Robert Dinsdale was born in North Yorkshire and currently lives in Leigh-on-Sea. He is the author of five previous critically acclaimed novels including the bestselling The Toymakers, which was his first venture into magic. You can find him on Twitter as @Robert_Dinsdale and here is a link to his book. 

Welcome to the Hive, Robert. It’s great to have you here to discuss your latest novel, Once a Monster. Firstly, can you tell our readers a little bit about it? What can they expect?

Thank you for having me!

Imagine it’s London, 1861: a storm-ravaged night, torrents of rain sluicing over the city. You’re there in the city, the buried rivers rising up through the cobbled rows, when a figure looms ahead of you: not a man, but something different, something bigger, something bestial, something haggard with just the tiniest intimation of horns…

Once A Monster is my reimagining of the story of the Minotaur of Knossos, and it’s set in just this milieu. Nell, an orphaned mudlark who works a stretch of the river Thames off the Ratcliffe Highway, spends her days searching for coals, chunks of iron, rope and wire cast up by the river’s tides – but one day, instead, she stumbles upon the body of a brute. The problem is, he’s not quite dead – and though Nell knows she should really loot his body for the few pennies his possessions will provide, instead she resolves to nurse him back to health. But this is no ordinary stranger: this man’s back is carved with a lattice of inked scars in the design of the Labyrinth of Knossos, and beneath his coils of matted hair there really do appear to be the impressions of horns.

At first Nell’s overseer, the fallen merchant prince Benjamin Murdstone, isn’t convinced by the stories of this man’s ancient, mythic provenance – but soon, seizing an opportunity he thinks will return him to his rightful place in society, he becomes bent on using the stranger for his own ends. Nell, meanwhile, is drawn to the stranger as a friend – and the stranger, believing he owes a blood debt to Nell, resolves to help her rise out of destitution in any way he can.

I like to think of Once a Monster as a novel grounded in the reality of poverty in 19th century London – it just so happens that this real, researched landscape has been intruded upon by myth. That place where the real and the imagined mix has always been one that draws my eye – and I hope readers get swept into the stranger’s story as it’s slowly peeled back. 

What first drew you to writing a reimagining of the Greek legend of the Minotaur? 

I’ve been very lucky that there’s such interest in Greek myth at the moment, because it’s a happy accident that I ended up here too. When I was a boy, my family house was filled with books – and, among them, there was a book of Greek myth for children that must have been a gift to my mother, back in the early 1950s. I’m quite sure the illustration of the Minotaur I saw in that book – with its slavering jaws and black eyes, devoid of any humanity – is not one that would appear in a children’s book published today! But, like lots of things, that image lodged in my mind – and, comprised with the puzzle of his Labyrinth prison, the story stayed with me ever since.

Sometimes, the things that have the deepest impact on you are the images, stories, songs that really opened up your imagination. Back then, I had no idea who or what the Minotaur was – and, though I knew it was a cannibalistic monster, some part of me must have pitied the creature, kept captive as he was in this strange, cruel prison.

Quite separately, I’d always wanted to write a novel set in Victorian London. I’ve never enjoyed novels set purely in the ‘here and now’. I want a novel that transports me to some other place, some other time – and there’s something peculiarly intriguing about Victorian London because it is at once so familiar and yet so unreal, almost like the experience of reading an alternate history can be. Cities seem eternal to us, but in fact they’re in a constant state of flux and change – and the London of two hundred years ago is a very different city to the one we know today. Somewhere along the way, that image I had from childhood of the Minotaur seemed to merge with my interest in the buried London, the London that used to exist, the city beneath the city which we all know. Once I’d started picturing the Minotaur in fog-wreathed 19th century London, it wasn’t too much of a leap of the imagination to start thinking about the sewers beneath the city, the subterranean London world, and how – if you squinted just enough – that might be a corollary for the Labyrinth as well. 

It’s in strange meetings like this that, I think, the best stories are made. 

Once a Monster is set in Victorian London which has been described as both grim and magical. Can you tell us what inspired you to set your novel in this historical period? What grim and magical aspects of London are represented? 

Victorian London is a special kind of landscape in fiction – it’s almost a mythic place, in which all kinds of stories find their own resonance. Some of my favourite modern novels make use of the 19th century city to such vivid effect: I remember being bowled over by both Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, both epic narratives devoted to recreating that past world. I wanted the same feeling for Once a Monster: the feeling of a living, breathing city touched by something strange and new. 

London is a fabulous city (in the original sense of the word). Its history sets it apart from so many others: at once an ancient Roman garrison, the city of the Tudor Kings, a city of plague and fire, a city of industry and modernity; it has worn many different cowls across the centuries. Scratch beneath the surface and you realise that it still carries those older cities with it. The remnants of the old Roman garrison can still be seen, right there in the modern city. Abandoned stations and disused railway lines riddle the city just beneath the surface, scything through old plague pits and the relics of buildings razed to the ground when the city was sacked, conquered and put to the torch. 

I wanted to make use of these hidden, half-forgotten parts of London, and treat them like memories that the living city still clings onto. In Once a Monster this means the manifold rivers of London which were slowly buried as the city grew, many of them eventually subsumed into the grand engineering project that was the London sewers, which are being built in the time the novel is set. 

London as a strange melting pot, a living city whose wounds have calcified over and whose past lives still exist, somewhere underneath the surface – yes, there was no better setting for my story of a man who might just be the Minotaur of ancient myth. 

Give us an insight into your character, Nell? And who else can we expect to meet?

Nell, ten years old, orphaned and condemned to a life on the river, is nominally the main character of the novel – though in truth she’s part of a bigger cast, all of whom I hope have their own stories to sink into. Upon her mother’s death, Nell has been sent to work for Benjamin Murdstone, mudlarking on the river. The other children in Murdstone’s employ have largely given up on dreams and aspirations of their own – but Nell still clings onto a dream passed on to her by her seamstress mother, who instilled in her the ambition of one day being a dancer on the London stage. Nell’s as far away from that gilded life as it’s possible to be – but the relentless cold and penury of her life in Ratcliffe hasn’t quite killed the dream yet.

If Nell is the novel’s principle protagonist, Benjamin Murdstone is its villain – though I don’t like to think of things in those terms, and hopefully reading the novel will reveal why. Murdstone was such an interesting character to write. Like Nell, he started his life in penury – and, by a succession of trades, bartered his way to a much better life. But, when he was at the height of his wealth and success, a bad trade drove Murdstone back into bankruptcy and penury, and at the end of his life he finds himself where he began: looking for treasure in the mud, desperate to avoid his fate as just another ragged man in the London gutters. In his young life, his single-mindedness set him on the road to prosperity. Now, in his dotage, it just might be the thing to end him.

And, like all my favourite Victorian novels, the wider cast is packed with a roster of various hopefuls, degenerates, merchants and thieves. Oh, and one particularly mysterious, deformed brute of a character, his body scarred with a Labyrinth tattoo…

We see such varying opinions from authors when it comes to the time of editing their books. How have you found the editing process over the course of writing each of your books? Enjoyable, stressful or satisfying?

I would rather be one of the unlucky Athenians cast into the Labyrinth to appease the insatiable appetite and bloodlust of the Minotaur than edit a novel. I would rather run the gauntlet of teeth and claws.

There’s an old adage, ‘writing is rewriting’, and for lots of brilliant writers it’s like gospel. I’ve met writers who thoroughly enjoy the editing process; it’s where they find their novel, and for them getting the words onto a page so that they can start shaping it, like it’s the clay from which their story is formed, is the heaviest work. But for me it’s the opposite: once I’ve written a chapter, a passage, a sentence, it seems to set in mind and tone – and undoing it is the most difficult thing. Remember chaos theory? How a butterfly flapping its wings might cause a tornado on the other side of the world? Well, editing a novel is like that for me. One passage upended leads to another passage upended, leading to fault-lines and cracks throughout the novel. I can see them everywhere in everything I’ve ever written – and I couldn’t hate it more!

The problem, of course, is that nobody could possibly get all 500 pages of a novel right the first time round – so writing always involves some levels of editing and refinement as you try to get the story at its sharpest, the writing at its most allusive and affecting. I just hope that all of the fault lines I can see in the book, all the spreading spider-web of cracks that come from editing, don’t reveal themselves as easily to a reader as they do to me.

We always appreciate a beautiful book cover! How involved in the process were you? Was there a particular aesthetic you hoped the artist would portray?

I have to hand it to Neil Lang and his colleagues at the Macmillan art department – the cover of Once a Monster couldn’t look more eye-catching and atmospheric – and I couldn’t take one iota of credit from them for it, because I had no involvement in the process! I love the process of handing over a novel and seeing how an artist – working in a very different medium – channels that into a striking cover design. It feels alchemical to me, and I’ve been very lucky: the package for Once a Monster is much more vivid than anything I would ever have imagined. 

This one is just for fun and is one of our favourite questions here on the Fantasy Hive: which fantastical mythical creature would you ride into battle and why?

I’d be on the back of one of the giant eagles that bore Frodo and Sam away from Mount Doom at the end of the Lord of the Rings: and, by being on the back of one of those eagles, I’d be as far away from the action as possible, hovering above with a paper and pen, taking it all down. 

Can you tell us a little something about your current work(s) in progress, Robert? Have you any upcoming projects which you can share?

I’m going to be an absolute spoil sport – I couldn’t  possibly share. It’s too soon in the process, and (a ridiculous writer’s superstition, I know – and not one that I know if anyone else shares), if I tell anyone, my interest in it and hunger for it will immediately vanish! 

Are you planning anything fun to celebrate the release of Once a Monster? Do you have any upcoming virtual or in person events our readers may be interested in?

Publication day will be a quiet day for me, though I’m hoping to visit my local bookshop and see Once a Monster there – a surreal treat which hasn’t lost its magic for me, even fourteen years after my first novel was published. But I’ll be at Goldsboro Books’ ‘History in the Court’ on Thursday 5th October – and do watch my Twitter for announcements of any other events happening soon. 

Finally, what is the one thing you hope readers take away from your writing?

I just hope readers might remember the ride. Some books live in you forever and some books die fast – I’d love it if, for some readers, Once a Monster sticks around. 

Thank you so much for joining us today!

Once a Monster is out now and you can order your copy on Bookshop.org