Paul Barnett / John Grant

Looking Back on The Legends of Lone Wolf   October 22 2001

It seems a very long time ago that I was approached with a view to writing a series of novels to parallel the Lone Wolf gamebooks that Joe Dever had been successfully publishing for some years through a division of the UK publisher Random-Century that was then called Beaver Books. (Whenever I tell friends about this here in the States they tend, for some reason, to get their drinks backed up into their nostrils.) Later it became Red Fox, but essentially it was the same imprint.

I'm not quite sure why I was chosen as the author for these novels. Looking back even a short time afterwards, I couldn't understand why the editors at Beaver hadn't approached any of a whole host of more likely candidates. I do know that an editor in Random-Century's general division with whom I'd worked before, the estimable Nancy Webber, played a part in it all; other than that I haven't a clue. (Nancy much later, at my request, worked on The World and the two Strider novels, and is still a dear friend -- as well as my first choice of copy-editor whenever I'm given the option.)

Early meetings with Joe went well, despite -- or possibly because -- we're two such different characters: Joe very much more formal than me, usually neat and smart in stark contrast with my untidy hair and battered jeans. And so we moved to contract, with Beaver signing me up for four novels.

The first two, Eclipse of the Kai and The Dark Door Opens -- which today are to me almost embarrassingly simple-minded -- were received rapturously. What they did, so far as the series as a whole was concerned, was establish the practice of introducing additional major characters beyond those present in the gamebooks, a practice that continued right through until the semi-abrupt termination of the series some years later with The Rotting Land. The first of these new characters was Alyss, who decided to take part one late evening when, bereft of further inspiration, I'd gone down to the pub for a relaxing pint before bedtime. Instead what happened was that Alyss jumped into my life -- she's never quite jumped out of it again -- and I half-ran all the way home and up the stairs to the computer, where I sat up half the night watching my hands type pages and pages about Alyss.

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