Final foray into a war-torn medieval world

Today sees the publication of my fourth historical novel, THE DARK ARMY. It’s something of a celebration. ‘Happy Publishing Day to me’, as they say. But it’s also a sombre occasion, because while I’ve enjoyed writing in this genre, this will probably be my last venture there. If you stay with this blog, you’ll see what I mean by that …

The bulk of my professional writing career has been spent in the twin realms of crime/thriller fiction and horror. I have occasionally ventured out of those confines into science-fiction (Dr Who etc) and fantasy (two of my early novels, STRONGHOLD and DARK NORTH, while they’re technically set in the Middle Ages, are out-and-out works of sword and sorcery).

But I was seriously diverted into one of the great loves of my life, historical adventure fiction, during the Covid crisis. Though my most successful books by far have been contemporary crime thrillers, and that’s the path I’ll continue to follow doggedly, during those awful years of lockdown I found myself, as so many of us did, having submitted work and waiting for long periods of time – much longer than I was used to – for a response. To fill these hours, I speculatively began to write a novel that I’d pitched neither to my agent nor any publisher, called USURPER.

It was an idea I’d had since I was a teenage wannabe but which I’d never done anything with. Its central character was Cerdic, a young Saxon earl, a boy really, whose holdings are overrun in 1066 by Harald Hardraada’s Viking insurgents during what eventually becomes the Norman Conquest of England. His family are all killed and he himself is taken prisoner after he fights in the battle of Hastings … but Cerdic is determined that this won’t be the end of it.

Through various machinations, turning Viking against Viking, and even Norman against Norman, and through numerous of the most intense combat sequences I’ve ever written, Cerdic works his way back to a position from where he can strike to reclaim both his title and his ancestral lands.

As I say, I completed the book during lockdown, but was a little surprised when I saw that its final length came to 180,000 words … which though some historical novels are twice the size of books in other genres, suggested that it might prove a difficult sell. However, my agent, the wonderful Kate Burke, came up with the idea to cut it down the middle, in other words transform it into two novels. So, I did, and the second book, BATTLE LORD, was born. This second phase of the saga literally commences the day after the events on the last page of USURPER and is pretty well a direct continuation of the tale.

A more manageable package, we were then able to sell the two-book series to Canelo, part of the Penguin publishing group. Canelo opted to publish the titles as THE WULFBURY CHRONICLES under the author name, PW Finch, just to put a little blue water between these and my more familiar crime novels. But they enjoyed the duology so much that they commissioned another two in a similar vein, though, at my own instigation, not in the same series.

It was my view that Cerdic’s story had been told to completion in the first two books. Instead, I pitched Canelo THE DEVIL’S KNIGHT, another action-packed medieval yarn concerning the same family of minor Anglo-Saxon nobility, though a hundred years had now passed and they’d been absorbed into the feudal Anglo-Norman culture of 12th century England. They’re not so much powerful barons in this second series – all the Saxon nobles lost their titles in due course after the Conquest – but landed knights, expert warriors whose duty is to fight and kill the king’s enemies in return for his favour.

Before I’d even put pen to paper on this one, I’d sketched it out and saw that this one too could only be told fully at formidable length, again somewhere between 180,000 and 200,000 words. And so, yes, again it seemed right to divide it into two. As before, Canelo were happy to oblige.

THE DEVIL’S KNIGHT, the first of the two books, was thus published in 2025, and told the story of Thurstan Wildblood, a descendent of Cerdic and a man raised entirely in the martial household of a great marcher-lord, and who has now fought his way to pre-eminence in the equally warlike court of Richard the Lionheart.

When Richard embarks for the Holy Land, on what will later be called the Third Crusade but which at the time is known simply as the Great Pilgrimage, Thurstan goes with him in command of a company of elite warriors.

Of course, when the crusade gets underway, it’s a nightmarish ordeal: the heat, the dust, the flies, the endless killing, the back-stabbing among so-called allies, and the limitless numbers of Muslim soldiers who continue to pour into the theatre from North Africa, constantly, bolstering Sultan Saladin’s armies, so that no matter how many of them Richard decimates, there are always more to come.

When Richard is forced to make a treaty with Saladin so that he might return home, where his treacherous brother, Prince John, and King Philip of France are now carving up his domains between them, the wily Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury-in-waiting, sees a way to offset the inevitable accusations of failure that will follow. Thurstan is charged with abducting a Coptic Christian girl, Melinda of Jerusalem, from her Muslim captors. Melinda reputedly has the power to pray over wounded men and instantly heal them, and so if Thurstan can return her to Canterbury, where the English Church can proclaim her a living saint, she’ll be deemed one of the greatest prizes that any crusader king could ever have secured.

The problem is that this abduction and cross-continental odyssey must be done in complete secrecy and therefore by land. Even as great medieval quests go, this one is virtually impossible.

First of all, the desert-begirt St Hildegard’s Tower, where Melinda is being held, is all but impregnable, but even after the excessively bloody rescue/kidnapping succeeds, Thurstan and his small company of hand-picked companions face a journey of staggering distance.

To make matters worse, in the Land of Demons that the Middle East has descended into, it proves impossible to conceal this information, and very soon, all manner of enemies are on their tail, seeking to acquire the saint for themselves, not just lawless bands of battle-scarred knights, but Saladin’s most zealous and fanatical followers, the sect of Assassins, and even Christendom’s own elite corps, the Knights Templar, who wish to take her to Rome instead.

But Thurstan has one advantage over all these others. Earlier in the war, while trapped in a fever dream caused by an infected wound, he was confronted by an arch-devil, Belphagor, the so-called Bishop of Hell, who was drawn to him by the vast toll of lives Thurstan had already accounted for but who in payment for the knight’s soul, offered him complete and total invincibility in battle. When Thurstan recovered from this near-death experience, no one took his vision seriously. He was dreaming, they said. But now, mysteriously, even Thurstan, who was always massively adept in combat, appeared to have improved beyond all recognition. He was literally unbeatable with sword in hand. As the war proceeded, he won fight after fight, but secretly, has been haunted ever since by concern that his soul might indeed be forfeit, that he might be damned to eternity in the chasms of Hell.

And yet now, from out of nowhere, he’s been presented with this possibility. If he can save this living saint, surely his soul will also be saved?

Might it even be prophetic? Is there maybe a reason he has been granted this unnatural physical prowess... if indeed there is anything unnatural about it at all?  

Either way, the problem is that lethal obstacles now face them. The tormented knight’s comrades fall one by one, leaving only Melinda and his young squire, Pandulf, by his side. Against the unsurvivable scale of threat they now face … to save this saint, Thurstan must again become a devil.

And thus begins THE DARK ARMY ...     

So, why ... ?

... will this be my last foray into this genre? Well, it’s a hard but straightforward truth: we can’t just take our readership wherever we’d like it to go. For me, writing fiction is all about entertaining the masses, and ‘my masses’ are primarily interested in dark contemporary crime thrillers. Some have crossed over and enjoyed these blood-soaked medieval romps, but others have commented politely and then asked in the next breath: ‘But when is the next Heck novel coming out?’ ‘When is the next Lucy Clayburn coming out?’ ‘When are we going to get another stand-alone urban noir, filled with psychotic criminals and hardened anti-hero detectives?’

I can’t stand against that tide, so that’s where I’ll be focussed from now on.

I’ve had a lot of fun writing these medieval actioners. In truth, I’m bursting with further ideas for them, but reality is reality. Hopefully, those who are interested will enjoy the four that are already out there – USURPER, BATTLE LORD, THE DEVIL’S KNIGHT and, of course, today’s publication, THE DARK ARMY (the second and final part of the Thurstan Wildblood series) – and please feel free to tell the world if you do. There’ll certainly be nothing lost in that.

Thanks for the image at the top to Stockcake.com.