Amazon Interview with David Gemmell
| Source: Amazon | 
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You have always written about heroes, the varieties of heroism and the dash and style that go with heroism.
It goes back to my mother, who was an outrageous woman, a single mother in a period when that made you a pariah on the outside of society. She was a cockney who taught herself Revived Standard Pronunciation and went on the stage. She told me stories when I was a child; Horatius on the bridge was a great favourite and she was keen on stressing the importance of style. From her I got my love of history and myth; she also raised me to be something of a poser and told me never to rush into a room but to pause in the doorway for maximum effect. When I was 14, fat and knock-kneed, she called me for an audience in the bedroom where she was lounging and sent me off to a friend of hers. He showed me how Yul Brynner, John Wayne and Robert Mitchum walked, and asked me which walk I wanted to learn as a way of getting rid of the knock knees. I opted for a combination of Wayne and Brynner.
Growing up in West London, I knew my share of gravel-voiced hard men and later on, as a journalist, I interviewed mercenaries and members of the SAS. What they had in common was a sort of focus, a capacity to break a job or a crisis down into the immediate next thing to take care of with no thought about long-term risks. They also had in common a refusal ever to bluff. One of them tossed me a coin once and said to catch it, and I did; he then said to imagine he had a gun to my mother's head and to catch it, and I said that would be harder. But it would not have been for him. I used that scene in Waylander, of course.
Jon Shannow, in The Jerusalem Man, is largely based on a friend of mine who ended up in jail for armed robbery. When I was a young journalist, I wrote about a Rachman-style landlord who threatened me; just round the corner from a cafe he owned, I was jumped and beaten and hospitalized. My friend went to his cafe, which was full of his men, checked which one of them was him, and then laid into him with a length of pipe, facing down the others. I knew people like that, so I write about them.
You grew up in the city and live in the country; there is a town/country opposition in your work
My mother had a friend, a man with waist-length hair in the 1950s, who used to lie on the grass with his shirt off to absorb the energies of the Earth. He told me that stone blocks were magic and I suppose that is what I think.
You write about the defence of traditional ways of life...
I want the work to speak for itself, implicitly. "He that has ears let him hear." I don't like to talk about the ideas of the work too much...
You have always written series and have tended to have more than one on the go at any one time.
It is all to do with marketing. I did not particularly intend to be a fantasy writer but after I wrote Legend, they asked me for another fantasy novel; and after I wrote King Beyond the Gate, it narrowed down further to another Drenai book. If readers and publishers like what I have done in a single book, then I will do it again. My books are always intended to have the capacity to stand alone--the Stones of Power books are only linked by the stones, the Rigante books by the Rigante people at various points.
Do you do much research?
I used to write everything out of my own head and now I hire researchers to keep track of what I have already said. What I do research for myself is simple things, like how to steal a bull. I am not someone who does a year of research before writing--that would bore me to tears.
