Daniel O’Malley Talks Stiletto, Writing a Razor-Sharp Sequel

In regards to the writing of Stiletto, well, there was pressure to get it done, but most of the real pressure came from myself, and my friends and family—the people I see all the time who would ask pointed questions over dinner. And there were a few panicked moments of “Wait, how did I write something that people liked? What was the exact process?” But for the most part, I write for my own pleasure, putting down a story that I like, rather than one that I’m designing for other people to like.
These days, four years between books can seem like an eternity to fans who want instant gratification. Can you talk a little about some of the challenges you faced in writing the sequel that required a little extra baking time?
I know the intensely irritating feeling when there’s a book you want, and you want it now, dammit. Stiletto certainly took longer than I had anticipated; there were a few things that made that happen. The first is that I’m not a full-time writer. I have a day job, with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. It’s a role I take a lot of satisfaction in, but it means that from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., I’m in the office, doing office things. For me, writing fiction happens during the evenings, or on the weekend, or occasionally during my lunch hour. So, that’s going to slow down the progress, especially compared to those novelists who can work on their stuff during the day.
Things got especially busy at work after I was attached to the Operational Search for MH370. I’m a media and communications person for that search, and it’s the kind of intense project in which everyone involved is putting in a tremendous amount of effort and energy. Some days, when I got home, it’s hard to get into the writing groove.
Another thing was that I really wanted to do some research in the UK and the Netherlands. I’d lived in London for a few months after high school, and I’ve visited since, but there were places I wanted to visit and people I wanted to talk with for Stiletto. So I had to wait until the opportunity arose, but I think was worth the wait. I got to renew my sense of the city, and go to new places, and I think it’s made a real difference. Plus, it gave me a bunch of ideas that I might not have come up with.
The first book managed a brilliant juxtaposition of storylines and timeframes and unreliable narrators—just the kind of magic trick that is very hard to pull off twice. How is the structure of the second novel different? Were you sorry to lose the quasi first-person voice of Myfanwy’s “letters”?
I find it very useful to have different characters to switch between—partially because the different perspectives can be so good for storytelling and partially because if I get stuck, a change can make all the difference. In The Rook, I could go back and forth between pre-amnesia Myfanwy and post-amnesia Myfanwy. In Stiletto, we follow a few characters, including Myfanwy, but the two main ones are Odette (a Grafter) and Felicity (a Pawn). These two women are complete opposites, and they’ve been brought up to loathe each other, so that makes for some exciting energy. I wanted to explore hate—it’s one of the main themes of the book—and I tried to show the viewpoints of both sides.
Myfanwy Thomas’s letters in The Rook were great to write, not least because they made for a useful device to educate the new Myfanwy (and the readers) on the world of the Checquy. I really do enjoy a good info-dump, and Thomas’s letters were a good tool for the dumping of said info. So, I was sorry to lose that tool for Stiletto. But I was also sorry because I’d become fond of Thomas as a character. She had started out just as the source of information for her namesake, but she became more and more interesting to understand and then to write about. It was sad to write her last letters, even though she had died (as it were) in the story before the book had even begun.
The Checquy novels are defined by their oddness, mixing espionage elements, cosmic horror, and a surprising amount of humor. Which bits are your favorite to write?
Well, they’re all fun to write—if you forget about the actual effort of writing. If you’re not amused or frightened or intrigued when you’re writing something, then why would someone else feel that way when they’re reading it? In Stiletto, there were quite a few scenes where I got very, very sucked in. I did quite a bit of research for the parts set in Paris during World War II, when it’s occupied by the Nazis, and the entire city is under curfew and in darkness. I really did feel quite antsy as I wrote that, the tension of moving through the streets, wondering if a patrol of soldiers will come along and throw all the plans into chaos. And there are scenes when the supernatural touches on civilians, and I felt distinctly uneasy as I wrote them, the idea of these incomprehensible, inexplicable forces reaching out and touching people’s lives.
One thing I appreciated about the first book was the immense care you put into building out the world and its history, its structures and organizations, even its bureaucratic red tape. How did you get about developing all of that, and how much of it actually makes it onto the page?
I don’t start out with a fully mapped world. It’s always about answering the questions that occur to me. And every answer always leads to more questions. If this woman knew she was going to lose her memories, then how did she know? And why would she believe that? If there are supernatural government officials running around dealing with secret threats, where do they come from? How do they get identified? If they’re inhuman, where do they live? Where do they get buried? Where do they work? And who pays for all the therapy they’d need?
Once I knew that I was going to have a secret Government department, I knew that I’d need some organizational structure (that’s Government Department 101, you’ve got to have an org chart), but it’s very much about broad strokes, and filling in the detail as it comes up. So, for me it’s a combination of plotting and flying by the seat of my pants.
I write a lot of material in my first draft, it’s very much a vomiting on the page of all my ideas. Then I leave it to fester for a while, and come back and see what works. I prune, I polish, I prune, I polish, and I send it off to my editor, who gently points out that there’s still a good deal of polishing and pruning to be done. I also like to go off on tangents, to give little side stories that might not be immediately relevant to the main story, but help illustrate a theme or an aspect of the world. Sometimes those get cut, sometimes they turn out to be crucial in a plot development, and I didn’t even realize it until it all came together.

Do you see the series as a number of episodic adventures, or do you have a larger endgame in mind? How many novels might readers expect to see in this universe?
I don’t see the Rook Files as being one single story, like George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones or the Belgariad by David Eddings. There’s too many different places and times (and elements of the public service!) that I want to explore through the lens of the Checquy. I guess I think of it more like the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, where different books will look at different elements. As long as I think of ideas, I’d like to keep writing in this universe. But I also have lots of other ideas for other universes that I want to explore.
Your bio mentions you spend your working days writing press releases for a government agency. How does being “inside the beast” inform your creation of the byzantine quasi-governmental organization you’ve created?
I started The Rook before I entered the public service, in fact a good part of it was written when I was working as a waiter and a barista. But having a government job has certainly helped with the details. There’s nomenclature and procedures that I just didn’t know about, but which form a daily part of life in the public service. I also get a lot of inspiration from my colleagues. The organization I work for, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, is responsible for investigating transport accidents, so there are people in my office who get the call that they need to get their go-bag and head out the door immediately. They’ll travel to remote areas with their equipment and do a lot of technical investigative work. It’s a big inspiration when I’m writing about Government officials who work at a desk and then are suddenly called upon to go do remarkable things in the world.
Without spoilers, can you tease your favorite scene in Stiletto?
I was pretty pleased with a scene set at the Royal Ascot races. For me, horse racing has always been something I associated very strongly with the United Kingdom, probably because I am a big fan of the works of Dick Francis and his son Felix. If I need comfort reading, I go for a Dick Francis novel. Royal Ascot is a event of glamour and fashion, and I was interested in the different sections for different people, some of them quite exclusive. It seemed an ideal setting for the elite of the Checquy and the Grafters to attend as a social gathering . I’ve tried to capture the excitement of the event, with people dressed in their finest, caught up in the energy of the races—but still with their own interests to advance. It’s a good opportunity for supernatural diplomats to interact with each other outside the office.
Also, someone important gets impaled through the torso by a razor-sharp crystal spike.
A portal between dimensions opens in your living room. What terrifying creature emerges, and what do you do about it?
Seven opossums march out, foaming at the mouth, trailing crimson smoke, and singing doo-wop. On the couch, I’m frozen with incredulity by the impossibility of what I’m seeing. They spread out in a semi-circle around the living room, staring at me with their blank pupil-less eyes. They continue crooning, shifting through a medley of popular 1950’s standards. Any time I make a move to get up, their fur bristles and the harmony of their singing stutters distressingly. The portal continues to flicker and burn in the corner of the room. Increasingly ill at ease, and at a complete loss as to the appropriate etiquette, I feebly offer to fetch them some cheese and crackers—an approach which seems to mollify them somewhat. I return from the kitchen to find them unmoved, and I gingerly place a smale plate of crackers and brie in front of each of them.
They take it in turns to eat, so that their rendition of Sorry (I ran all the way home) continues without a break. Finally, when the cheese is all eaten, they turn and, still singing, move through the portal into the void beyond. It snaps shut, leaving a ring of fire that ignites the floor.
I rush to put out the fire, beating down the flames with a blanket from the couch. Then I collapse onto my knees, gasping until my heart slows down.
Shaken, I give a moment’s thought to starting an opossum-based cult of faith. But instead I get out my computer, and start writing an opossum story.
Preorder Stiletto, available June 14. If you haven’t read it yet, drop everything and read The Rook. We promise there are no terrifying doo-wop opossums. (Or are there?)