Helen Dale joins Brian Smith to discuss the Romans and us. 

Brian Smith:

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org and thank you for listening.

Hello, my name is Brian Smith and with me today is Helen Dale. Helen is a senior writer at Law & Liberty. She won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper. She read law at Oxford and Edinburgh. Her most recent novel, which we’ll talk about here extensively along with The Hand that Signed the Paper, is Kingdom of the Wicked, which was shortlisted for the Prometheus Prize for science fiction. Helen appears in a number of outlets including The Spectator, The Australian, Standpoint, and Quillette and has a very active Substack. Thank you for joining me Helen.

Helen Dale:

Thank you for having me Brian. Good to be here.

Brian Smith:

So I wanted to start off by talking about Kingdom of the Wicked, which I’ve read twice and I enjoy very much. And it takes the readers on a sort of strange journey to an alternate history and I hope you can tell our listeners a bit about the book and what led you to write it.

Helen Dale:

Well, first, it’s in two parts. There’s two books, but there isn’t going to be a third. So all the people who keep trying to say, “Please make it a trilogy and write a third book of Kingdom of the Wicked” are destined to be disappointed. Once I’d finished the second book of Kingdom of the Wicked, the story is indeed finished—as you can confirm—it comes to a natural end. So book one of Kingdom of the Wicked, which came out in 2017 is called Rules and book two of Kingdom of the Wicked, which came out in 2018–you can tell I wrote them back to back—is called Order. And the Rules and Order is from F. A. Hayek in Law, Legislation and Libert,y because I used a method from Hayek in order to develop the legal system in the books.

So what I’m going to do now, and this is very lazy of me, but it always works, is I’m going to read the blurb off the back of book one of Kingdom of the Wicked, which was written by my editor and my editor is very good at writing blurbs. I’ve written three novels and I’ve not written the blurb for any of them because I’m completely rubbish at this. And if there are any writers listening to this, they would think that I have been extremely lucky because most of the time the poor writer is forced to write the blurb. But my efforts are so pitiful that this has reliably been taken out of my hands by everybody. So I shall read the blurb off book one and you’ll see where this story is going.

784 ab urbe condita—31 AD. Jerusalem sits uneasily in a Roman Empire that has seen an industrial revolution and now has cable news and flying machines–and rites and morals that are strange and repellent to the native people of Judaea.

A charismatic young leader is arrested after a riot in the Temple. He seems to be a man of peace, but among his followers are Zealots and dagger-men sworn to drive the Romans from the Holy Land.

As the city spirals into violence, the stage is set for a legal case that will shape the future—the trial of Yeshua Ben Yusuf. Intricately imagined and ferociously executed, Kingdom of the Wicked is a stunning alternative history and a story for our time. Thank you, Matt Rubinstein, my editor, who wrote that.

Brian Smith:

Very good. So why’d you write this?

Helen Dale:

Well, after my first novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper was enormously, enormously successful, it was a massive bestseller and enormously, enormously controversial. And I had signed—like most writers do—with my first book I had signed what’s known as an option clause. Which in contract law gives your publisher effectively the right of first refusal on your second book or your next book. In my case, it would’ve been my second book. And when a book is sold, probably hundreds of thousands of copies by this point, the publisher really does expect you to write another one because your name has become a license to print money. And I also had this idea in my head that I would be a full-time writer.

And remember I had been admitted to university to study a combined qualification. This is an Australian thing where you do an arts degree and a law degree at the same time and it’s five or six years long; and you can do this with science or accountancy as well. But I had done it with liberal arts and my liberal arts was in classics. And so I actually abandoned the law studies at the time thinking I was going to be a full-time writer. And I started to write a second novel, which I thought I would use my classical education, my ability to read ancient languages to write a novel with a Roman empire setting.

And I started to do the research for it and put it together and so on and so forth. And I’d written about 40,000 words and I realized it was just dreadful… It was just unpublishable. I was writing to a contract, I was attempting to force myself to do something when I wasn’t ready to write it. I hadn’t thought about it long enough and I knew it was so bad—it was. And 40,000 words, I’m not a quick writer. 40,000 words represents a year’s work probably, maybe even more. But I have a recollection of it taking about a year of me being a full-time writer and just all this money piling up and me just trying to be a full-time writer and staring at the walls and trying to write this book.

I don’t know whether you have this in the United States, but Australia and the UK both have this system whereby that you get hard waste disposal and the local council, local authority, sends around notices saying if you’ve got hard waste that’s unsuitable for recycling or for your bin or so on and so forth, you leave it out on the curb on an appointed day and special disposal vehicles will come around and collect and it saves you a trip to the dump.

Brian Smith:

Yeah, we do.

Helen Dale:

And I admit I got all of the drafts of the manuscript, all of my notes, everything, boxed it all up and put it on the footpath with like a dud TV set and various other things for the council to take it away. I just wanted to embalm the entire thing in a giant block of Perspex and then fire it out of the solar system. And I then realized that I had made a very foolish decision abandoning the law degree and I had to go back to university to complete the law degree. I did various other things first. I mean—because I’d traveled all around Europe and particularly lived in Italy and things like this, worked in Italy, worked on archeological digs—did all sorts of stuff like that to do the research for the book.

And I just had to come back to the university some five, this was like five years later, six years later. It was enormously later than it should have been, where I still had this open enrollment in law. And I called the university and I called the law faculty and said, “Yeah, I was admitted.” And they all knew who I was because the first book won the Miles Franklin Award, which is the Australian equivalent of the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize. It had sold all these copies. It had been very controversial. And I said, “oh, I think I better come back to law school and do my law degree.” And I remember the secretary in the law department, “Did you not come up with an idea for another novel?” And I’m going, “It’s worse than that. I wrote 40,000 words of rubbish and had to throw it away.” And so I had to pay a fine, it was only $30, but I did have to pay a fine for just taking years to come back to start and then complete the law degree.

And after that I just did what lawyers do. I did my law qualifications. Three years of study I had to do. And I just went into a pupillage. I was at the bar and then I did very well at university and was kind of a bit of a star. And so I came and did my postgraduate qualifications in the law of England and Wales. I did what’s known as the BCL at Oxford where I was at Brasenose College. And then because I got a job in Scotland, I did Scots law Qualifications at the University of Edinburgh, while I was in practice up there for several years.

And the thing is, the idea of a book set in ancient Rome never really went away the whole time. I was working all these years. I was just working in various law jobs or studying or doing both at the same time. And I thought I would really like to write this book that would be… I think I can write a good book.

And I had written one short story for a magazine back in the ‘90s where I had specifically focused on the scene of how would a modern society respond to a Jesus Christ-like figure and what would the execution look like? About two paragraphs of that short story actually finished up in Kingdom of the Wicked, in book two of Kingdom of the Wicked. I mean I built it up very differently, because there’s a sting in the tail with, I’m quite good at plotting. I’ve always liked crime fiction and I know how it works, police procedurals, that kind of thing. Because I’ve been a lawyer. And that story culminated in execution by firing squad and it looked very South American, the caudillo and that kind of thing.

But I left it. That short story came out in like 1998 or something, but I then just left it and I was becoming sort of more economically successful as a lawyer and I had more experience and more knowledge to draw on and so on and so forth. So I gradually started to put together Kingdom of the Wicked. And I returned to