Basil Creese

I have always moved between different forms of storytelling. As a musician, I learned how atmosphere, rhythm and structure can carry an idea before I began applying those lessons consciously to fiction. Writing cultural and political pieces for magazines gave me another way of examining the world, but fiction offered the freedom to take those concerns further. It allowed me to build societies, follow political ideas to their most unsettling conclusions and explore how ordinary people survive the systems imposed upon them.

Dark Red Traces was initially conceived as a graphic novel. When that collaboration failed, sheer bloody-mindedness made me rebuild the project as prose rather than abandon it. The novel later earned me a place among the winners of the Black Breakthrough Writers Award. That experience, and the response of the other writers on the programme, confirmed that the characters and world had the potential I believed they possessed.

Alan Moore has been a major influence, particularly in the way he combines politics, mythology, popular culture and formal experimentation. I have an exhaustive collection of his comics, novels and prose. His recent works such as Providence, Jerusalem and The Great When demonstrate how a fictional world can extend far beyond a conventional linear narrative.

I also admire Richard Stark’s Parker novels, especially The Hunter, for their economy, moral coldness and refusal to make their protagonist conventionally likeable. Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels showed me the pleasure of placing a highly capable central character inside a heightened world of danger and conspiracy. Zephaniah Chapel emerged partly from my desire to combine something of Bond’s reach and physical competence with Parker’s pragmatism and emotional austerity.

More recently, I have greatly enjoyed Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series and its companion novellas. Herron combines espionage, institutional failure, political anger and very dark humour without sacrificing narrative momentum. That balance is something I value enormously as both a writer and reader.

The politics matter, but the story comes first. I want readers to enter a vivid world, meet dangerous and complicated people, and feel compelled to discover what happens next. Dark Red Traces contains political satire, speculative technology and an examination of authoritarian Britain, but it is also a hard-boiled thriller about survival, betrayal and the unexpected obligations we acquire towards other people.

The world can be bleak, but the books are not without humour, music, tenderness or resistance. Albion may possess the aircraft, prisons, surveillance systems and Mech Troopers, but it never entirely controls the people it has attempted to discard.

I would also tell new readers not to expect Zephaniah Chapel to introduce himself as a hero. He is cynical, violent, self-interested and initially determined to remain responsible for nobody except himself. His humanity has to fight its way to the surface. That journey is central to the story.

Zephaniah Chapel remains my favourite. He began as an attempt to create a Black British protagonist who possessed the strategic intelligence, physical competence and narrative authority traditionally reserved for characters such as James Bond, Jack Reacher and Richard Stark’s Parker.

I did not want Chapel to be morally uncomplicated. At the beginning of Dark Red Traces, he is a former Albion soldier labouring in drought-stricken fields and selling his military skills as muscle for hire. He has survived imprisonment, betrayal and service to a country which subsequently decided that people like him no longer belonged on the mainland. Cynicism is not an affectation for him; it is protective equipment.

When other Black Breakthrough Writers Award winners critiqued the opening of the novel, they were immediately struck by how cold and anti-heroic Chapel appeared. That reaction reassured me because it meant the beginning of his character arc was working. He needs to start from a place of emotional isolation for his later choices to matter.

What makes him compelling to write is the conflict between the man he claims to be and the man revealed by his actions. He insists that everything is transactional, but repeatedly discovers obligations which cannot be settled with money.

I want to build a substantial and interconnected body of work. Dark Red Traces is the first Zephaniah Chapel novel, and I am developing the second, Cruelty of Shadows. The series will continue exploring Albion, the occupied Island and the political and corporate forces profiting from that relationship.

I am also developing The Dark Red Dossier, a companion volume designed to sit between the first two Chapel novels. It expands the world through short stories, journalism, government propaganda, intelligence assessments, song lyrics and recovered documents. Its approach lies somewhere between Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s Black Dossier and Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novellas. It allows resistance fighters, collaborators, workers, criminals and ordinary Island residents to occupy the centre of their own stories.

Alongside the Chapel series, I have written Lost Gods: Pillar of Ashes, the first novel in a horror-fantasy series about an immortal living among us. I intend to continue developing that world as well.

My long-term aim is to create a bibliography in which every book leads naturally towards another. I want readers who discover one story to find an entire shelf of worlds, characters and histories waiting behind it.