Scott Lynch on Lies of Locke Lamora, interview June 6th 2006

On a warm June 6th 2006 I met a very sick Scott Lynch who had still not recovered from the flu but like an old trouper the show very definitely did go on with plenty of aplomb!

VW Scott Lynch I think your book the Lies of Locke Lamora absolutely brilliant.

SL Thank you.

SL Anyone who didn't hear me say that I sort of owe a debt to the work of people like Tim Powers and Mary Gentle would slap me, so I'll mention those names.

Originally the novel was supposed to be set in what you might call more of the analogue/medieval society, a typical high fantasy setting. That bored me so quickly I realised that I had to do something else so I moved the timetable of Locke's world to the Elizabethan/Renaissance period; which is a personally more interesting period than the medieval era for me to set my book in.

VW I think what really shocked me in the whole of this book was, when Locke goes back to one of his early life interludes, we discover he is acually just a six year old. I think that is just quite extraordinary!!!

SL Locke is certainly what we would call a child prodigy, and it is just unfortunate, or fortunate, depending on how you see him that he is a child prodigy in the art of crime and very little else!
I was not anything like that I was an ordinary little boy, where certain values are ordinary. I thought it would be interesting to sort of speculate about this boy, who was really fantastically good at something which he really shouldn't be, that could get him killed!

VW Well definitely a charmer, an actor, excellent at the charades. Then you have got ...Is it Jean, John or Jon?

SL It's Jean. (Said as John) Jean is the exact opposite; he's bigger, He's - err - I won't say butch, he's very soft in his look but he has other talents!

The Gentleman Bastards were conceived as an ensemble, and it is actually going to be a very important plot point when you start start to meet the other people in his background and find out more of where he comes from. Locke and Jean compliment each other and lock together like Lego Bricks and click. Because each provides something that the other is not; Lock is an incompetent fighter and runs away but Jean is the more grounded of the pair and is the one who gets them out by improvisation!

Locke was the person I dreamed about from the beginning but Jean grew into the exact opposite to that. He evolved into the character that he is but their joining together is very essential to what they become over the next three or four books.

VW But I mean Jean is the one who lost his parents in a fire. In fact he was a middle class quite well to do person.

SL Yes he was; he came from the privileged side of things. His parents were very wealthy merchants who were able to give him an education and afford him a very soft existence. The mathematic education and the letters the other poor little Gentleman Bastards are only just beginning to acquire. I did that to remind people that not all had an education. We sometimes forget that there was not always reading and writing skills, they were not common; in fact they were ascetic skills and most of Locks world had no conception of these things.

VW What I find most interesting is the Father chains character, if you went back in time would be very much a Fagin type figure in Oliver but he was very hot on learning the languages of the time, the culture to do the work that they needed to do or used to do.

SL Absolutely, someone of the lower classes could obtain the education if the wanted to. As we have seen of con artists and others, it is relatively easy to pick up anything you need to do. But back in this sort of time, in the novel (as Scott gestures at the book in an audio recording!) Back in this time the lower class people would have been blocked of from this type of thing. And any education they did get would most certainly have given away that they were not a Duke or a Lord etc because of their tone and manor. So this would have been what Jean had in mind for his
little boys and girls.

VW I think it is quite extraordinary the way you have melded everything, together, and the actual science fantasy is very low key.

SL I hope so, I'm just the author, I hope that they do just enjoy the book.

VW Well I would say so because suddenly you hear words like the rising sun and the red moon or the glass bridge, or the eldren they are a previous race who were there.

SL Most of the nice cities and the old things that are in Locks' world were not built like human beings, they were part of a village that had disappeared fifty plus years before.

VW Let's get back to Father Chains, Why did he form the Gentlemen Bastards? What was his ultimate aim?

SL We are going to see more of Father Chains in future books. I'ts going to be a seven book sequence where the even books are not going to have flashbacks, but the odd books 1,3,5,& 7 are going to have flash backs of Locke's life, childhood, teenager years, development and so forth.

Chains reaches a place in his life where he realised that he was too set in his ways to carry out the crimes he had envisaged but Chains is more or less the first major con artist, in the world! He doesn't understand what is a confidence trickster, con artist, as we would understand it in society and his society has only just become culturally economically and complex to support this sort of crime of which Chains is the first real entrepreneur of this. He claims he is too old to to do what he sees fit so he gives himself something else to do, he has never had a family, never married, and so forth so he is not a bad individual despite being a thief.

His major life project is to take this bunch of young thieves and train them to his ideal and say I can't do but I can give you the skills to pull of some really wild stuff. That's his angle to see this project work before he dies.

The people in the group are the twins Calo and Calongo, Jean and Locke and Bugg. Sabetha is also one of the original group but she gets her real intro in the next book. That is why I hide her in the cracks of the book.

VW Yes you do!!!

SL Yes there are three people including my editor complained bitterly about that, they said, when are we going to get to know Sabethia?

VW But it's a wonderful build up and Locke is pining for her though she is some thousand miles away by the time you get three quarters of the way through the book by which time he has got into an emotional state and is not able to release it.

SL Locke, I'm afraid that if Locke were to meet me he might have some unfortunate things to say and physically assault me. No that would be Jean. No, no not Jean. Of all things it is mostly Locke that is tortured; as to what Bug is, he is twelve in the current era of the book. Locke and Jean pick him up five years previous to "Locke Lamora" and him you will see and hear of in the 5th book you will see how they found him and what they do to help him. So he is a second generation Gentleman Bastard. The original crew were the four boys and Sabethia. What can I tell you about them?

VW I want to hear about the adversaries - the Grey King and the falconer? The falconer I do want to know about him because with him comes alchemy, with alchemy comes things that people do not understand, because it is so much into the esoteric. It is a fascinating world!

SL The grey king and the falconer, were you thinking perhaps of the mesibee clan? The semi-antagonists, in a sense.

VW Yes,the father, two sons and the daughter who got horribly killed.

SL So Sorry! If you have a sympathetic character, you won't last long. But she was a potential friend a potential girl between Locks feelings for his lost love and so she had to go!!!! The family stems
from a Godfather reference in some ways. The Carlo father is not from Camore: He comes to Camore and re-organised what I think is your typical underground world figure, in that he sees himself as a loving father, a devoted husband , good, responsible and respectable family man; and yet he will do the most viscous horrible things at the drop of a hat. He had some evil torture going on in there too? I wanted there to be that tacotary, the first time you meet him, there is the colourful, prince of thieves, gangster talks, the posh club, the selling the rituals and so forth. Then the next time you see him, he is torturing eight men for relatively trivial reasons. I know men who were previously very dedicated in his service and now he's getting getting rid of them.

VW Do we get to see the grey king, further on in the books?

SL The Grey Kings part in the story is more or less done, some chance, one day I may write a little more on Don Le Chesa Duke but his part finishes in this book.

VW For the research of this book did you base it on the renaissance going on in Italy, I am reminded very much of places like Florence, Rome Veniceand in some of the things you put in about the underworld, very much also like parts of London.

SL I discovered while writing this book, anytime I set out to write a fantasy dialect, it will be discovered, it tends to read like to Charles Dickens on drugs, whether you like it or not. It tends to lead to, in your mind to parts of London Town.

I love Oliver Twist and most of Dickens work. But also Thomas Hardy "The return of the Native" where you're writing is very close to nature. I wasn't consciously thinking of that but I can see that reference to it. I'm a history nut in general, I love the study of the Elizabethan era. Anything between the surrounding areas between the 14th and 18th centuries,

There's mixing and muddling of the elements of Locke's world; there are the Napoleonic era in thoughts of technology and applicability simply because it might be a little achronistic, there is a different world so you can write it in a different orders. For instance they didn't have gunpowder for example. Awful lot of research, there was an awful lot of reading, many, many books and novels and histories!

VW What are the main novels that have a most influenced and interested you?

SL In terms of Loch Lamora - A lot of Dumar, the Three Musketeers', the Man in the Iron Mask, Count of Monti Cristo. I really, really enjoy that sort of thing. All the swash buckling stuff - yes - I really enjoyed that, thoroughly.

This book took 4 1/2 years to write; this is my first novel, tortuously long and so every thing that I read in that period went into my storyline. The work of a lot of contemporary authors Neil Gaiman, W. Stover, Terry Pratchett, yes he's funny. Did you know that a 1% of all books sold in England are Terry Pratchett's, I have read his books and they are a lot of fun.

VW You do writing with games, not computer games but pen and paper role playing games?

SL I was attempting to write prose, not short stories like others.

VW While you are here in London are you visiting any of our historical places that might feature in a later book?

SL While there's not a lot of time for seeing the sights and doing Buckingham Palace, the Tower and the like, I have seen quite a few pubs. I have walked about a bit and drunk in the sights of London streets. I have been running like hell just to keep up.

VW Are you planning to see much more?

SL Even though I haven't seen all the tourist places; I've seen lots of pubs, been to the Phoenix, I don't think I've seen anything pre-civil war.

VW Scott thank you so much for your time as you've been so ill.

SL Thank you for asking for an interview.

After the interview Scott had to see the doctors and go back onto antibiotics to carry on with his interviews during his stay in London.