'Killings at the Source. A Noirtasy Novel' - fantasy detective story

 

For sale in the UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HR1T2B7V

For sale in the USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HR1T2B7V?th=1

I had been thinking about this novel for many years. I started writing it in 2024 but got stuck and came back to it during 2025 by which stage I was about halfway through. Typically I write straight through with a book, though there can be long breaks before I complete one, the longest were with 'Crimson Bodies of Naugail' (2015) which I had begun in 1991 and 'Munich White' (2015) which I had started 20 years earlier. Coming back to this novel after a much shorter period, still really gave it a boost and I was able to finish it relatively quickly.

The basic principle this all began from was me thinking about a fantasy setting in which magic would only work within a certain radius of something. While I did not think of it this way at the time, it was rather like the principle of a mobile phone mast's cell. However, I was more thinking of stone circles or other powerful sites. From this I then thought where would it be interesting to see this happening. I knew it would effectively pin down the magic user to a certain location and I guess that was where the idea of setting it on some islands rather than a vast continent. I had also wanted a fantasy novel somewhere warm rather than the typical rather damp temperate regions or icy wastelands and the occasional desert that tend to be the settings for such novels. 

Thus, I suppose in my mind I associated a kind of Caribbean climate with islands. Saying that, given the world on which the novel is set has two suns (and three moons, hence the tendency to high tides and floods) it would most likely be warmer. So, from this came the concept of The Archipelago, I know it is a common trope, but it seemed to fit and was an easy name for readers to get to grips with.

I did not think up names for all of the islands, but many of them came about as I featured them in the novel and reflected their position in the chain or their nature. With names for both the characters and the places, I very much used the Joffrey Principle, i.e. that the names are pronounceable in English and are quite like actual names from our times or our history, but are a little bit different.

Most of the action takes place of Yslekynt, the main island which not only houses the chain's capital Kerylue, but also The Source for this region. Perhaps not very imaginative but The Source was what I decided to call this force that powers magic on this world. When I realised it would then work well with having a 'sourceror'  I went with it. For various reasons its power works along the full length of The Archipelago, though its strength ebbs towards the two ends of the chain. Rather than the standing stones or ley lines I originally envisaged, I moved to having it as a golden viscous liquid flowing beneathe the earth coming to the surface at various points including at the uplands that Kerylue runs up to. This provided an opportunity to develop a religion around it.

I then thought of what magic might be done drawing on the various Sources. I have always tended to elemental magic. The first fantasy story I wrote as a child featured a man who could work fire magic, not simply to cast fireballs but to actually become fire himself. I returned to something of this principle for this novel. I feel a little guilty that I simply included air, earth, fire and water. I sought different ways in which they might be used as I knew this was not going to be an epic adventure story but something more urban. I had been influenced by the role-playing game 'Bushido' (1979) which unsurprisingly makes use of Japanese legends including the five elements from Chinese Wuxing philosophy: earth, fire, metal, wood and water. This led me to use eight forms of magic, adding fibre, flesh, metal and stone, to the classic Ancient Roman/Greek four - earth as 'soil'. In fact there are others, notably light which is used by the protagonist, the investigator, Ylfrad Clayr and later mind is mentioned. 

In the novel, a couple of kind of anti-magic people become involved. Reading the Empire of Salt trilogy C.F. Iggulden: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-books-i-read-in-july.html I was a little worried that given he featured one character who drains magic it would be seen as derivative, but he also features a lot of different magic approaches and a steampunk element in these novels which are absent from mine.

Thinking about a city sitting on top of a source of magic I quickly imagined that almost everything in it would be created using magic. As a result much of Kerylue is almost too perfect and despite the cover image, the crowded streets are very regular. I worry now I missed a trick in not have what we much more envisage as a 'magical' city of twisty, spiky buildings and alleyways. Only Symbe Street, an artist's quarter where Ylfrad lives in an exotic tower, comes close to that. Seeing magic as almost like a form of manufacturing/industry led me to envisage the eight synfes - guilds for each of the 'legitimate' types of magic. Indeed magic itself morphed into being 'werk', so you have airwerkers, firewerkers, fleshwerkers, fibrewerkers, etc. 

Again now, with the apprenticeships and the regulations, the Synfe Inkirmyn which rules The Achipelago, I ended up with a very bureaucratic fantasy which may lack the eldritch nature of magic readers expect from fantasy novels. However, as it transpired it fitted pretty well with the detective story nature of this particular novel and also permitted mulling over challenges when things do not fit the assumptions and expectations of the 'correct way'. I recognise that snobbery, discrimination and social class division are themes deep in me that come out quite a lot in my writing. However, as I age, I quite like to feature fantasy characters who are not either kings, queens, lord and ladies, or always right from the bottoms of society (though at least one of those features in this novel), but how the 'ordinary' people often with extraordinary capabilities survive and thrive in a fantasy world.

As the title indicates the novel revolves around the investigaion of a series of ostentatious murders in and around Kerylue. I realised quickly that with people able to manipulate fire and flesh, etc. I had to work out how to stop someone simply burning another person or ripping their body apart. I had already had the idea that the principle of reciprocity would inhibit such action, i.e. that any magic a werker did against another person would have a reciprocal effect on the caster, so if they set someone on fire the caster - the werker - would also catch on fire in the same way. I also came across the approach by Leigh Bardugo in 'Six of Crows' (2015): https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-books-i-read-in-february.html She has fewer types of magic but in fact there are characters called 'heartrenders' who can use magic to simply kill people. She also has a kind of steampunk approach with other characters using revolvers. 

Again worried that I would be seen as derivative I adhered to my reciprocity principle to make it much harder for people to kill using magic. I had also realised that if someone could simply magically strike another person dead then there would be little to investigate. For what I envisioned I needed complex killings that would potentially provide a lot of (false) clues. This was what made this a noirtasy, in that detection and not just simply magic were both important parts of the story.

Probably time to turn to the term 'noirtasy' itself. In the summer of 2026, on the Bluesky social media site, I got into a discussion prompted by the renowned author, R.J. Barker who was writing a detective novel in a fantasy setting. Ray Aune and 'UnHusband' made suggestions, to a degree prompted by the relatively new genre 'romantasy' which combines romance and fantasy novels to huge success. A number of ideas were bounced around but I particularly like Ray's suggestion of 'noirtasy' combining film noir and fantasy, though he was not actually that keen on the term himself. To me it seemed to fit the romantasy pattern and would be easily comprehensible by readers who like fantasy.

So, that is the background to my latest novel. I have been careful not to provide spoilers but to give some indication of what the book features and why I wrote it the way I did. I hope that you will find it an engaging, refreshing fantasy read. As always I am eager to hear from readers of my books and have developed a thick enough skin down the years to take it when people tell me a book of mine is so bad that they demand a refund, it should never have been written and I must never write anything ever again. I do, however, certainly welcome more positive even if critical comments.