The Kingston Raine Series
For fans of Terry, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, and Monty Python shennanigans.
Kingston Raine. High-stakes corporate spy on the run for his life, about to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend and thwart his greatest nemesis - dies.
- And arrives in Limbo.
This couldn't happen at a more difficult time for the Grim Reaper. He's under review and his tenure as CEO of Death Inc. is looking shaky.
Not being one to sit around, Kingston takes matters into his own hands. He's going to escape by any means possible, rescue the woman he loves, and do it all while trying to avoid an existential crisis.
Even the Grim Reaper can have a bad day. When one of Hell's inept devils scares the wrong man to death, the Grim Reaper and Satan are forced to cover it up so that none of Limbo's lawyers can discover the truth. But this simple mishap sets off a chain of events that brings Death face to face with someone who has the power to strip him of all his authority: a bureaucratic angel desperate to up-end the afterlife and rule with an iron fist.
If Death has any hope of saving mankind he must put his faith in the one man more troublesome than Satan himself: Kingston Raine. Amazon |
Nothing throws the afterlife into chaos quite like an impossible murder, except for listening to Satan’s recommendation to hire an outside investigator: Kingston Raine.
As soon as Kingston and his friends take the job they realise that they have attracted the attention of a secret organisation working within the Bank of Limbo, an organisation that routinely assists the rich and nefarious in Life. What troubles Kingston is that these blackmailers and murderers are more interested in how Kingston and his friends can benefit them, and not at all concerned about having every last secret of theirs exposed. If that wasn’t bad enough, Kingston realises that he is now ridiculously famous, and the entire population of Limbo seems to know everything there is to know about him and his friends, which now puts them all in immortal peril. Amazon |
Spending an eternity in the afterlife can be pretty dull, but Limbo has a solution: an inter-realm gladiatorial battle royale designed to reward ingenuity and integrity. But deep down it’s about cheating as much as possible while winning is simply an after thought.
In walks Kingston Raine, ready to out-think, out-steal, and out-cheat everyone in the tournament. Amazon |
Kingston Raine is at his wits’ end as he tries to protect the most dangerous prisoner to have ever escaped from Hell: a Scottish muse driven mad by one of Satan’s devils.
Chased across the realms by millions of bounty hunters, this muse's fate is left in the hands of Death and Satan amid an epic political tug of war. Kingston and his friends do their best to keep the muse from turning against them, and for the first time in their lives their charm and great ideas are outclassed on every occasion. Amazon |
The world holds it’s breath as Kingston Raine and Joanna York are given the most dangerous assignment ever proposed: from a few scant clues they must figure out who, in all of Life, is the son of the Devil before Satan himself realises what the pair are up to.
To prevail, the Grim Reaper will have to silence a fallen angel once and for all, Satan will need to launch the greatest invasion ever seen, and Kingston will have to face the likely possibility that he's the one who kicks off the apocalypse. Amazon |
Background
Back when I was around 20 I wrote a comedic play featuring the Grim Reaper and the usual host of characters from the afterlife. In it, the Grim Reaper discovers a fallen angel who is tired of Heaven and instead wants to go to Hell instead. She tells him that Lucifer has a son somewhere on Earth. Lucifer doesn't know this as it was this angel's job of hiding the kid. In exchange for a pretty sweet deal in Hell, she'll offer to tell Lucifer about his son. The Grim Reaper panics at this news, and, when ambushed by Lucifer, he runs off and accidentally kills Bruce Wayne. Yep. Batman. The Grim Reaper actually killed Batman. This causes quite a commotion in Limbo as it is supposed to be impossible to kill a fictional character. Shenanigans ensue.
I put the play away because I realised that staging it would have some kind of cease and desist letter come my way for using Batman without authorisation. The problem was, replacing the Batman character with someone I came up with made the whole story a bit blah. So, I shelved it, and largely forgot about it for some years.
Three cities and two countries later, I was up late one night, staring into the great rabbit hole that is YouTube. I was watching The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. What's it about? Two guys who travel from one hotel to another, trying their food so they can write some articles on the cuisine as featured in significant locations around England. What's it really about? Two guys try to one-up each other by talking bollocks.
By midnight I had a weird idea for a book: the protagonist becomes self aware and starts jumping from one story to another. But why? Probably because he's somehow been removed from his own story and is trying to get back home. So how does he do that? I had no idea. Still, I thought it could be quite amusing. I was writing a bunch of horror at the time and I needed a change of pace, so writing an oddball story with a British sense of humour was exactly what I needed.
By 1am, I started thinking of that play I wrote all those years ago. The problem was, it didn't quite fit with what I now had planned. This protagonist didn't really have much to do with Lucifer's kid. But, maybe he could go in Batman's place and focus the story on him? It sounded reasonable, so I scrapped that half of the story and made it all about the main character being killed and trying to get back to his own universe. I went to bed, and by 10am the next morning I started writing Kingston Raine and the Grim Reaper.
I really liked writing the book. The words flew from my hands and onto the screen. I wanted Kingston to jump from one book to another and make a mess of things, so his first pit stop was a Shakespearean play, since that would tell him (and the reader) that he was well and truly in over his head. I went with Macbeth, since I had studied it as a kid. Naturally, Kingson's presence there changes the story and he only just escapes with his life. Next chapter, he gets a sidekick. But who? My best two options were Little John and D'Artagnan. I liked the D'Artagnan angle because there could be a lot of English / French bickering, but since D'Artagnan's skills were with the rapier, that was a little too violent for the story I was telling. So, between one paragraph and the next, I settled on Little John. Lo and behold, Kingston appears just outside of Sherwood Forest, arriving just before Robin Hood rescues Little John and his friends. Once again, Kingston has ballsed things up. Robin Hood ends up never meeting Little John and goes on to do his own thing. Kingston ends up with a loyal sidekick. Then: they sit down in a restaurant and try to one-up themselves, ala Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
I thought it was the silliest thing ever, but I received a lot of praise for it. And since I liked writing it, I thought about making it into a series. Five seemed like a good number. Since I had the second half of a play from way back, one that focussed on Lucifer's son, I could us that, but probably as the final story. In the meantime, I had three stories in the middle of figure out.
I paced around the house for a while trying to come up with titles. The Bank of Limbo fell into place almost immediately. Someone's doing silly things between the Bank of Limbo and the Bank of Hell. Kingston investigates. Easy. Except it wasn't. This book was a lot harder to write than the first one. This one, I wanted to show Kingston doing what he normally does: corporate espionage. But half of the difficulty in writing it came from his girlfriend, Joanna York. She doesn't really feature in the first book, so I had no idea who she was, what her personality was like, and how they got on. Yet, I had forgotten that I didn't know anything about her. Also, some cracks in Kingston's character started to appear. He was a little too cocky and too good at what he did, but there just didn't seem to be any way around that. I had, somehow, written Sterling Archer long before I'd ever seen the show.
The third story, the Arena of Chaos, came from some weird game I was trying to come up with; a battle royale between various different creatures that you could magick together. I threw my hands up in defeat and decided that Kingston should manage a sports team in the weirdest afterlife Olympics ever, where the point is not about winning with dignity, it's about cheating without getting caught.
For the fourth book, having a muse who was incapable of reigning in her powers was too irresistible to ignore. She wants Kingston's help but she doesn't want to listen to him. I wanted to tie in some of the previous stories, so I had them re-visit Macbeth. For Macbeth, it's been only a few days since he last saw Kingston. For Kingston, it's been years. Throw in a devil who is obsessed with this muse and an invasion into Limbo by a tonne of Hell's bounty hunters, and you have a situation that Kingston can't talk his way out of.
Finally, it came time for the fifth book. By then I was utterly exhausted and the characters were starting to grate on me, with Kingston in particular. I think I was suffering from main-characteritis. The books also started to get loooooong. The first one was a reasonable 106,000 words. The second: 116,000. The third and fourth: 126,000 each. Then in came Kingston Raine and the Lost Angel. 180,000 words. When I was writing it I was also trying to manage the early stages of my writing career. I had to do all those time-consuming things you need to do when starting a new business, and I was doing it all myself while also working full time. My deadlines were slipping out of control and even though I had written and edited the fifth book, I was so close to it that I couldn't see any of the things I liked about it anymore. So, I took a year off to focus on something else. One year turned into three as I finally found time in my schedule, and it seemed to do the trick. It also made me a little nostalgic for the group of mischief makers.
At long last, the series is now complete.
Back when I was around 20 I wrote a comedic play featuring the Grim Reaper and the usual host of characters from the afterlife. In it, the Grim Reaper discovers a fallen angel who is tired of Heaven and instead wants to go to Hell instead. She tells him that Lucifer has a son somewhere on Earth. Lucifer doesn't know this as it was this angel's job of hiding the kid. In exchange for a pretty sweet deal in Hell, she'll offer to tell Lucifer about his son. The Grim Reaper panics at this news, and, when ambushed by Lucifer, he runs off and accidentally kills Bruce Wayne. Yep. Batman. The Grim Reaper actually killed Batman. This causes quite a commotion in Limbo as it is supposed to be impossible to kill a fictional character. Shenanigans ensue.
I put the play away because I realised that staging it would have some kind of cease and desist letter come my way for using Batman without authorisation. The problem was, replacing the Batman character with someone I came up with made the whole story a bit blah. So, I shelved it, and largely forgot about it for some years.
Three cities and two countries later, I was up late one night, staring into the great rabbit hole that is YouTube. I was watching The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. What's it about? Two guys who travel from one hotel to another, trying their food so they can write some articles on the cuisine as featured in significant locations around England. What's it really about? Two guys try to one-up each other by talking bollocks.
By midnight I had a weird idea for a book: the protagonist becomes self aware and starts jumping from one story to another. But why? Probably because he's somehow been removed from his own story and is trying to get back home. So how does he do that? I had no idea. Still, I thought it could be quite amusing. I was writing a bunch of horror at the time and I needed a change of pace, so writing an oddball story with a British sense of humour was exactly what I needed.
By 1am, I started thinking of that play I wrote all those years ago. The problem was, it didn't quite fit with what I now had planned. This protagonist didn't really have much to do with Lucifer's kid. But, maybe he could go in Batman's place and focus the story on him? It sounded reasonable, so I scrapped that half of the story and made it all about the main character being killed and trying to get back to his own universe. I went to bed, and by 10am the next morning I started writing Kingston Raine and the Grim Reaper.
I really liked writing the book. The words flew from my hands and onto the screen. I wanted Kingston to jump from one book to another and make a mess of things, so his first pit stop was a Shakespearean play, since that would tell him (and the reader) that he was well and truly in over his head. I went with Macbeth, since I had studied it as a kid. Naturally, Kingson's presence there changes the story and he only just escapes with his life. Next chapter, he gets a sidekick. But who? My best two options were Little John and D'Artagnan. I liked the D'Artagnan angle because there could be a lot of English / French bickering, but since D'Artagnan's skills were with the rapier, that was a little too violent for the story I was telling. So, between one paragraph and the next, I settled on Little John. Lo and behold, Kingston appears just outside of Sherwood Forest, arriving just before Robin Hood rescues Little John and his friends. Once again, Kingston has ballsed things up. Robin Hood ends up never meeting Little John and goes on to do his own thing. Kingston ends up with a loyal sidekick. Then: they sit down in a restaurant and try to one-up themselves, ala Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
I thought it was the silliest thing ever, but I received a lot of praise for it. And since I liked writing it, I thought about making it into a series. Five seemed like a good number. Since I had the second half of a play from way back, one that focussed on Lucifer's son, I could us that, but probably as the final story. In the meantime, I had three stories in the middle of figure out.
I paced around the house for a while trying to come up with titles. The Bank of Limbo fell into place almost immediately. Someone's doing silly things between the Bank of Limbo and the Bank of Hell. Kingston investigates. Easy. Except it wasn't. This book was a lot harder to write than the first one. This one, I wanted to show Kingston doing what he normally does: corporate espionage. But half of the difficulty in writing it came from his girlfriend, Joanna York. She doesn't really feature in the first book, so I had no idea who she was, what her personality was like, and how they got on. Yet, I had forgotten that I didn't know anything about her. Also, some cracks in Kingston's character started to appear. He was a little too cocky and too good at what he did, but there just didn't seem to be any way around that. I had, somehow, written Sterling Archer long before I'd ever seen the show.
The third story, the Arena of Chaos, came from some weird game I was trying to come up with; a battle royale between various different creatures that you could magick together. I threw my hands up in defeat and decided that Kingston should manage a sports team in the weirdest afterlife Olympics ever, where the point is not about winning with dignity, it's about cheating without getting caught.
For the fourth book, having a muse who was incapable of reigning in her powers was too irresistible to ignore. She wants Kingston's help but she doesn't want to listen to him. I wanted to tie in some of the previous stories, so I had them re-visit Macbeth. For Macbeth, it's been only a few days since he last saw Kingston. For Kingston, it's been years. Throw in a devil who is obsessed with this muse and an invasion into Limbo by a tonne of Hell's bounty hunters, and you have a situation that Kingston can't talk his way out of.
Finally, it came time for the fifth book. By then I was utterly exhausted and the characters were starting to grate on me, with Kingston in particular. I think I was suffering from main-characteritis. The books also started to get loooooong. The first one was a reasonable 106,000 words. The second: 116,000. The third and fourth: 126,000 each. Then in came Kingston Raine and the Lost Angel. 180,000 words. When I was writing it I was also trying to manage the early stages of my writing career. I had to do all those time-consuming things you need to do when starting a new business, and I was doing it all myself while also working full time. My deadlines were slipping out of control and even though I had written and edited the fifth book, I was so close to it that I couldn't see any of the things I liked about it anymore. So, I took a year off to focus on something else. One year turned into three as I finally found time in my schedule, and it seemed to do the trick. It also made me a little nostalgic for the group of mischief makers.
At long last, the series is now complete.