The Eisenhorn books, and their successors, the Ravenor and Bequin books, have been very popular. What started as a spontaneous bit of fun with Xenos has grown to be a trilogy of trilogies, an interlinked and epic cycle that will conclude with Penitent and Pandaemonium, the last two parts of the Bequin series (and yes, I am going to write them soon. They’ve both taken a number. They’re sitting in the waiting room).

Along the way, I have written a bunch of short stories featuring those characters. These shorts have often been produced to accompany the publication or new edition of an Inquisitor novel, something new to get people in the mood. Some of the stories (‘Missing In Action’, ‘Backcloth For A Crown Additional’ and ‘Playing Patience’) have become well known, because they are fixtures in the omnibus editions of Eisenhorn and Ravenor. About ten years ago, I thought about collecting all the shorts into an anthology, a companion volume to the trilogies. I thought completists might like to have all the Inquisitor short stories gathered in one volume that could sit on their shelves alongside the novels. It became clear that to make a collection of worthwhile length, I’d need to write new stories, and I began to do that, writing ‘Master Imus’ Transgression’ and ‘The Strange Demise Of Titus Endor’. Then I got stuck, on a short story called ‘Nathan Inshabel on Elvara Cardinal’ (ask me about that sometime), and the anthology never happened. ‘Master Imus’ and ‘Titus Endor’ were turned into audio dramas. The former has never been published in its original prose form.

This summer, my Black Library editor Nick Kyme mentioned the idea of an anthology again. Time had passed, and the number of stories that could be included had increased. All we now needed to make a nice, book-length edition was a couple of new stories, or maybe a novella.