on. Some of the best distillations of that feeling come in John Blanche's surreal concept artwork, and just recently I saw a review of the Calpurnia books that referred to my writing as "John Blanche in prose". That's a compliment I'm delighted with. 6 You're well known for your Shira Calpurnia novels, that came together to form the Enforcer Omnibus. What was your inspiration for these novels? I had had the character of Shira Calpurnia in my head for a while after I started publishing short stories in the old INFERNO! magazine -- in fact her first appearances were in the micro-stories I wrote for my local shop's Necromunda campaign newsletter. When I moved her to front and centre and started to build a story around her a few themes crystallised pretty naturally. I had read (or reread) Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, a murder mystery set in Soviet Moscow, and was particularly struck by the way the detective character's ideas about crime and punishment came up against the rigid ideological framework his superiors forced him to work with. That set me rereading the pages on the Arbites in the old Codex Imperialis and wondering what it must be like to try and sort out your ideas of justice and law in a horrific totalitarian theocracy like the Imperium, where the ideals we associate with good governance have been distorted out of all recognition. Parallel to that I thought about the insane scale of the Imperium and its Adeptus, a