When planning the Guy Fawkes: Demon Hunter trilogy, I was sure about one thing: I wanted escalation in each book. That figures in terms of what’s at stake, and the different threats faced, but one significant way the series escalates is in terms of the scale of the setting.
A Clangour of Bells:
The first book is very much a coming-of-age story, and as such Guy Fawkes’ birthplace is of huge significance. Luckily for me, Guy Fawkes was born in York, which is an amazing city, so I was happy to spend time there both in my head and in person. In York, today, you can still walk down Stonegate, the street on which Guy Fawkes was born. You can pass through Bootham Bar, as Guy Fawkes would have done on the way to school. York Minster is still a major landmark in the city. Here, York’s history is Guy Fawkes’ history. Major events that happened in York at the time became part of the story, including the real history of Margaret Clitherow.
There are a couple of other locations visited in the novel. Saint Robert’s Cave becomes an important base of operations for the young demon hunters. This is only 17 miles outside York. The only other place any kind of distance from the city is Selby Abbey, a mere 13 miles away. There’s talk of events in Durham, but Guy never gets there, not until the second book.
A Dream of Demons:
In the second book, Guy has to take responsibility for himself and his actions. His first action is a trip to Durham, some 75 miles away. From the start, this establishes that this story is taking us on a journey, and it goes to a lot of different places within the UK. But because it’s not easy to cut our ties with our place of origin, of course, we spend some time in York again. History plays a part in where the story took me, so when Guy Fawkes’ mother remarried, we had to go to Scotton, almost 20 miles from the city of York.
We get to visit some pretty extraordinary places in England, including the amazing Brimham Rocks. On the day I visited, it absolutely poured with rain, but it didn’t take anything away from the wonder of the place.
But Guy’s travels down stop there. After a disaster, Guy needs to find himself again, and as such, he hits the road, travelling south. Guy Fawkes is said to have worked at Cowdray House for a period of time, so he had to head towards the south coast, stopping by Oxford University en route, but finding it not to his liking.
With this escalation in setting, came an escalation in the scale of what he was doing, and getting involved in royalty led to a visit to London, taking in royal palaces too.
A Diabolical Plot:
Obviously, the story has to end up back in London, but it’s a fact that Guy Fawkes fought for the Spanish in Europe. This meant further escalation was possible. Given the reach of the Spanish stretched a considerable distance, this gave me the freedom to send Guy Fawkes far and wide in this novel.
But then I stumbled on a little something called the Anglo-Moroccan Alliance and saw an opportunity to send Guy Fawkes further afield still. Part of that alliance was the trade of saltpetre, something required to make gunpowder, and I figured if gunpowder was involved, Guy Fawkes would be interested in that, so this need for escalation sent him as far as the Atlas Mountains. The story takes in many locations in Spain – Cordoba, Madrid, Bilbao, and cities in northern Europe including Calais and Nieuwpoort before Guy Fawkes’ inevitable return to England.
But his time in England is not confined to the capital. He knows his acts have a finality to them, and as such, they bring up back to where we began with a visit to the city of York, where it’s time to say goodbye to some ghosts before the events escalate further with thoughts of regicide and mass murder.
The final book in the Guy Fawkes: Demon Hunter trilogy, A Diabolical Plot, is available now.