Mark A. Latham is a writer, editor, history nerd, frustrated grunge singer, and amateur baker from Staffordshire, UK. An immigrant to rural Nottinghamshire, he lives with his wife and dog in a very old house (sadly not haunted), and is still regarded in the village as a foreigner.

Formerly the editor of Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine, Mark writes for tabletop and video games, and is an author of strange, fantastical and macabre tales.

mark-latham.com| Bluesky: @markalatham.bsky.social | Orbit Author Page

Welcome to the Hive, Mark. Congratulations on your release of The Last Vigilant! For some of our readers who may not know, can you tell us a little more about it? 

Thanks for having me! The Last Vigilant has been a long time in the making, and marks my first foray into epic fantasy. It’s a mystery story at its heart, throwing together two very mismatched characters into a world of intrigue and superstition. You have this elderly savant – a woman who has lived alone in exile for at least 40 years – and the grizzled soldier sent to find her. She’s the last surviving member of a near-mythical order, while he is a pariah within his own company, sent on this supposed wild goose chase by an officer who despises him. Together, this unlikely duo has to solve the mystery of a missing child. Failure could see two rival nations go to war again. But of course, complications arise in the form of spies, enemies old and new, and even supernatural entities…

I found your three main characters instantly compelling and I loved seeing the dynamics between them. How did the characters of Hawley, Enelda and Lady Iveta evolve during subsequent drafts? 

First off, I’m really glad you threw Iveta into the mix as a main character. She’s an interesting case study for me, because in the initial concept and first draft she was very much a side character, and I had no plans to keep her around after the first book was done. By the second or third draft, she was fully cemented as a secondary protagonist, with a story arc that not only feels pretty dramatic in this book, but will have big repercussions on the wider world. As the plot developed, I delved much deeper into her character and backstory, and I’m so glad she’s resonating with readers. I started to feel pretty bad for everything I put her through in the book, but she comes out swinging after every setback.

With Enelda and Hawley, although I really refined their relationship and deepened their character arcs with redrafts, they stayed true to that initial concept throughout. I have to say, their (often barbed) banter is my favourite thing to write, and I think some of the best dialogue I’ve ever written. Working on the second book, every time I get a bit stuck and the words aren’t flowing, I just skip ahead to the next scene of Enelda and Hawley having a tête à tête, and I find the words just start flowing. I think I sort of inhabit those characters now, and writing them just comes naturally. 

Who was your favourite side character to write and why? I personally loved Sir Redbaer! 

Redbaer is another one whose scenes grew (actually at the expense of the castle Steward, Everett, who got cut out completely, and then written back in as a minor character. Poor guy. Such is life in the editing phase). He’s ostensibly noble and true, but he’s a complicated fellow, and I can see why readers have taken to him. 

Honestly though, my favourite is Clemence. As soon as I started writing him, I thought “Here’s a guy who can be a scenery-chewing villain”, and I just pictured Ian McNiece in my mind’s eye, dressed like an archbishop, being outraged at these upstart characters undermining his authority. He was always great fun to write, even when he was being an absolute cad.

If you could spend the day with any one of your characters, which would you choose and how would you spend the day?

Haha, that’s a bonkers question, which makes it brilliant. Honestly, my main characters are all damaged individuals in some way. So I think I’d eschew hanging out with any of them, and instead head off for a day with the old poacher, Jens. He’d teach me about farming, woodcraft, hunting, fishing, archery, and survival skills. If you look at how proficient Iveta is at those pursuits, you’ll see what a good teacher Jens is. I reckon the old-timer would be a mine of information about the world around us, and the connection of the people to the land. We’d have a lovely time getting back to nature, whereas with the other characters I’d almost certainly end up getting into trouble!

Was there anything specific that inspired you to write about the order of Vigilants and their abilities? 

I only had the vaguest outline of the order itself when I started the story. I think through Enelda, we slowly learn about the many disciplines that the Vigilants mastered, and the traditions, rituals and rules they followed. I can’t honestly point to a single source of inspiration. There’s definitely some Inquisition and Knights Templar in there (with the caveat that in the book’s setting, the evil entities they pursue are very real, rather than just providing an excuse to torture people). Maybe some Golden Dawn; definitely a pinch of Jedi. I think really it boils down to “What would an entire organisation of Sherlock Holmes’s look like?” Now imagine dressing up those uncanny powers of deduction with religion, ritual, and strict dictates, and you’ll have something akin to the Vigilant Order.

How important was it for you to explore how corrupt the Vigilants have become since Enelda’s time? 

It’s very important, and I haven’t finished that story yet. Firstly, I’m a strong believer that there’s light and dark in everyone – nobody in the book is truly pure and wholesome, just as no one is truly evil. But the idea with the Vigilants is that the original organisation is long gone, with Enelda being the last of their kind. As a sort of mythical body, they get idealised a lot, but I think you can see even from Enelda’s POV that they weren’t particularly wholesome. They were inquisitors, absolutely no-nonsense, and there are hints that they were feared as much as they were respected. 

Fast forward 50-60 years, and now you have a new Vigilant order, who are basically sheriffs and wardens who have taken on the name of “Vigilant” just for a bit of continuity. It was supposed to make the law-makers more revered and respected, but actually they ended up being more and more corrupted, sullying the name of “Vigilant” for generations. It was essential for the plot (and there’s more than a little allegory in there), because Enelda comes back into the world almost like she’s been preserved in a time capsule for 40 years. She sees these guys running around dressed in Vigilant garb, and even inhabiting the old Vigilant temples, but they are very much not Vigilants. It isolates Enelda, holds a mirror up to her, and sets her up as very much a lone beacon of justice in an unjust world.

One of the concepts I absolutely loved about your book was how well you blended an epic fantasy-esque world with a mystery plot at its heart. Had you always planned to combine these two genres? Or did this just occur as you were writing?

 I’m a bit of a ‘pantser’, but I’m not that much of a pantser! The combination was there right from the initial pitch. I remember sitting in a pub with my old agent, with a list of elevator pitches to run by him. Top of the list was “Miss Marple and Richard Sharpe go on adventures in Westeros”, and that [rather glib] one-liner stayed at the top of my mood board for quite some time. Enelda sort of blends Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes, two of my all-time favourite detectives. Hawley is sort of a combination of Richard Sharpe and Derfel from the Warlord Chronicles.

From that initial discussion, I made the decision that the world be low (or even no) fantasy. If anything, that’s the bit that changed – it is very low fantasy, but the magical aspects, along with the religion, the angels and demons, are all expansions of the original idea. The series (and the world) will get more epic as it progresses. This first book is a very close-focused cross-section of a much larger world.

Without giving away too many spoilers, tell us a scene from The Vigilant that you most enjoyed writing?

One of the things I tend to do when I’m sketching out an outline is put all the big set-pieces in place. As I get to them, in order, they always go one of two ways. Either they’re a joy to write, because I’ve been looking forward to them for ages, or they’re torture to write, because I’ve built them up in my own head and I rewrite them over and over until they’re as perfect as I can make them. One that was a real joy is the autopsy scene. No spoilers, but this scene just came together exactly as it was in my head. Through Hawley and Clemence we see the way that Aelderland has regressed into this land of superstition and small-minded prejudice, while it shines a light on Enelda, who seems to come from a more enlightened time (at the same time being cranky and demanding). It’s quite graphic, but it’s one of my favourite scenes in the whole book.

Your cover has such classic fantasy aesthetics and immediately reminded me of The Wheel of Time covers! Was this the aesthetic you were hoping the artist would create? How involved in the process were you? 

My involvement in the cover (and this has been true of every book I’ve ever written) came in refining the details after the initial sketches, to maintain continuity. I had very little input in the overall concept and composition. I think generally, authors have to trust the editors and the sales team to make the right decisions. Interestingly, I was a bit nervous about having  figurative art on the cover, because I wanted Hawley to be a little more ambiguous in appearance. It made me think a lot about how he should be represented in the story.

That nervousness was dispelled when I saw the first painted roughs. Mélanie Delon is such a great artist (her work on the US editions of the Witcher novels are incredible), and I was stoked to have her as the cover artist. The final image is so striking! I think the similarities to the Wheel of Time are accidental, or at least subconscious. Nobody in the team made that choice deliberately – we’re all super-aware that this book is nothing like the Wheel of Time. Melanie did what was right for the story, the mythology, and the setting, and I think in that respect she absolutely nailed it. 

You’re facing a horde of Riftborn demons, which fantasy creature would you choose to ride into battle against them?

That’s a tougher question than you might think! Riftborn are sort-of-demons, and sort-of-spirits. They live inbetween worlds, and are always looking for a way to break through the veil into the real world. Usually they do that through possession, but legends tell of incursions when these horrible shadow-creatures actually materialize in reality. Now, there aren’t many “fantasy creatures” in the world of the Last Vigilant (yet! But no spoilers…), and the ones that are hinted at are actually related to the Riftborn in some way or another, because they’re all linked by the specific rules of magic in this setting. So I’d have to look in the wider world of fantasy and mythology to find a fitting ally. Someone or something that can straddle the worlds of the living and the dead, with the power to banish demons or send tortured souls to the afterlife. Valkyries, maybe? Are they “creatures” per se? I think riding into battle alongside the Valkyries would be suitably epic either way!

How does it feel to have your book out there in the wild? Did you do anything special on release day? 

 Never has a book taken so long (for me) to get from concept to reality. My first pitch was made in 2017 if I remember rightly. The first draft was completed during the pandemic. Then I had a whole thing where I changed agents (which took a while), did another redraft for the new agent (Jennie Goloboy, at the Donald Maass agency, who is just the best), and finally sold the book to Orbit in 2023. The editing wasn’t finished until the end of ’24, during which time I added around 20,000 words to it and made it more epic! So I feel like I’ve lived with this book for a long time, and to finally see it on a bookshop shelf was such a cathartic moment!

I did my main celebration when I signed the contract with Orbit. I went out and bought the most ostentatious, OTT rock guitar I could (settling on a Lzzy Hale signature Explorerbird in cardinal red), and played it very loudly. A few drinks were had on release day, and then on the first weekend of release I actually went along to the brand new bookshop in my village and did a meet & greet. Very low-key, really, but I wanted to start as I mean to go on, by supporting and promoting indie book stores. They’re the life blood of publishing IMO!

Mark, it’s time to spill some secrets! What can us readers expect in the sequel? What more is to come in the Kingdom of Oak and Steel series? 

As you might expect, work is quite advanced on book 2. You can expect more of everything. More characters, more insight into the wider world, more magic and myth, more intrigue, secrets, and lies. You can definitely expect Enelda and Hawley to get into even more trouble! They start the second book like they ended the first: in the capital city of Helmspire, which is a huge bustling metropolis, full of wonders and dangers in equal measure. And now Enelda works for the king, so the kind of mysteries she investigates have considerably higher stakes. I can’t wait for this one to land!

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

 I think on the surface, a lot of my work seems fairly dark – even bleak – and definitely features very flawed characters dealing with extreme adversity. More than anything, this stems from my lifelong love of the horror genre! However, I hope that readers can see the underlying message of The Last Vigilant: that no matter how bad things seem, and how glum the future might appear, there’s always good in the world. As long as there are people willing to stand up and be counted – who strive to make a difference – there’s always hope. Maybe this book is my way of processing… Haha. In any case, I think The Last Vigilant is my most hopeful book to date, and that’s really what I’d love readers to take from it.

Thank you so much for joining us today!

 It’s been an absolute pleasure!

The Last Vigilant is available now – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org