Interviewing Andrew Knighton

Hello!!

I recently loved reading The Executioner's Blade by Andrew Knighton a fascinating mix of the fantasy novel and murder mystery with a very unusual investigator - the City Executioner. Lots of surprises and also a fascinating world to explore. I definitely wanted to know more about this and it was lovely to have the chance to talk to Andrew about the book and a few other things.

How do you like to booktempt The Executioner’s Blade?

In a city where monsters go to die, an executioner seeks justice for a priest she killed.

Or if I was going to put it in book comparison terms, Shardlake meets The First Law.

The executioner is not the usual investigator we meet how did Lena evolve as the main character?

Lena was inspired by two sources.

The first was Joel F. Harrington’s history book The Faithful Executioner, the biography of a real executioner in 16th-17thcentury Nuremberg. I was fascinated by this man viewed with fear and suspicion by a society that relied upon them, someone who killed to deter violence. I’ve written on Juliet E McKenna’s blog about how professions can provide great inspiration, and an executioner was unusual enough to make adistinctive protagonist.

Around the time I read Harrington’s book, Breaking the Glass Slipper talked about the limited roles for older women as fantasy protagonists, and how if a character was a mother she usually got defined by that role. It made me determined to write a character who was both an older woman and a mother, who was shaped by those parts of her life but not defined by them.

Once I jammed those two elements together, other things emerged. An executioner seemed like a good profession for someone who wanted to be left in peace, which fitted an older character hiding from their past. That meant someone grumpy and antisocial, classic character traits for a jaded detective.

And thinking about capital punishment led to its most obvious flaw – that sometimes the wrong person gets executed. Guilt that they’d executed the wrong person was a powerful motive for a character who cares about other people and ensuring they have justice, even if she doesn’t like to admit it. Someone who hates people but loves humanity.

What really struck me was the central location of Unteholzand its many religions, politicians and even underworld bosses. How did you go about creating this location and did it surprise you in any way?

Unteholz is part of a world I’ve been dreaming up for years. It’s inspired by Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, an era of innovation and exploration, or to look at it another way, an era of warfare and exploitation. There’s religious turmoil, leaps forward in printing and literacy, and new influences from the wider world. Everything is changing—society, economy, culture, faith—and that creates a dynamic space for storytelling.

I wanted Lena to have fought in religious wars, so I put her city in a pseudo-German region that’s going through terrible turmoil. As with everything about this world, I pillaged history for details to bring it to life, adding elements from other times and places to make it distinctive.

And just as I was about to get started, an editor asked for Twitter pitches. I liked my “executioner seeking justice” concept, but it needed more. The world had monsters, so Unteholz became “a city where monsters go to die”, and suddenly everything changed. Now I was thinking about wyvern burial rites, the economics of unicorn horn and gryphons on battlefields. I added caves under the city where sick monsters go and a caste of outcasts butchering those beasts. Things got epic fast.

Social inequalities and prejudices are an important part of the setting, but I didn’t want them to normalise prejudices from our own world. There are vast divisions of wealth and social standing in Unteholz, but there’s also gender and sexual equality. To paraphrase many people smarter than me, if I can imagine a world with dragons then I can imagine one where people of all genders are treated equally.

The range of characters in The Executioner’s Blade sprang from different facets of that city. You get a suspect who’s embedded in its politics and economy, another who’s a religious leader, one running a crime gang, all so that I could explore these topics in a single book without it feeling forced.Future books will be more focused. The next one explores economic issues and how we value life, then the third will be about religion, both with characters related to their themes. But in this book I wanted to lay out my stall and show the many facets of Unteholz.

Once I got writing, I had loads of fun seeing how these parts sparked off each other. I thought about the lived reality of the city, fishing around in my idea notes for details to make it richer. What do people eat? How do they pass their time? How do you harness a war dragon?

For anyone who wants more of that world, I’ve got a bonus features page up on my website, with links to pieces I’ve written about this book, other stories set in its world, reviews, even a playlist of music to go with the story.

When mixing the two genres of fantasy and mystery did you have to resist making all the answers too easy via magic?What did you gain writing from this blend of styles?

Each genre gave me something different. Fantasy provided the world, its strangeness and its characters, while the murder mystery gave me a shape for the plot.

Knowing the limitations of magic in the setting meant I could avoid it becoming a loophole or undermining the workings of the mystery. For anything where magic matters, that element is established in advance, so readers have a chance to work it out like in any other mystery story. Mystery loses its satisfaction if the solution is some new piece of magic that readers didn’t know about.

What three words would you use for the next book in the series?

Money, mining, and monsters.

Or, to use the book’s title, The Executioner’s Price.

What else can we look forward to you in the near future and in this weird world of social media where can we find out more??

It’s been a good couple of years for me, so I have a few things coming up.

The second book in this series, The Executioner’s Price, is out in November – preorders up now through the publisher Northodox as well as other book buying sites.

I’ve written a fantasy trilogy for Orbit about a fake chosen one. The second book, Forged for Prophecy, came out in August, and the last book is due in March.

I’m branching out into scifi next spring, with a novella from Luna Press called All That is in the Earth, about survivors struggling to get by on a quarantined planet.

And there’s something else that hasn’t been announced yet, but might be out before the end of this year, so watch this space!

If anyone wants to hear more about what I’m writing, the best place to look is my website, andrewknighton.com . I post a flash story there once a month, and blog posts when I’m in the mood, including some commentary on my books. I have a mailing list for news about new releases, and to get those flash stories straight to your inbox. For social media, I’m most active on Bluesky, as @aknighton, where I talk about books, writing, freelance work, and my cat.

What great books have you read recently?

So many! The sffh scene is so lively right now, I could sit here all day just talking about British authors, never mind what’s going on elsewhere in the world.

Adrian Tchaikovsky keeps knocking it out of the park – Bee Speaker is a wildly imaginative take on the post-apocalypse and what it means to be human, or even sentient.

Abraxus Elijah Honey by Ella Ruby Self is an atmospheric fantasy about people coping with grief and coming of age on the coast of 19th century Wales.

I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of Daughters of Nicnevin by Shona Kinsella, a historical fantasy about love, community and interdependence that deeply moved me.

And I finally got around to subscribing to Speculative Insight, then read their collection of articles from the first half of this year. There was fascinating stuff in there, especially the essays about aspects of the Discworld novels.

People keep talking about a golden age of TV, but personally, I think there’s never been a better time to read.