All I wanted to do was write a light-hearted detective story in the hard-boiled tradition, with a little squeeze of fantasy just to juice things up. What I never planned to do was invent a whole other world.
It happened like this. After a delightful weekend reading Dashiell Hammett stories, I got the urge to pull up my collar and go sleuthing myself. The result was a story called The Wooden Baby, in which a down-at-heel private investigator takes on a curious case involving a fairy changeling.
The Wooden Baby was my attempt at mashing together the two genres of crime and fantasy into a squirming hybrid. I also wanted to find a way to distil the classic gumshoe archetype down to his essence. This interest in the archetype, by the way, is one of the reasons I haven’t yet told you the fellow’s name. I certainly never intended for that one story to develop into a series. But, shortly after I’d written The Wooden Baby, something peculiar happened … read the rest of this article on the 40kBooks blog.
Graham Edwards 