What inspired you to write the Brethren Trilogy?

Back in 1999, I was in a pub with two friends who were having a conversation about the Templar Knights. I listened, intrigued by the idea of these medieval warrior monks. Some months later, I came across The Trial of the Templars, by historian, Malcolm Barber, which details the dramatic downfall of the Order. The trial, masterminded by the French King, Philippe IV, saw the eventual dissolution of this two-hundred-year-old Order, one of the most powerful, influential and affluent of their day. It also saw the imprisonment, torture and execution of hundreds of men across Europe, the descriptions of which made for a harrowing read. By the end of the book I knew I wanted to tell their story.


How long did it take to write the books?

From concept to creation, Brethren, the first in the trilogy, was seven years in the making. I had to do a lot of research before I began. The story was initially told in first-person with Will as an old man in Scotland, looking back on his life. When the agent I now work with read the synopsis, he loved the idea, but didn’t like the perspective. On his advice, I switched to third-person. After this, the novel, which soon became a trilogy, began to take shape. Two years after our initial correspondence, the agent signed me up, but it would be another two years before we found a publisher. By the time I came to write Crusade and Requiem, I had years of research and writing under my belt – I also had deadlines – each took around nine months to finish.


Did you study history?

Not since school, and then it was Victorian architecture and Vietnam, neither of which resonated with me much. The enormity of the task I’d set myself became apparent when I read my first book on the Crusades. That one book soon turned into one hundred, alongside a growing pile of folders filled with notes, maps and sketches of siege engines. I love the little details you find by accident, when looking for something else. I remember researching the layout of the Tower of London one day and coming across a passage that mentioned that King Henry III had a pet elephant. That had to go in. In the end, readers only see a small percentage of what I actually researched in the books themselves.


How much of the story is fact?

The three books are a mix of fact and fiction. The battles, locations, period detail and histories of the real characters portrayed are factual in the main, with a dollop of artistic license where necessary. I would say Requiem is the most fact-based of the three. Alongside my fictional characters, figures such as the Scottish rebel leader, William Wallace, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, and the notorious French and English kings, Edward I (known as the Hammer of the Scots) and Philippe IV (known as "the Fair", a reference to his good looks, not his temperament) play a major part. The plot is spun around events that occurred during the period: the beginning of the Anglo-Scottish wars, the French king's attack on the pope and the arrest, trial and fall of the Templars, which forms the main thrust of the narrative.


Where do you write?

In my study, straight onto the computer, surrounded by teetering piles of books. I’d love to be one of those authors who can scribble away in a noisy café, but alas I need silence.


Where do you get your inspiration from?

First and foremost from the history. There are so many incredible things that happened during this period, I don’t have to look far to find something that will liven up, or advance the narrative. When I started the trilogy, I knew there were certain historical events that I wanted to use in the books. I weave my own plot and fictional characters around these events, which can be complex to say the least. I find inspiration for individual scenes can come from almost anywhere, mostly when I don’t have a pen handy.


How do your characters come to you?

The real ones obviously from historical sources, although I do have to put personalities onto them and bring them to life, often from scattered and disparate facts. The fictional ones come from anywhere and everywhere. Sometimes they take lots of work, other times they introduce themselves. Everard barged right past me, plonked himself onto the page and said, this is me, this is my voice and it’s tough if you don’t like it. Garin was extremely painstaking; I had to work and work to find who he was, doing numerous character outlines, working out his history. Will was organic. When we first meet him, at thirteen, he views his world with a certain naivety, which is pretty much how I entered his world, not having studied the period before. He grew with me and my voice as the novel progressed. I think in many ways he is me.


What attracted you to this period in history?

The knights initially attracted me to the period, or specifically their demise. But soon after I began my research the story expanded to include the great events and people of this time: the Crusades, royal assassinations, court intrigue and political turmoil. I love the richness of the age and the feeling there must have been, as trade lines and borders opened up, that the world was new and waiting to be discovered.


Was the Anima Templi real?

The Anima Templi is my creation, although I don’t believe it to be an improbable one. Acre, the Crusaders’ capital after the fall of Jerusalem, was a melting-pot of cultures, races and religions. People learned to get along because they relied on one another for trade and commerce. They made alliances, friendships. It’s simple to think of the Crusades as one long war, but in truth there were many years of peace between the conflicts. The “Shepherd’s Crusade,” which I recount in Crusade, occurred because new arrivals from the West had no idea of the balance, albeit delicate, that existed in Acre between Christians, Muslims and Jews. They set about slaughtering the local inhabitants and it was only thanks to forces such as the Templars that the massacre wasn’t even greater. I thought it reasonable to imagine that some men of the time might want to work to keep this peace.


Did current affairs shape your telling of the historical story?

When I changed perspective from first-person to third, early on in the writing of Brethren, it enabled me to open the story to a multitude of voices. By this point I had already decided that this would be a story of the Crusades as much as a story of the Templars. I had also come across the Mamluk warrior, Baybars, in the course of my research and had been captivated. The third-person narrative meant I could explore the Crusades from both Christian and Muslim points of view. Initially, what I was writing seemed like ancient history. 9/11 changed that. On that day I was writing a speech where Baybars proclaims a new jihad against the West. After this and during the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq that followed, with members of the British government calling for a Crusade, the world I was writing about and the world I lived in came eerily closer. This made the historical conflict I was exploring more real and gave the project a relevance that wasn’t quite so apparent in the earlier stages. However, despite these unexpected similarities and the sudden topicality of the novel, Brethren remained at its heart an adventure story, rather than a criticism of current political events. When I come to the computer to write, I have to “step over” into the thirteenth century. To do that effectively, I can’t be actively thinking about the modern world.


Why did you decide to write a trilogy?

The inspiration for Brethren came from the Templars’ downfall, so that was always going to form a large part of the narrative. My original starting point changed, however, when I began researching Baybars and the Mamluks, and the story split. After I read about the battle of Ayn Jalut, where the Mongols were defeated for the first time, I knew that was where I wanted to begin. But that meant that I would be covering a period from 1260 to the end of the Order in 1314, and because there were now two narratives to contend with, plus a rapidly-growing number of battles and events I wanted to cover, there was simply no way to squeeze it all into one book! The narrative lends itself to three separate novels, which follow on from one another, yet which each have their own specific story-line.


Is Brethren your first novel?

Brethren is my first published novel. I wrote two books of a planned fantasy series in my early twenties, but neither was published. I can look back on them now and see why. But they were fun to write and got me over my fear of the massive word counts involved in novel writing.


How do you write a novel?

When I was 14, I won a poetry award. The awards were handed out during a prize-giving evening by a novelist, a mature, rather grave-looking gentleman (I have no idea who he was). All through the ceremony, I was building a question in my mind, which had started to form when I was told that he was an author. Finally, when the evening finished, I crept nervously up to him and asked my question. “How do you write a novel?” It was a good question, I thought. There must surely be some definitive answer, a Rosetta stone with which I would unlock the secret. And I wanted to know, I really wanted to know, because for some time, I had wanted to write one. He looked down at me, shook his head at my apparent idiocy and gruffly replied. “You just do.” I was gutted. What kind of an answer was that? How could I possibly write one without knowing how? It wasn’t until ten years later that I understood. You really just do.

You start with an idea and you set the words to the page until months, or decades later, you have a novel. Some writers I know have an overall idea of what the novel will be about, but invent it as they go and don’t always work in chronological order. Personally, I cannot start writing until I have the plot worked out, with detailed notes for each chapter, and I work through from the first word to the last in order


What do you do when you’re not writing?

I love spending time with friends, going to the theatre, listening to music, cooking – anything to relax after a hard day in the thirteenth century. I mostly avoid television, although I’m addicted to films and DVD box-sets! I’ve recently taken up photography, ice-skating and horse riding, the last in the name of research – I’m learning that the hardest thing about it is the floor.


Who is your favourite author?

I am firmly of the belief that to be a good writer you have to be a good reader and therefore I read almost anything. My study is lined with books, from Wilbur Smith to Will Self. I don’t have one favourite author, or book. I’ve liked different things at different times in my life and I find what I pick off my shelves depends entirely on my mood. Some days, I want to be challenged, other days I want to be swept into an adventure. But to give you an idea, here’s a selection of some of my most memorable reads to date, in no particular order:


  • The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis.
  • The Dark is Rising Series, Susan Cooper.
  • His Dark Materials Trilogy, Philip Pullman.
  • The Warlord Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell.
  • A Cook’s Tour, Anthony Bourdain.
  • Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson.
  • Macbeth, Shakespeare.
  • An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears.
  • The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl.
  • Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung.
  • Atonement, Ian McEwan.
  • Burning Your Boats (selected short stories), Angela Carter.
  • The Crow Road, Iain Banks.
  • Restoration, Rose Tremain.
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
  • The Lion of Macedon, David Gemmel.
  • The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.
  • The Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle.
  • The Confesssions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
  • Perfume, Patrick Suskind.
  • The Deathstalker Series, Simon R. Green.
  • The Secret History, Donna Tartt.
  • The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett