Jon Grimwood - The fallen blade

The Fallen Blade is not a ghost story. But that sheer sense of strangeness was in my head when I began thinking about Tycho. And there seemed only one place I could set his story.

Obviously, researching the series is fantastic fun.

So far I've made three trips in the past two years. Walking the backstreets, using waterbuses to navigate from one part of Venice to another. A lot of my time is spent sitting in cafes with a notebook, thinking, "Ah, so that's what Lady Giulietta looks like," or, "That house there is obviously where Lord Atilo lives."

All of the locations are real.

I'm now halfway through writing the next part of Tycho's story, The Outcast Blade, so I'll be going back soon. What do you do when you're not writing?

I'm always writing, in my head if I can't get to my laptop. Sometimes on my iPhone or on the nearest scrap of paper. I still have a novel outline I wrote on a restaurant napkin because it was the only thing I could find to write on.

I work in cafes and bars and on trains, in public parks and occasionally, if lucky, on planes and in airports. I'm writing this in a cafe in West London while waiting for a friend. When not at the keyboard I'm reading, walking or riding my motorbike. The bike's a Triumph Bonneville that I've had made all black, and I use it to belt round the winding back roads near my house in Winchester.

There's a certain purity and sanity that comes from riding a motorbike (at least there is for me). It locks you into a single moment. And you really know you're in that moment when you feel the bike stay still and the world flow around you. I always write better after riding. This is the other reason I do it.

I suppose if I'm not writing, reading or riding then I'm probably travelling or cooking, which is something else that works for me. Food tends to play a large part in my books. One of Tycho's great losses is nothing he eats tastes right to him. Will the rest of the Assassini trilogy be set in Italy or will we be taken to other exciting locations?

The whole story arc is mostly set in Venice, which is a hundred or so little islands joined by bridges and divided by canals. When it's not there it's in one of the Venetian empire's colonies like Cyprus, or on the mainland of Italy. (Apart from all of Tycho's flashbacks to Bjornvin, which are set in North American in the last Viking stronghold, all that remains of the colonies of Vineland.)

It was said that the Venetians were more interested in lovers seen through a window of a palace on the Grand Canal than the murder of a prince five hundred miles away. (Even when they ordered the murder themselves.) Venice owned a huge empire, had one of the biggest and most powerful navies and the greatest shipyard in the world. But as long as the gold kept coming they kept looking inwards at themselves. Not for nothing is it a city of gilt and mirrors. What film made you cry last?

It's well-known men don't cry. We choke up with emotion (yeah, right). The first ten or fifteen minutes of Up were devastating. And a really clever lesson in what you can do with any genre/form you like. The scene in Gladiator where the hero's dying and he sees his dead child waiting in the distance as he comes towards them is a killer. And I've known the video for Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt" reduce seriously hard men to tears. (Simply because it's impossible to watch without sensing the angel of Death hovering just off camera.) But what film made me cry last? A Studio Ghibli anime called Only Yesterday, right at the end, more or less after the credits, when a childhood version of the heroine appears in the train-like a cross between a ghost and a memory-and makes her adult self turn back to that place she's leaving.

It taps into that sense of, "If I only knew back then when what I know now…" But it's cleverer than that (it would be, it's by the guy who directed Grave of the Fireflies), so it also taps into a sense of, "If only I knew now what I knew then…"

Childhood and old age make for great characters, and I try to have a mix so all ages have their part in the book. Your novel features a unique combination of pirates, assassins, vampires and Italian dukes. If you could be any one, which would you choose?

Vampire… Because a vampire can happily be any of those or, indeed, all of those over the course of a vampire lifetime, but the others can't necessarily be a vampire! The hook for me isn't just immortality, or near as, damn it, it's immortality with added powers and not that serious a trade-off. I'd happily function only at night if I could see in the dark and move faster than anything else around me!

I wonder sometimes if becoming a vampire isn't like growing up. You think you'll never be that age, you'll never do those things. And then experience creeps up on us in much the same way that I suspect vampireness creeps up on the undead.

At first they think they'll be just like humans but different; then discover that they're less and less like humans as years turn into centuries. Obviously, Tycho's right at the start of this. Well, he thinks he is. Do you have a favorite character?

I like all the characters in The Fallen Blade-even the wicked ones. But Lady Giulietta, red-haired and stroppy, a pawn in her family's power games, the original medieval poor little rich girl who decides to fight back and finds she's simply made her life worse is right up there for me.

So, obviously enough, is Tycho.

He's the most fun to write but also the hardest because he's not quite human, and I have to keep that otherness in mind. There's a strangeness to how he sees the world. And I have to remind myself-and the readers-that how he sees the world is not how the rest of us see it, for all he's got human failing and emotions in the mix.

The other one I really like is Duchess Alexa. I think there's a lot more going on with her than anyone around her realizes. How old is she? Why goes she always wear a veil? How come she looks so young? This is a woman who likes to watch the world through the eyes of a bat and poison her enemies. Yet is so devoted to her niece, Lady Giulietta, that she'll do anything for her. That's Alexa's weakness, of course. And she has enemies who'd be willing to use that. introducing If you enjoyed

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