Giant Thief (review here – 8.2/10), was published through Angry Robot Books in early 2012, and there are with two sequels following close on its heels.

Reviewer Ryan Lawler caught up with David to chat about the difference between short stories and novels, what’s in a name, society’s love of the anti-hero, and much more.

Ryan Lawler: Hi David and welcome to Fantasy Book Review. Can you start by letting us know a bit about yourself and what lead you towards a career in writing.

David Tallerman: By day I’m an itinerant IT Technician, roaming the UK in search of computers to fix.  It’s a job that’s literally taken me the length and breadth of the country.  Right now, I’m living near Leeds and working in London, which is every bit as difficult as it sounds.  I spend an awful lot of time of trains!  But hey, trains are great places to write, so it could be worse.

As for the writing side of things … I guess the only answer to what led me into doing it as a career, what’s now effectively a second fulltime job, is that it seemed too important to approach in any other way.  I realised a few years ago that I’d probably never be happy unless I took it as seriously as I felt it needed to be taken.  Since then, I’ve written vast quantities of short stories, film scripts, comics, poetry and – at time of right now – just under three and a half novels.  The first of those novels was Giant Thief, which came out a couple of months ago; its sequel, Crown Thief, is with my publisher Angry Robot right now and should be out this September.

Ryan: You have been a prolific writer of short stories. Was it difficult to transition your writing to full length novels?

David: Yeah, a little.  Because I was so conditioned to short fiction writing, I came at Giant Thief by treating every chapter as sort of a short story in its own right, and there are advantages and disadvantages to that approach.  It took me the second novel to really feel like I was playing to the benefits of the form.  There’s so much more that you have to keep in your head with a novel, every scene has to work not just in its own context but within the wider whole of the story entire; you have to think about things like character arcs and subplots and pacing and story beats that don’t necessarily have that much impact on short fiction.  It’s a big mental leap to make.

Ryan: You must have a hectic writing schedule. Do you get much time to enjoy and obsess over any weird hobbies?

David: Sadly, things are pretty scant on the weird hobby front these days.  Nothing quite prepares you for the demands of writing a novel in a year around a full time day job, but it doesn’t leave much in the way of free time.  I listen to a lot of music and watch a lot of films; those are the things that keep me more or less sane.  Does decorating count as a hobby?  I’ve been doing a heck of a lot of that lately.  I bought a hundred year old house that hasn’t seen a lot of love in recent decades, and I’m busy renovating it, with the help of my folks, into the writer’s sanctuary of my dreams.

Ryan: Giant Thief introduces us to Easie Damasco, the happy go lucky thief who steals anything and everything in sight. How much of your own personality do you see in Easie?

 

David: I always hope that one of these days someone will come up to me at a Con, tell me how much they enjoyed one of my books and offer to buy me a drink, so I have to be careful what I say here.  I’d hate to think that people might avoid purchasing me alcohol because they were worried I might have off with their wallet!

All I consciously gave Damasco was my sense of humour, or at least the snarkier aspects of it, and his random outbursts of kindness towards animals.  But there are days when I wonder if we’re not a little bit more alike than I’d care to admit!  Certainly when I was writing much of Giant Thief, I’d moved to a new city and I was living quite a secluded life … I think Damasco got stuck with a lot of that.  He’s the perpetual outsider, not quite sure how to get inside or even if he wants to.  Perhaps if I’d been going out more in those days he’d have ended up a little less obnoxious!

David: That’s a tough one.  I haven’t read any of the books that Giant Thief has been drawing comparisons to when I wrote it, and although I’d like to now – I’m really itching to read some Joe Abercrombie, for example – I just haven’t had the time yet.  Truth be told, I’m far more up on movies than books, and I know there’s been a massive resurgence in crime cinema over the last decade or so.  You just have to look at some of the films that have been coming out of South Korea, or lately, Australia.  I guess that people are a little more willing to root for the bad guys when things aren’t going so well; perhaps there’s something about a global recession that makes readers that bit more tolerant to characters that aren’t following the rules.  Maybe, too, hard times make us a little less willing to overlook the scarier things that are going on out there in the world.

Ryan: I seem to be reading a heck of a lot of thief and heist stories at the moment. Do you think there is any reason in particular why these stories are so popular at the moment?

David: That’s a tough one.  I haven’t read any of the books that Giant Thief has been drawing comparisons to when I wrote it, and although I’d like to now – I’m really itching to read some Joe Abercrombie, for example – I just haven’t had the time yet.  Truth be told, I’m far more up on movies than books, and I know there’s been a massive resurgence in crime cinema over the last decade or so.  You just have to look at some of the films that have been coming out of South Korea, or lately, Australia.  I guess that people are a little more willing to root for the bad guys when things aren’t going so well; perhaps there’s something about a global recession that makes readers that bit more tolerant to characters that aren’t following the rules.  Maybe, too, hard times make us a little less willing to overlook the scarier things that are going on out there in the world.

Then again, I think there’s a risk of looking for trends where they don’t necessarily exist.  Maybe it’s just that thieves and heists are popular because we’ve had a glut of terrific thief and heist stories lately and people haven’t had time to get weary of those tropes yet.

Ryan: Does it say something about our society that we continue to devour these dark and gritty books about morally ambiguous people doing nasty things to others?

David: I don’t know that I ever thought of Giant Thief as being dark or gritty.  I wanted it to be very ground-level fantasy, but I don’t know that that’s the same thing.  Also, the humour was always in the forefront for me … but then, I have a fairly odd sense of humour.  I find Damasco funny, for example, at least most of the time, and I think I underestimated just how much his despicable behaviour would annoy some readers!

The thing is, life is frequently unpleasant and violent, and there are plenty of morally ambiguous people out there doing nasty things to each other.  To me, Damasco isn’t an anti-hero; his behaviour is a more extreme example of how I suspect I or most people would behave in the circumstances he’s thrown into.  Most people don’t react to danger with heroics.  Most people get scared or angry or frustrated.  Personally, I like to read about characters I can relate to on some level, even if they’re not necessarily people I’d want to spend time with.

Ryan: The Giant Thief has a lot of Spanish stylings in the naming conventions, the lay of the land, and overall feel of the book. Did this require a lot of research on your part or did the whole thing come straight from your head?

David: Well, there are bits of Spain and other southern European countries, but I poached from all over really; Mexico offered up a lot of the terrain, and Morocco was a big influence on the city architecture.  I did a certain amount of research in the later drafts, to try and get clear in my head some of the things that I’d described the first time through.  There’s a town, in Italy if I remember rightly, that looks a lot like what I imagined Muena Palaiya to be, and that fed into the final description.  I’ve never felt the need for veracity, as such, since the Castoval is obviously a made-up place and not in any way an attempt to represent historical Spain or historical anywhere else … but I realised that photo reference is useful for injecting a bit of realism and practicality into my imaginings.

Ryan: I’ve been caught out a few times calling your book The Giant Thief, and I’ve seen a number of reviewers do the same thing. How frustrating is that for you?

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