Like a lot of people, I first encountered Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” in its filmic form. I liked the John Huston–directed movie a lot. I suspect I would like anything that teamed Michael Caine and Sean Connery together, but having them in a really good film based on a great story was even better. When Tim and Melissa first suggested the Rags & Bones concept to me, Kipling was one of the authors I immediately thought I might like to pay my respects to with an homage. Possibly because I worked in a bookstore when Kipling’s books first entered the public domain and thus they are inextricably linked in my mind: I still have nightmares about the sudden influx of dozens of new editions of The Jungle Book.
Once I had the idea of revisiting “The Man Who Would Be King,” I thought about the two central characters. Who would my buddies be, my Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot? It wasn’t a great leap from there to decide I would use my existing duo, Sir Hereward and his puppet companion, Mister Fitz. The other main character is, of course, Kipling himself, who in the original narrates the story in the first person. Possibly because I’d recently been rereading a text from my university days (the story collection Points of View, edited by James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny), I decided to twist this somewhat and write the story as a dramatic monologue, with the writer character “overheard” as he tells the story of two wayward goddesses and we, the reader, also apprehend what is happening as he narrates both past and present.