I then scratched my head over it for a while. So I found myself writing a short novel titled The Atrocity Archive (no ‘s’). It didn’t work as a story (I was still working on my craft) but it occurred to me that if I mixed up the Len Deighton-esque British spy thriller ambiance with an incongruous protagonist and added tentacle monsters from beyond spacetime, maybe I could turn it into a cross-genre mash-up that would work. On the other hand, earlier in the decade I’d written an odd technothriller about a covert British government agency that protected us from the consequences of certain catastrophic mathematical discoveries. A year earlier I’d published a short story titled “A Colder War” which got some attention, but its tale of a 1980s cold war updated with Cthulhoid horrors was too bleak to expand into a novel. I was tired of far-future SF at that point and wanted to do something for light relief a spy story, perhaps, or maybe something Lovecraftian. Let’s rewind to the summer of 1999, when an aspiring SF novelist called Charlie had finished a space opera and was waiting to hear from the editor to whom he’d sent it. It’s extremely unusual for a series to hop from one publisher to another, yet with the publication of The Delirium Brief by Tor.com Publishing next month, the Laundry Files will be on its third US publisher (and fifth English language publisher overall). One of the realities of publishing that we don’t like to talk about is that a series generally lives or dies by grace of its first publisher.
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