An Intense Love of Place: A Guest Post by Scott Lynch
Lynch’s vividly transportive world-building will have you under a spell. This “heisty” fantasy about a gang of amusing and charming thieves brims with dark humor, mischief and suspense that will keep you on your toes. Read on for an exclusive essay from Scott Lynch on writing The Lies of Locke Lamora.
Paperback $20.00
The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard Series #1)
The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard Series #1)
By Scott Lynch
In Stock Online
Paperback $20.00
The first book of the epic fantasy caper Gentleman Bastard Sequence about a roguish group of conmen, which George R. R. Martin says “captured me right on the first page and never let me go.”
The first book of the epic fantasy caper Gentleman Bastard Sequence about a roguish group of conmen, which George R. R. Martin says “captured me right on the first page and never let me go.”
What made me want to write a fantasy like The Lies of Locke Lamora? I was a dreamy kid with an intense love of place, I suppose. I grew up in Minnesota and loved every light and angle and season of it. The glass towers of St. Paul and Minneapolis in the twilight. The country roads vanishing into nowhere. Tolkienic pine trees jutting into sharp winter air. Red lights of radio towers blinking over the black rolling fields at night. I kept a catalog of these impressions. Still do, everywhere I go, everywhere I dip my feet in new water or see a new sun come up.
All of that might seem like a strange lead-in to a novel about a steamy Mediterranean city-state lashed by a salty sea, but that was what I wanted for my imaginary city of Camorr. I wanted such a tangle of impressions, such a set of glimpses of a lived-in place. The way the light moves across the stone walls, the way people throw things into canals, the haunted and half-known undercity, the wine and towers and sharks— a place so deeply described you can almost taste the dust on your tongue as you flip the pages. I wanted Camorr to be as much of a character as the people living in it; I wanted Locke’s entire world to feel that alive and that strange. Possibly I have succeeded, just a little bit— the novel is still going strong nineteen years after it first met the world, and I still feel a little tingle of excitement when I return to Camorr (as I did most recently for the short story “Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent”). It’s a place of warm days and dangerous nights, a place of high beauty and desperate squalor, a city of gamblers and fools and secrets.
It’s a place that I might well write about for the rest of my life, but will never be finished writing about.
Prepared for B&N Reads
Author photo credit: Sharona Jacobs
June 25, 2025