resourcefulness, intelligence, endurance. The Germans displayed all these in spades fighting in Russia. The Confederates in the Civil War. But they were on the wrong side. That’s not just a victors-writing-the-history-books point. They were on the wrong side, meaning they were on the side of Wrong. Virtues exhibited in support or defence of evil can’t be virtues, if anything they make it worse, because they were brave and selfless for the cause they killed more good guys and were able to do more harm. But the thing is, right and wrong aren’t absolute, they’re incredibly subjective. Nobody really knows what’s good and what’s evil, not for sure, or there wouldn’t still be wars all over the place. People would know what was right, and there’d be no need.

TH: That’s a good point to ask you why you’re so interested in war. You’ve said many times you’re a ninety-eight percent pacifist.

KJP: Indeed. And I’ve studied war all my life. I study war the way a doctor studies a disease. I’m ninety-eight percent a pacifist. Well, maybe ninety-two. I think war for a writer is basic shorthand for conflict. And conflict is the heart of all literature. Even in Jane Austen.

TH: That would explain the scholarship. It doesn’t really account for the fascination. I should point out, we first met at our local blacksmith’s shop, we were both there to learn blacksmithing. But I wanted to make hinges and pokers and stuff. You wanted to know how to make swords.

KJP: Primarily, yes. Also hinges and pokers and stuff. But swords first.

TH: Making stuff is a big thing in your books; some readers reckon too big.

KJP: Well, I confess I enjoy the research. I enjoy making things, yes. But artefacts, like things archaeologists dig up, are our closest link to people from long ago and far away. I reckon if you want to draw readers in to an entirely imaginary world, you need to make it feel as real as possible. They say in the antiques business, nothing makes a forgery more convincing than authenticity–like, where you use salvaged nineteenth-century screws to put together a fake piece of furniture. So I have lots of real things in my books, tools and furniture and clothes and weapons, and I have people making them, because that’s what people did in the real past, when they weren’t growing food. And I have lots of farming too, for that reason. If you want to write real people, you’ve got to have them doing real things. That’s one of the reasons I don’t do magic in my books. Inevitably it’s hard to be convincing with magic because it can’t ever be real.

TH: Passing reference to the antiques trade there. You used to be a coin dealer.

KJP: Very small scale. In the late 80s, early 90s, I used to snoop round coin fairs and coin shows. I’d buy small medieval European silver, which most dealers couldn’t be bothered to identify because it’s really complicated and there’s not many collectors; I did the identification, and sold on to specialist dealers. Typically I’d pay five dollars and sell for thirty-five. I guess I was earning three, four dollars an hour. But it was good fun, and it’s what really got me interested in history.

TH: And then a spell as a lawyer.

KJP: Yes. Let other pens dwell.

TH: I know what you mean. The one good thing I got out of my time in the legal profession was that nothing about human nature, nothing nasty or mean or horrible, will ever shock me again. I saw it all, in microcosm, without having to leave my office.

KJP: Mostly I found it just boring. There were long spells when there wasn’t much work on, and I’d sit at my desk reading the Bible - because you have to have a Bible, for the clients to swear oaths on - because it was the only half-way readable book in the building.

TH: Now I’m going to ask you the question that always makes me want to shed blood when I get asked it. Where do you get your ideas from?

KJP: I see pictures in my mind, and they intrigue me, and then I try and figure out the story behind them. That gives me a central character, if I’m lucky, or a group of characters. With the Engineer books, I had this mental image of a man who really wanted to go home. That was all; an overwhelming longing to go home, but it was impossible, but he refused to accept it. From that I gathered that he had to be a patient man, a builder of mechanisms to achieve a very difficult objective. That meant he had to be an engineer. Then I was reading about mechanical toys in Alexandria, and also the legend of Weyland the Smith. That gave me enough to feel confident there was a book there, and I started looking around for auxiliary characters. Then someone was telling me about hunting wild boar in Germany, and I remembered there were a whole lot of medieval handbooks on hunting, and that gave me Valens, though I got his face, so to speak, from somewhere else.

TH: Where?

KJP: An extremely fine example of Harry Potter fan fiction I stumbled across on the Internet. Actually, the character in that which I liked so much turned into a different character, Miel Ducas; and my friend the boar-hunter got roped in as his cousin, Jarnac. But these clues I get from different sources are just starting points. The characters only really start to grow once they get talking to each other.

TH: How about Basso, in your latest book?

KJP: He was a portrait on a Roman coin; the emperor Caracalla. That’s how he started off, anyhow, though of course Basso’s nothing like Caracalla. I bought a small lot of junk Roman coins on Ebay. Another one was Constantius the Second, and he gave me Nico, in Purple and Black. That was unusually easy. Soon as I saw the face, I had Nico completely formed, so to speak. The rest of the characters in that book were people I was at school with; inevitably, given the subject matter.

TH: What about the Scavenger books?

KJP: That was another mental picture–basically, the one that starts the book. Also, there was a line in a Joe Bethancourt song, which I misheard. I thought it was ‘laying a track of Poldarn steel’. Actually it was ‘cold iron steel’. When I asked Joe what the lyrics were, that gave me the whole ambiguity thing, is he the god or isn’t he?

TH: Bardas Loredan?

KJP: That was the old lawyers’ joke; bring back trial by combat, it’s fairer, cheaper and a damn sight less traumatic for the participants. Gorgas began life as Gul Dukat, in Star Trek. But I take great care in filing off the serial numbers. Seriously, it’s just the initial spark. After that, I work them out like mathematical equations; the characters have got to be like this or like that, or they wouldn’t be capable of doing or likely to do the stuff I’ve got lined up for them. You do the math and x is the character.

TH: What’s next?

KJP: That’d be telling. But I want to move out of my comfort zone, if I can. Not too far, of course, but enough to cause me problems. Solving that sort of problem is what makes the difference. That was what was so nice about Purple and Black; it was really good to have a chance to experiment with a different way of structuring a book, but it would only work on a small canvas, so to speak. I’ve always had characters writing letters in my books, it’s a way of giving a character a different sort of voice besides dialogue; they’re able to think about what they’re saying, be deliberate about it, and that in itself means you can get across stuff about them that you can’t just hand the reader on a plate in narrative or work into dialogue. The same applies to first-person, which is something I’ve never done outside of short stories and would like to try.

TH: I really like first-person. But you’ve got to have the right character as your narrator.

KJP: That’s probably what’s held me back in the past. My characters wouldn’t want to talk about themselves in that way, they’re people who hold things back. But I’m doing another novella for Subterranean shortly, and I think that might just be the opportunity. Also, I might break my own inviolable rule and have some magic.

TH: Why?

KJP: To make life difficult for myself, of course.

TH: KJ Parker, thanks for talking to me.

KJP: My pleasure.