1.- Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads’ readers?
Sure thing! I’m the author of seven novels (culminating in my latest, The Last Vigilant, out now from Orbit), and numerous short stories. I’ve previously been known for my mystery and Victoriana books, often with a horror/spooky twist, but at the moment I’m very much focused on epic fantasy.  
Thanks to my former life as the editor of Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine, I moonlight as a freelance tabletop game designer (miniature wargames, TTRPGs, and board games) specialising in licensed games, notably The Walking Dead: All Out War and The Elder Scrolls: Call to Arms. I also work as a tabletop industry consultant, and a narrative writer for video games such as Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.

2.- How did you start writing for publishing?
I guess I came to it the boring, traditional way, albeit a bit later in life (I got my first book deal aged 36, which I’m told makes me a late bloomer, haha). I had an idea for a novel while I was working at Games Workshop on their Warhammer lines. I had no idea what I was doing really, and it took me an absolute age to finally get a full draft together that I was happy with. But I sent it off to a bunch of agents, and was delighted when I got a couple of positive responses. I signed with an agency, and not too long after that sold The Lazarus Gate to Titan Books. I’m acutely aware of how lucky I was to actually sell my first novel!
The timing was fortuitous – I was about to change jobs as part of a corporate restructure, and to be honest I wasn’t feeling enthused by office life anymore. I took the book sale as a sign, and walked away from full-time, salaried work. It was crazy really – the book deal wasn’t exactly big money. I just figured that now I’d sold my first novel, and I had a bunch of industry contacts in the tabletop gaming sphere, I’d never have a better opportunity to realise my dream and be a full-time writer/games designer. It was somewhat terrifying, but it worked  out okay in the end!

3.- During your career, you’ve combined writing original works with writing for franchises (WH40K, Frostgrave); do you find it to be a different experience?
Very much so. In fact, over the last few years I’ve come to the conclusion that franchise writing (or “work for hire” as it’s often called) isn’t really for me anymore. Don’t get me wrong, it can be an amazing feeling having your name associated with a big property that you love (and for the right property I’d still throw my hat into the ring), but I think the process of producing those books can be really formal, businesslike and templated. Generally speaking, you have to get the pitch approved, then a detailed synopsis. Then your work is reviewed not just be an editor, but by a licensing  or IP manager. There’s not a huge amount of freedom to come up with anything new or clever, or to really develop existing characters in a meaningful way (unless that’s part of the brief of course).
On top of that, unless you’re writing for someone like the Black Library, who sell lots of copies and pay a good royalty, there’s often not a huge amount of money in it. I’ve had a few conversations with publishers about some fairly big licenses, and the fee was so miniscule I couldn’t justify taking on the work. A lot of that is on me: I am not a fast writer. If you’re a solid 5k words per day kind of writer, you love franchise stories, you prefer to work to a plan, and you’re happy to turn around fiction quickly to a tight brief, then honestly you’ll earn a decent living doing it. It requires a different, very disciplined, mindset.
Having said all that, you mentioned Osprey Games’ Frostgrave, which was a different experience again. Myself and a few other writers got hired to write stories for Frostgrave and its spin-off, Ghost Archipelago. We were in on the ground floor to be honest. The game designer and creator, Joe McCullough, was also the commissioning editor. He’d laid the foundations for the world, but deliberately hadn’t gone into much detail, so we were given pretty much free rein. I did a couple of fun short stories, plus a novel, Destiny’s Call. It’s a short, pacy adventure book, perfect for YA readers, featuring pirates, dinosaurs, wizards, Vikings, zombies, flying carpets… I had a blast!

4.- How did the first idea for The Last Vigilant appear?
I’d completed the Apollonian Casefiles trilogy, and was just finishing up my second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Red Tower. Naturally, I was thinking about what to write next. It was a weird place to be – I was out of contract, and I’d just written a short horror novel that wasn’t selling, so I was starting to brainstorm outside the box. I didn’t really want to write any more Victoriana, because I felt I was in danger of being stuck in that niche forever. So I had a list of ideas – big top-line elevator pitches – and I sat in the pub with my previous agent, discussing which would be the best thing to write next. The pitch that stood out was “Miss Marple and Richard Sharpe go on adventures in Westeros”. Just completely glib, but with the core of an idea that would become The Last Vigilant.
A lot of the ideas were there from the start. I wanted the protagonist to be an elderly woman, with a brilliant mind but not a huge amount of street smarts. So the idea was that she’d solve crimes, but her lack of social filters meant she’d get into trouble. Of course, we can’t have an old lady getting onto fights, and so she needed a big lump of a soldier – sort of a minder – to take the beatings on her behalf.
Once I had that clarity of purpose, I went away and came up with character ideas, story outlines and so on. Of course, almost immediately afterwards we had a pandemic, publishing went into disarray, I parted company with my agency and had to find a new agent… From inspiration to publication took about five years!

5.- I cannot avoid drawing a small parallel between Watson/Holmes and Hawley/Enelda. Would you say they were partly inspired by the classical characters?
I wear my influences on my sleeve. I’d written a lot of Sherlock Holmes stories – two novels and a bunch of shorts – and I just found that style of writing natural, and I love Holmes and Watson. As I said before, I saw Enelda initially as more of a Miss Marple type character, but she definitely combines aspects of a whole bunch of famous detectives.
Other than being a soldier, Hawley doesn’t (yet) have much in common with Watson. But he is Enelda’s crutch – her tether to the real world, the person who grounds her when she starts to spiral. Here’s a woman with the sharpest mind on the planet, but she’s lived alone in a crumbling tower for 40 years, and that isolation has taken a toll on her.
I definitely went characters-first on this series. With traditional Sherlock Holmes stories, it’s all about the mystery, and then Holmes comes along and solves it as the reader follows along. It’s almost undesirable for Homes and Watson (or Marple, or Dupin, or Poirot, etc) to develop too much as characters, because really they’re just the means to illustrate a fiendish plot to the reader. With The Last Vigilant, I wanted these characters to come alive, and honestly it’s been the most rewarding experience for me as a writer. I live and breathe Drake and Hawley these days.

6.- Could you tell us more behind the inspirations of the world of The Last Vigilant?
The way I approached the worldbuilding on this book followed a fairly logical progression. I decided very early on that it would be a mystery story first and foremost, and I felt strongly that it should therefore be a low fantasy world, with just one or two big fantastical elements. I think in a high fantasy setting, it’s really difficult to present a “whodunnit”, because pretty much everything can be hand-waved away by magic. In The Last Vigilant, most of the detective work is done the old fashioned way, with legwork, interviews, examining clues, etc. It’s the 10% that does involve the supernatural that pushes the book firmly into the fantasy genre.
So on that note, I wanted the world to be gritty, and as real as possible. I took the very deliberate choice to base much of Aelderland on medieval England. It’s such a familiar setting to a lot of people, because of all the movies, TV shows and books, so I could sort of outline the world in broad strokes, and focus my worldbuilding on the points of divergence, rather than having to explain every aspect of daily life for my characters. In case I got a little too nerdy with my medieval research, I included a handy world printer in the back of the book! When I was writing, I very much had Cadfael and The Name of the Rose in my head, which explains why there’s a lot of monastic intrigue in this first book!
I have to address the elephant in the room. There’s a lot of subtext and a big pinch of allegory in the book. The world is pretty bleak – not grimdark, but certainly dark! Aelderland is gradually revealed to be pretty backwards. They won a huge war to separate themselves from an old empire, and as a sort of knee-jerk reaction the kings of Aelderland outlawed everything that they considered “foreign”. They looked to their most ancient texts, and decided to change all the laws (and even rewrite history), so that they could hearken back to olden times when Aelderland was great. Whether those times ever really existed is a matter of debate, but the king decides what is true and what is heresy! I think obvious parallels can be drawn with the rise of authoritarianism around the world generally, and Brexit Britain more specifically.
On the subject of inspiration, as I’m writing book 2, I’m finding that some of the people who worked on the book in various capacities are inspiring the worldbuilding and storytelling in subtle ways. For example the cover artist, Mélanie Delon, painted that amazing piece of art that conjured a certain atmosphere and style that has now firmly become part of the way I imagine the world and the characters. Saskia Maarleveld, who narrates the audiobook, did such a good job with voicing the characters that I just hear her renditions in my head when I’m writing dialogue. And Tim Paul who produced the map has basically created an in-world artefact, which tells us a lot about how illuminated manuscripts look in this setting, and will go on to inform the other maps in the series. I think we’re always finding inspiration from different places, and it’s amazing what other people can bring to a setting, seeing things in it that perhaps I didn’t as its creator.

7.- Apart from writing, you’ve also worked in the creative field as game designer/consultor. Would you say it has influenced the way you approach writing?
The things that make me successful in the tabletop industry are all quite useful skills in the publishing industry to be honest. Consistency, commerciality, discipline… without those things I don’t think I’d have done quite so well.
What I don’t do is look at fiction like I look at game design or RPG worldbuilding. Things like having a monster manual where every creature in a fantasy setting is fully fleshed out and given stats and rules – I think in fiction that takes away a lot of the mystique. It’s important to present in-universe characters and creatures consistently, but too much detail can constrict storytelling down the line.
Funnily, my original career path was editorial. I’m a trained production editor, and later went on to become a managing editor of magazines and rulebooks. So when I get proofs of my novels back from editorial, I do take the red pen to them with particular focus. The last time around I was told I was the only author my editor had ever seen to mark up line spacing, kerning, etc. I’m not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse!

8.- What hobbies does Mark A. Latham practice in his free time?
You’ll be unsurprised to learn that I play a lot of tabletop games! On top of that, obviously I read a lot. I buy more books than I can ever read (collecting books and reading them are, after all, two separate hobbies)! I play guitar – I have a bit of a guitar-collecting habit, which has had to stop because I’m physically out of room. Wait… “collecting” seems to be a theme, doesn’t it? I bake bread (excellent destressing process). And in the last few years I’ve discovered a love of mixology – I love making cocktails. I’ve even had a few conversations about writing a cocktail book!

9.- What can we expect from Mark A. Latham in the future?
You’re definitely going to see more Drake & Hawley books. I’m nearing the end of book 2 of Kingdom of Oak & Steel now, which I’m very excited about. I’m expanding the world in all sorts of ways, many of which I hadn’t even imagined when I first came up with that pitch in the pub years ago! I still keep adding to that big list of ideas, too, so I’m hoping there’s much more to come once this trilogy is finished.
In other spheres, my work usually involves working with big licences, which means I’m always working on projects that I’m not allowed to talk about! Let’s just say I’m expecting a few announcements in the near future so I can finally reveal what else I’ve been up to.