My first concept for Pagans had a much more high fantasy concept than the final result. I wanted to write something about a swords and sorcery world, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth or George RR Martin’s Westeros, that had trundled along for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, then suddenly had an industrial revolution with all the resulting social changes. Now, a couple of hundred years later, that world looked very much like our own, with housing estates and mobile phones, but all the fantasy elements, the dragons and monsters and dark magic pushed back to the edges and half-forgotten.
I started writing, only for it to fizzle out after a few thousand words, mainly because I wasn’t sure what the plot was. I hoped one would come along if I wrote enough, but it turned out that’s not really how plots work. You’d think I’d know this, having been writing for television for years at this point, but I’d only ever needed enough structure to get me through a single episode of a kids’ animated show like Shaun the Sheep or Hey Duggee, and the more adult shows I wrote for, like Green Wing or Campus, were written more like sketch shows, where we found a structure as we went along, but this didn’t really work for me in prose. Also, in those shows, we wrote about ten times more material that ever got filmed, so it wasn’t very practical to carry that across to a book.
A Very Different Britain
Still, the idea stayed in my head, slowly evolving into something based much more on real history, with Britain’s past of successive waves of Roman, Saxon and Viking invasion and immigration forever changing a land that had once belonged to a Celtic people. Except in this world, technological breakthroughs happened elsewhere, with Britain remaining a backward nation in a world ruled by a Pan-African superpower, a Mughal Empire and a liberal Islamic regime making up a European Caliphate. This Britain had an East/West divide: a Saxon England with various Celtic tribes displaced to the West, those who dwell in the West doing so as second-class citizens. To the North, behind a Wall fortified with border towers and searchlights is a powerful independent Scotland with little interest in its backward Southern neighbour.
But I still wasn’t sure how to tell this story, until I started watching obsessed with Nordic Noir shows like The Killing and The Bridge. Suddenly I realised I had the perfect way into this world: two mismatched cops from different cultures investigation a ritualistic killing that seemed to be victimising an unfamiliar religion in this world of modern paganism, where the closest thing to an English state religion is worships of the old gods like Woden and Tiw: an underground religion from a faraway land, whose symbol is a fish…
Police Procedural
Telling this story as a police procedural also meant my characters would be focused solely on investigating the murder (and further murders). There would be no need for me to digress and explain exactly where their history had diverged from our own, or what was going on elsewhere in the world, because it simply wouldn’t occur to the protagonists to do so. I could drip feed information about this alternate history into the story as and when the protagonists encountered it, letting the reader build up their own picture of what was going on rather than try and spoon feed it to them.
Even so, I probably still wouldn’t have got any further with it if it hadn’t been for a worldwide pandemic and lockdown. The projects I’d been developing with my regular comedy co-writers all went into stasis and suddenly I had nothing to do. I was lucky enough my wife, a tech copywriter, had more work than she could handle, so at we could at least keep paying the mortgage. Our two children were attending school online, while I did the shopping and cooking, then we’d go out for a walk in the afternoon, but this did leave me some free time during the mornings. It occurred to me then that if I didn’t start writing Pagans now, I never would.
A year later, I had a first draft. My agent, James Spackman, took it to numerous publishers, many of seemed genuinely to like it, but had no idea what to do with it. After another year, we were about to give up when James told me he’d heard about a new indie publisher called Moonflower, who were interested in popular fiction but wanted stories with a twist. He sent the manuscript to their editor, Emma Waring, and soon afterwards we got to have some really fun discussions, nowhere near as many edits as I’d feared and then, suddenly, Pagans was on the shelves.
(c) James Alistair Henry
About Pagans by James Alistair Henry:
21st Century London.
The Norman conquest never happened.
The ancient tribes of Britain remain undefeated.
But murders still have to be solved.
The small, mostly unimportant, island of Britain is inhabited by an uneasy alliance of tribes – the dominant Saxon East, the beleaguered Celtic West, and an independent Nordic Scotland – and tensions are increasing by the second. Supermarket warpaint sales are at an all- time high, mead abuse shortens the lives of thousands, and social media is abuzz with conspiracy theories suggesting the High Table’s putting GPS trackers in the honeycakes.
Amid this febrile atmosphere, the capital is set to play host to the Unification Summit, which aims to join together the various tribes into one ‘united kingdom’. But when a Celtic diplomat is found brutally murdered, his body nailed to an ancient oak, the fragile peace is threatened. Captain Aedith Mercia, daughter of a powerful Saxon leader, must join forces with Celtic Tribal Detective Inspector Drustan to solve the murder – and stop political unrest spilling onto the streets.
But is this an isolated incident? Or are Aedith and Drustan facing a serial killer with a decades-old grudge? To find out, they must delve into their own murky pasts and tackle forces that go deeper than they ever could have imagined.
Set in a world that’s far from our own and yet captivatingly familiar, Pagans is “The Bridge” meets “Vikings”, exploring contemporary themes of religious conflict, nationalism, prejudice… and the delicate internal politics of the office coffee round. Gripping and darkly funny, Pagans keeps you guessing until the very end.
Pagans by James Alistair Henry is out now in paperback (Moonflower Books, £9.99). Order your copy online here.
And read more Meet the Authors of Crime Fiction on Writing.ie here.
