The leading grimdark author, known for his cynical and violent fantasy novels, is back in the world of the First Law – along with a lot more women ...

British author Joe Abercrombie may have sold five million copies of his violent, darkly humorous fantasy novels, and had his books praised by reigning overlord of the genre, George RR Martin (“bloody and relentless”). But the first time he sat down to write what he believed would be “the great British fantasy novel”, it didn’t go well.

Growing up on David Eddings and Dragonlance, Abercrombie was aiming for full-blown epic fantasy when he made a stab at his own novel in his early 20s. He managed a few chapters, but it was “absolutely pompous”, he admits now, away from his home in Bath to meet with his publishers in London.

A decade later, he tried again. He kept the same characters, the same storyline, but “straight away it had this much more world-weary, humorous voice,” he says. “I was taking myself, and the fantasy genre, much less seriously.”

The story began to work. Abercrombie spent months refining every paragraph, even “taking it seriously enough” to show it to his parents, who are still his first readers and biggest critics. “I can remember my mother saying – she denies this – ‘This is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be’. I knew then that I was on to something.”

That something was 2006’s The Blade Itself, following the adventures of torturer Inquisitor Glokta, barbarian warrior Logen Ninefingers, and the dashing but vain swordsman Jezal dan Luthar. Gritty, violent, cynical and redolent with dark humour, “it was my take on Lord of the Rings, but bringing in all my weird preoccupations about how people work, the nature of violence. It’s a reaction against the shiny and optimistic heroic fantasy I read as a teenager. In trying to do the opposite, it becomes quite pessimistic and grim.”

Unusually for epic fantasy, the story takes place at a time when money is becoming the new power and the middle classes are rising; mercantile forces are afoot. “The fantasy I read as a kid did often take place in this medieval sandbox where nothing really developed or changed, where conflict comes from a battle between an objective good and evil rather than rising out of social forces and changes as it does in the real world. So I’ve always been interested in worlds that move on and shift,” Abercrombie says.

He couldn’t find an agent, sending out his manuscript to no avail. “Criticism of that first book is hard to take. You’re expecting to make an impact somehow, even if it’s negative – ‘I despise this book because it’s so powerful!’ – but what you get is the little photocopied slip saying ‘thanks, but no thanks’. So you have no idea if the book is unfashionable, weird, very bad, almost there … that total lack of any guidance was quite tough to deal with,” he says. “I think the combination of violence and humour wasn’t an immediate easy sell. People maybe read it and thought, ‘is this Game of Thrones or Terry Pratchett?’ Maybe there was a disconnect there.”

A friend in publishing passed the manuscript to Gollancz, and he was finally signed for a trilogy. Abercrombie continued his day job as a television editor, but he began cutting back as the royalties came in. “The first couple of cheques were little drips and then they started to get more and more significant, and I went from being shocked at how little writers earn to thinking, ‘oh, you could make a living from this’,” he says.

The Sunday Times praised his “twisty plotting and gallows humour”, the Guardian called him “delightfully twisted and evil” and the Times found that “there is a gritty edge to his world and an awareness of the human cost of violence that is very contemporary”. Two more books in the First Law trilogy followed, then three standalones set in the same world and a foray into writing for young adults. Today, Abercrombie is a leading voice in the “grimdark” fantasy subgenre, a label he has embraced: he styles himself on Twitter as Lord Grimdark and dedicates his new book A Little Hatred to his wife Lou, “with grim, dark hugs”.

This week, Abercrombie returns to the world of the First Law with A Little Hatred, the first in a new trilogy. Focusing on a new generation of characters – although bringing in some old favourites – it opens with a quote from Samuel Johnson: “The age is running mad after innovation; and all the business of the world is to be done in a new way.” The chimneys of industry are rising over this fantasy universe, and its denizens are struggling to come out on top. It’s funny and sardonic, violent and compelling – just what his readers have come to expect. It also features a notably larger cast of female characters than Abercrombie’s usual fare, including Savine dan Glokta, a brilliantly mercenary socialite, and Rikke, who can see the future with her “long eye”.

“The First Law was definitely very male,” Abercrombie admits. “A lot of classic fantasy tropes are male – boys with special destinies, wizardly mentors, shiny knights, that kind of thing … Even when I was writing the third, I was thinking, I didn’t cover myself in glory here. I could have done a lot better, both in terms of the central female characters, but even incidentally having more women in the world. But I would never have considered it. If I needed a politician or a blacksmith or an innkeeper, those were all men.”

Over time, he says, he realised that “there are many ways to get women into any story if you think about it for 10 seconds”. He hopes that having more women in the cast and the wider world will make it “more interesting”.

With two more books still to come in the new trilogy, Abercrombie is busy enough for now. Next, he’s interested in having magic collide with a more modern world. “Along with the cliche of worlds never really progressing, there’s this cliche of magic leaking away from the world in this slightly tragic way, and a tear shed over all that’s been lost,” he says. “I quite like the idea of magic erupting again in a violent and unpleasant way – that’s another direction things might go.”

• A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie is published by Gollancz on 17 September.