WARREN ELLIS, NOVELIST

[MattBrady]

by Chris Arrant

You think you know Warren Ellis?

You've read his work on Thunderbolts. You loved his work on The Authority and Transmetropolitan. Maybe you follow his blog or been a member of his forums… but do you really know Warren Ellis?

If only.

This summer, Warren Ellis’ first novel, Crooked Little Vein debuts from William Morrow. The book follows a burned-out private detective that is put on the trail of the U.S. Constitution… no, not that one – the real one. Hired for this by a corrupt Presidential aide, Michael McGill sets out on a cross-country scavenger hunt that reveals a surreal underbelly and threatens to make him a part of it. McGill is joined by a surreal and socialable college student named Trix who serves both as his assistant and encouraging voice as he descends to his ultimate destination.

From the advance copy provided by the publisher, we can tell you that Ellis doesn't pull any punches. His prose style, glimpsed in his comics work and online posting, is on full display as he documents McGill's adventure in the first person. Fans of his blog at www.warrenellis.com (and formerly diepunyhumans.com) can see where some of his lurid research postings came to influence this prose novel. For fans who enjoyed the uncompromising views of Spider Jerusalem in Transmetropolitan, this is the book for you.

We spoke with Ellis about the novel

Newsarama: What inspired you to write about such lurid activities as you have in Crooked Little Vein?

WE: It's all out there, Chris. This is what the internet trades in every day. These activities are the stuff of normal life and leisure for millions of people. It may be colorful, but it's certainly real. I invented very, very little in Crooked Little Vein. Even the macroherpetophiles; I found them back in the early days of the web, when I was writing professionally about the internet for a British computer magazine.

NRAMA: In the variety of comics work you've done, both creator-owned and company-owned, the characters and stories present a style and tone that's unmistakably you. In your creator-owned work it's seem the most potent, and this novel even more so - harkening back to your Transmetropolitan days and stepping even past that. What were your intentions behind writing Crooked Little Vein?

WE: Mostly just getting the damn thing done. This all started when I inherited a literary agent upon signing with the Writers And Artists agency in LA for film and tv work, years ago. Unbeknownst to me, W&A had a lit agency in New York, and one day Lydia Wills phoned me up to tell me that, now I was with W&A, she was my lit agent, and when was I going to write her a novel to sell? This went on for months. I nearly had her legs broken twice. Until, one day, I thought to myself, let's just shut her up. And I sat down and wrote the first ten thousand words of an utterly unsaleable novel. I figured I could recycle the material into comics later. So I handed her this horror of a thing, complete with Godzilla Bukkake scene, and said, take this and leave me alone.

Thinking, obviously, that she'd decide I was insane and never bug me again.

Two weeks later, she phoned to tell me she'd sold it to Harper Collins in New York.

It's one of the more epic backfires of my career, Chris.

NRAMA: That said, what's the secret to writing material that is far out of bounds from most people's experiences and still making it accessible to them without watering down your intentions?

WE: Not hyping it, I think. The protagonist, Mike McGill, is our eyes into the world of the book, and most of the time he's really not sure what's happening to him, which I think is a useful representation of a reader immersing themselves in the book. But he's low-key. He doesn't run around waving his hands and shrieking. It's all presented matter-of-factly, with some humor, and Mike's there just trying to cope. It keeps the material grounded. And when I vary the tone, and things get substantially scarier halfway through, I think that helps carry the reader through.

NRAMA: You've lived all of your life in England, and a good number of your characters in the past have been distinctly British. What led you to setting this story in America, and how does it inform the story you had in mind?

WE: There's an old insult to the effect that if an American wants to understand American history, ask an Englishman. We have a peculiar outside perspective on the country -- a combination of three thousand miles' distance, cultural colonization, and, as in the old bon mot, separated by a common language. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest we see America with more clarity, but we do have a certain angle of view on the country that Americans don't share.

Why set it in America? Well, aside from the rich comedy purposes, it can be said that from a certain perspective America is the experimental petri dish of the Western world. America remains an astonishingly good idea -- and those rights held to be self-evident, that had never ever been written down before and which shaped every Western revolutionary society and republic that followed...it's those freedoms that turned the country into both an engine of innovation and an inarguable nuthatch. That's always worth studying.

NRAMA; At your HeroesCon panel last year, you described this novel as a "weird detective story". With the profession of detective being a staple of crime and mystery fiction, how would you describe your take on the field and the genre in this novel?

WE: Hopeless, probably. It's just an engine. The detective novel is in large part a 20th Century turn on the quest novel; you could marry the rough structure of Joseph Campbell's mythic template to any early Raymond Chandler novel with some success. And Crooked Little Vein is a quest novel. Sinking it in detective fiction gave me a useful structure and a way to keep the engine ticking over.

NRAMA: In writing the novel in first person narrative, some writers say they reserve it for the characters which they have enough in common with to write it convincingly. What would you say of writing in the first person voice of Michael McGill as you do here?

WE: Not so much. Mike is not a fan of novelty, and tends to view the changing modern world with a little fear and a little confusion. He's probably a small-c conservative: he's not particularly good with new ideas, he tends to need being hit on the head a bit, he comes from a background in justice. He's not dumb enough to be prejudiced, but it's not hard to make him uncomfortable. I know a lot of people like Mike, but he's not me.

NRAMA: Followers of your work have delighted in your open sharing of research material you post on your blog at warrenellis.com, and previously at diepunyhumans.com. Seeing how all of it that people see collected are done so online, how would you say you incorporate research into your work and how different would your work be had you been living in a time with no internet?

WE: Well, I'd already been writing for years before the internet. It's going to be strange, years from now, to have been one of the people working through the changeover. I remain delighted at not having to haunt libraries and spend forty quid a week on magazines any more. Which I did. I used to have floods of self-published photocopied fringe magazines pouring through the letterbox.

The net replaced all that. I don't think Crooked Little Vein could have been written without the web. Almost everything in there is sourced from web research.

NRAMA: Do you have any appearances planned around the book's release in August 2007?

WE: Right now, it seems that I'll be in San Diego [Comicon] this summer, for the first time in ten years. After a hideous experience in 1997 and years of saying I'll never go back (and years of people in other media asking to meet me there), I decided to give it another chance. I'm there to launch a new comics series called Ignition City, and to launch Crooked Little Vein.

The prose novel Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis, is scheduled for release on July 24, 2007. For more information on this and Ellis' other work, visit www.warrenellis.com.

[Punchy]

Oooh, sounds cool.

I'll check this out. Cue Dusty ranting about how Ellis hates comics and this is all he's wanted to do anyway.

[Robert_B]

I'm there. Sounds cool.

[bcondray]

I'll get it.

As much as I love comics.. I love novels even more.


Ellis is always a great read.

[amlah6]

Godzilla bukkake? I'm in.

[Rockin' Rich]

Where the hell is mine?

[Ye Olde Iowa]

Sign me up. Ellis is a genius madman and this seems to be some pretty intriguing material that he is working with. Do we really have to wait until July though?

[kingofcities]

July?!? I don't want to wait that long.

I'm really looking forward to this. Hearing all of the little tidbits about CLV on the Bad Signal has been both fun and unbearable. I want to read the damn thing already!

[pmpknface]

Just added to my wish list on Amazon.com!

This is gonna be the 1st novel I've read in ages beginning to end.

[Equinox]

Originally Posted by Punchy

Oooh, sounds cool.

I'll check this out. Cue Dusty ranting about how Ellis hates comics and this is all he's wanted to do anyway.

Ellis loves comics. I mean, we writes so many of them, so...

I'm very interested to read his novel. Writing in prose vs. comic script is very, very different, and sometimes difficult. I've been writing in comic script for a month and a half now, and I sat down to re-draft a short prose I've been working on, and it was like flexing stagnant muscles. Very strange.

But Godzilla Bukkake? You all read that too, right? It's not just hopeful wishing on my part?

[Beyerstein]

i hope he stops writing comics

[bairdduvessa]

can't wait

[SpyGuy]

Wasn't there another novel of his called HEART OF AMERICA? I saw it solicited in the PREVIEWS catalog for March.

[wishlish]

Originally Posted by SpyGuy

Wasn't there another novel of his called HEART OF AMERICA? I saw it solicited in the PREVIEWS catalog for March.

That was the old title.

[Kolimar]

Originally Posted by MattBrady

WE: Mostly just getting the damn thing done. This all started when I inherited a literary agent upon signing with the Writers And Artists agency in LA for film and tv work, years ago. Unbeknownst to me, W&A had a lit agency in New York, and one day Lydia Wills phoned me up to tell me that, now I was with W&A, she was my lit agent, and when was I going to write her a novel to sell? This went on for months. I nearly had her legs broken twice. Until, one day, I thought to myself, let's just shut her up. And I sat down and wrote the first ten thousand words of an utterly unsaleable novel. I figured I could recycle the material into comics later. So I handed her this horror of a thing, complete with Godzilla Bukkake scene, and said, take this and leave me alone.

Thinking, obviously, that she'd decide I was insane and never bug me again.

Two weeks later, she phoned to tell me she'd sold it to Harper Collins in New York.

It's one of the more epic backfires of my career, Chris.

Heheheh

[Kolimar]

Comic book creators and their work in other fields. What do you think?

Good luck, Warren.

[The Guvnor]

Originally Posted by Warren Ellis

It's one of the more epic backfires of my career, Chris.

Ha, ha that's funny.

This sounds like it will be a great read.

EDIT: Kolimar beat me to it.

Originally Posted by Beyerstein

i hope he stops writing comics

Have you read Nextwave?!?! I hope he continues to write comics for many years to come.

[Nobody]

I'll get it. It's gotta be better than Chris Claremont's novels, right?

[Randy A]

Already preordered from Amazon..

[mrorangesoda]

This sounds awesome and has joined my list of summer reading.

[The Marvel]

I. Cannot. Wait.

[dethmtlmetro]

Warren Ellis is so cool. I can't wait to read this book. That was a great interview, too.

[puckett]

Originally Posted by The Guvnor

Have you read Nextwave?!?! I hope he continues to write comics for many years to come.

See, I agree with Nextwave... but like the whole Counter-X thing a few years back was blah. Excalibur was alright but his breif run on Wolverine wasn't so hot. I dunno... he's not a favorite, but he's written some favorite books. Can i say i inconsistantly like him? =)

[Brainiac]

COMIC VERSION of Crooked Little Vein???

[ganthet]

I have always wondered what a novel writen by Mr. Ellis would be like. Sign me up.