Q/A with Joe Abercrombie, author of "Best Served Cold"

Amazon.com: The ebook edition of Best Served Cold is available this month for 2.99. True to its title, it is a tale of revenge--but in your writing, the line between good-guys and bad-guys is often blurred. Did you ever feel sorry for the objects of Monza’s rage? Does she go too far?

Joe Abercrombie: I guess I don’t fully believe in the whole concept of good guys and bad guys, so the line between them has to be non-existent, really.  Evil tends to be a matter of where you stand, the best of us have our dark corners, and even the baddest of guys have redeeming features.  So although Monza has her reasons and her rationalizations, and some of those who suffer as a result of her quest for vengeance probably deserve what they get, in the end the whole thing gets way out of control.  She’s no better than most of those she takes vengeance on.  She’s certainly worse than some of them.  To be fair to her though, I don’t think she’d ever claim to be in the right.  She’s a killer, not a hypocrite.

Amazon.com: Your new book, The Heroes, is out in February. Can you tell Amazon readers a little about it?

Joe Abercrombie: It’s about war.  More specifically it’s the story of a single battle, its causes and its consequences, most of it taking place in one insignificant valley over the course of three days.  It follows a variety of cowardly, ambitious, treacherous, conniving, murderous, selfish, and very occasionally heroic characters on both sides and at varying levels of command, who all become caught up in the fighting or strive desperately to avoid it, with varying success.  The idea was to tell some exciting and entertaining individual stories without losing sight of the overall picture, present a perhaps more realistic take on warfare than you usually see in fantasy, and to pick away a little bit at our notions of heroism.

Amazon.com: You said you’re as influenced by TV and film as books. Were there any cinematic inspirations for Best Served Cold and The Heroes?

Joe Abercrombie: Absolutely--I’ve always watched a lot of film and worked as a freelance tv editor for ten years, so when I finished my trilogy and was looking for some inspiration for some tighter, more focused standalone stories, I thought about some styles of films I’ve always enjoyed, with a few favourites in particular, and how I might try and combine some of the things I liked in them with some influences from the fantasy sphere.  Best Served Cold was really my attempt to combine hardboiled thriller with fantasy, with the specific example of hardboiled thriller I was thinking of being the Lee Marvin twisty revenge film Point Blank, but with sun-bleached LA swapped for a land of feuding city-states reminiscent of Machiavelli’s renaissance Italy, and Lee Marvin changed into a female mercenary.  As you do. 

The Heroes was my attempt to combine a hard-edged war story with fantasy.  A lot of fantasy centres on war, or uses it as the backdrop, but it’s often a rather shiny, idealized version of warfare.  I wanted to season that with a more random, boring, terrifying, filthy, unpredictable, dare I say more realistic take on warfare gleaned from reading a lot of military history, and bring it all together into the story of one battle told from many points of view.  I guess I was thinking about some of those broad-canvas war films that cover huge casts and single battles--things like A Bridge Too Far, Gettysburg, Waterloo, but with some of the deeper investigation of character you get from serialized TV like Band of Brothers or Generation Kill.

Amazon.com:  What can fans expect next?

Joe Abercrombie: Well, having tried to combine fantasy with hardboiled thriller and edgy war-story, the next filmic influence to get my fantastical treatment can only be the western.  Think Lord of the Rings meets Unforgiven meets Lonesome Dove.  There’ll be narrowed eyes, there’ll be standoffs in dusty streets, there’ll be tough men grating pithy one-liners.  There won’t be six-shooters but, you know, that’s what the swords are for...