My favourite mention of The Fallen Blade so far calls it, ‘Two books occupying the same page space.’ And describes those as, ‘An adventure fantasy with a smidgeon of romance, great hordes of vampires and werewolves and, of course, plenty of swordplay.’ Mixed with, ‘A fantastic evocation of Renaissance Venice… the beauty of the culture it gave birth to and the merciless, brutally violent and Machiavellian politics that ran alongside it.’ [Guardian, UK]

My favourite, simply because that’s *precisely* what I was aiming to do.

When a reader commented on Facebook that the only thing the review missed was the, ‘Shakespeare casserole… delicious, and not too filling,’ it was time to crack open a cold beer. Because riffing off the first half of Othello was part of the fun. And I’m already enjoying myself riffing off the second half (and the first half of Hamlet) in the second book, which I’m now editing.

When I told my brother-in-law I was going to set my next book in Venice he looked at me and said, ‘My, that’s original.’ (Management consultants like stating the obvious). And, obviously, Venice has been the setting for so many novels and poems and plays and films it seem impossible that anyone could find anything new to say. But the point is, everyone who goes sees a different city.

Venice is what you bring to it.

It mirrors back at us what we’re interested in.

History, God knows there’s enough of that. Bars and taverns. High end shopping. Modern art exhibitions. Film festivals. Glorious churches. A palace so absurdly fantastic that it looks made from spun sugar and cake. Who other that the Venetians could house their dukes in a palace with no defences?

When pretty much every other prince in Europe hid behind castle walls the Venetian doges lived in glorious if fragile splendour. Why would they need defensive walls? The whole lagoon was their moat, and more than one invasion fleet run aground on the mud flats and were slaughtered at Venetian leisure.

The point is, Venice was fantastic enough already.

Onto this fantastical city I could layer a whole other reality of what was really happening. A hidden war between empires use crack troops of mages and werewolves to break each other’s morale. And then toss into boiling political mess a creature no enemy had faced before; Tycho, the last of one line and the first of a new.

What other city in the world — nowdays — has no cars, buses or trucks?

Until you’ve been to Venice and been shocked by the realisation, after a day or two probably, that everyone in this city walks everywhere (with water busses filling in for longer journeys), you appreciate this is what it must been like in ancient cities. Men drag carts loaded with crates of food through narrow streets. People stagger up over bridges bent almost double under goods. People stop, nod, touch their hats, call greetings to each other.

A year ago someone dumped a 1950s American car next to the Grand Canal as part of an art exhibition. Coming on it unexpectedly was as strange as suddenly stumbling over a dead dragon.

Life flows at a human pace. This sense of life being lived in public, of streets being an extension of houses, and public squares being where small children play football, teenagers flirt and find dark doorways, adults tut and decide to get a drink anyway, is what I wanted to capture.

I love Venice and it probably shows.

The city also unnerves me with its strangeness, with the impossible to ignore feeling that its ghosts outnumber the living. If fallen angels were discovered living in crumbling palaces, few people who’ve been there would be surprised.