Goodreads asked Alex Marchant:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Alex Marchant 'The King's Man' was actually written straight after 'The Order of the White Boar' - in fact, originally they were planned as a single book, which proved to be far too long for the intended readership - around 130,000 words rather than the usual 60,000 to 80,000 for ages 10+! They were sparked by the 2013 press conference announcing that King Richard III's grave had, beyond reasonable doubt, been discovered. Recognizing a unique opportunity to encourage the reassessment of this much-maligned king, I realized that my most effective contribution to that effort, as a writer of children's books, would be to tell a story of his life drawing on the original sources rather than the lies that had built up over the centuries after his death. To my surprise, as far as I could tell, this had never been done for children.

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