Robert Jackson Bennett is one of the most beloved authors working in fantasy today. His books have a way of finding readers at exactly the right moment and never quite letting go. Over more than two decades he's built worlds so vivid and strange and human, and his shelf of honors includes the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award and the Philip K. Dick Citation for Excellence, alongside Hugo and World Fantasy nominations.
That acclaim reached new heights with The Tainted Cup in 2024, the first book in his Shadow of the Leviathan series and easily one of his most ambitious works to date. It swept both the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award, introducing readers to the brilliant, reclusive Ana Dolabra and her assistant Dinios Kol. The 2025 follow-up, A Drop of Corruption, only deepened fans' devotion and made the series something truly special.
Ahead of the August 4 release of A Trade of Blood, the third book in the series, we sat down with Bennett for a warm and wide-ranging conversation. He opened up about the detective fiction he loved reading, the scene he had the most fun writing in the new book and dropped just enough hints about book 4 to leave fans excited with anticipation.
The detectives who live in Robert Jackson Bennett's head
When asked about the mystery writers and detective stories that have most influenced his thinking, Bennett was characteristically expansive. He cited Agatha Christie as foundational reading, though he was quick to note that his own novels are considerably larger and more tangled than hers. The real catalyst, he said, was Nero Wolfe, the fictional detective created by author Rex Stout.
"Those aren't quite as popular as they used to be," he said of Stout's novels, "and probably haven't quite aged quite as well as some of the other ones that are out there. Like, you kind of have to have a pretty good grasp of the 40s or the 50s or the 60s to read them."
But what hooked him was the structural conceit at the heart of the Wolfe books: a detective who never leaves his house, while a faster-talking, more Noir-inflected assistant goes out to do all the legwork. Bennett was candid about the debt.
"I kind of stole from it, to be quite honest," he said. "It was the idea of a detective who doesn't leave their house. Wolf himself, he never leaves his house. He has his assistant, whose name is Archie, go out and do all the actual shoe leather work, hop around and talk to all the people and look at all the clues, before he comes back to Wolf."
The appeal, he said, was almost like a sleight of hand: "It's almost like a cheat, you know, where the main character and the audience gets all the clues but doesn't understand what happened until they go back to this one guy in a room and then they say, oh, well, it's quite obvious to me what's happened here."
As he turned that structure over in his mind, he realized there was another famous precedent for it.
"The more I thought of this, the more I realized that there actually is another character who has this exact same sort of setup, which is Hannibal Lecter. He is a genius in a box. He wants to solve crimes for the fun of it and also to sort of taunt people and they bring him case files and he reads them and then he solves them."
Perhaps the most unexpected influence he cited was the early Harry Potter novels, and his reasoning was pretty illuminating. He argued that the first three or four books function, structurally, as murder mysteries with a contained environment, a sequence of crimes, a cast of suspicious characters and a resolution by year's end.
"Those first three books actually work quite well because they are so structured," he said. "And when they stop being so structured, they kind of fall apart a little bit, or get really long, and start to kind of wander."
On world-building, and moving on
Bennett's world-building in the Shadow of the Leviathan series, including the concentric rings of the Empire of Khanum, the biological horror of its Leviathans, the grafting industry and the layered political geography, has drawn consistent praise from critics. When asked whether there's any world he's built that he might want to return to someday, he gave an honest answer.
"Once I'm done, I'm kind of done," he said. He compared it to moving house: difficult, but also an opening. "A new house is a new opportunity to try and do new things and be in a new place."
He acknowledged that this is not necessarily the savviest career move. "Most readers don't follow an author from a series to series. They just will read this one series, and they'll never read anything by that author again." But the pull toward novelty is stronger than the pull toward consolidation. "I really like the chance to try new things. That's kind of the point of writing, is to try new things."
The scene he enjoyed writing most
When asked which moment in A Trade of Blood he had the most fun writing, Bennett was careful not to give too much away but offered a tease that will delight readers who've followed Din's story.
"Din meets someone who is a member of his family," he said, "and this creates a lot of stress for him, and it's very awkward. It's not nearly as fun as he kind of thought it would be." Watching Din try to navigate unfamiliar emotional territory, wanting to be a good family member while being, by his own measure spectacularly bad at it, was, Bennett said, "a lot of fun to write. I did enjoy that quite a bit."
Book 4: back to the coast?
For fans who've already mentally cleared their August calendars, the good news is that Bennett is already deep into the rough draft of book 4. The less reassuring news, as he cheerfully admitted, is that rough drafts for him are more like architectural bones than finished buildings.
"For book 3, I rewrote almost entirely," he said. "The bones are all there, they're just a different animal."
He offered what he was comfortable confirming: "We're definitely going to go back to the coast. It will definitely have a focus on the Titans, and we will meet some of the people that we met in book 1."
Legacy and the next strange thing
Asked what he would want to be remembered for if it came down to a single work, Bennett said. "Folks always ask me what my favorite book is, and I always tell them it's the one I'm writing now. That's the really good one. Everything else is garbage. But this one that I'm writing right now, this is the good one."
He admitted that The Tainted Cup is his biggest hit to date, but he's not ready to let it be his defining work. "I hope to make more things out there in the future," he said, "and hopefully something even larger and crazier and stranger than the things that you've read so far."
As for unexplored territory, Bennett said he's never really done a "substantially different secondary world story, where the nature of reality is very different." So far, no matter how strange things get in his books, the ground stays under your feet and the sky stays above your head.
"I haven't done anything super-duper trippy," he said, "where things can be altered more significantly." He mentioned the idea of a series set entirely inside a computer simulation as one possibility rattling around in his head.
"Usually what I do is I kind of have a directional sense of the sort of thing that I want to do, and then I pick a genre that is easy to colonize," he said. "A murder mystery series works very well for exploring how a culture is built and changes, and how it deals with stress, because you get to drop all the people around everywhere. Each book is a new place, a new crime, a new set of people, a new set of problems."
When he does eventually find that next strange thing to say, one suspects it will be worth the wait.
A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett is out August 4, 2026, from Del Rey Books.
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