Capital Conversations: Luke Arnold, Author of "The Fetch Phillips Archives"

By Maurice Burbridge | May 5, 2025

Photo Credit: Mark Fitzgerald

Actor-writer Luke Arnold disclosed the various experiences, opinions, and advice that contributed to the creation and success of "The Fetch Phillips Archives", a fantasy/noir series that follows the misadventures of the titular detective. The most recent entry, "Whisper in the Wind", was released last week. 

“With Fetch Phillips in particular, there was a version of that story that I started writing at 18, for the first time and then again in my early 20s,” Arnold said. The final version of "The Last Smile in Sunder City", his debut novel, wasn’t published until 2020. 

Originally, Arnold was influenced primarily by other media, but experiences in finding his voice and imagination helped him eventually turn those starting ideas into a full novel. He credits his work on “Black Sails” (the Emmy winning Starz show), as being “the best boot camp for a creative you could wish for.” 

In regards to “Black Sails”, Arnold recalls thought provoking conversations with great co-stars and writers about scripts that demanded a certain level of literacy. “When you spend that time talking about story, the human experience, myth, allegory and all the elements that come with working on that kind of material, it hopefully gets you out of thinking of story only in terms of tropes, genre and plot,” Arnold said. 

Arnold believes how he would have written Fetch in his youth is quite different from how he wrote Fetch when properly starting "The Last Smile in Sunder City.” 

“I think the more time you spend trying to be a good person, trying to live up to your own ideals and fail and recorrect, the more nuanced you hopefully get in being able to understand and write any character,” Arnold stated. 

However, he didn’t realize until much later on when he replayed it, that the video game “Final Fantasy VII” had influenced his initial ideas about the world, story and themes of Fetch Phillips. What he specifically appreciates about the game is how it captures what occurs when man-made technology is so close to divine/natural energy. 

“And both the beauty that can come out of that, but also this sense of sacrilege and corruption that can sometimes be evident when you see what we’re doing to the world,” Arnold said. 

Furthermore, he attributes the game’s impact on him, growing up in a generation where the climate crisis was uniquely prevalent. “In trying to understand such a big concept as what the world we are building is doing to the natural world beneath our feet, I think the imagery from that game was very much in my mind,” Arnold added. 

A prevailing theme of the book (and series) is a fight for nuance, and the questioning of an easy answer. Despite his love for the noir stories that influenced him, Arnold wanted to take the archetype of the alcoholic gumshoe detective, and see the ineffectiveness of that sort of personality.

He says that young people, in particular young men, are brought up to idolize the lone wolf archetype, but as one gets older, they realize the importance of community involvement, which these heroes often actively ignore or avoid. In regards to Fetch, Arnold adds, “that’s the thing he’s learning over and over, as I think a lot of us do, that engaging with the people around us is usually the most constructive thing we can do.” 

The best support he received when writing that first novel was, rather than specific advice, encouragement. He would recommend doing what he originally did, writing something small that other people may read, as constructive criticism and feedback are necessary fuels to confidently write longer works. 

“Despite what anyone [says], there are very few people out there who can just sit down on their own and write many drafts of hundreds of thousands of words on just the belief that this will be good and someone will care about this. I think some positive reinforcement is really useful and some people are very hard on themselves,” Arnold said. 

He would also recommend, if possible, finding other writers to have collaborative conversations with and provide each other feedback. 

“That’s why I think a lot of fanfiction communities, people can be so prolific in that, because you have this community to work and that’s why a lot of people get started there, as much as anything, because you have this encouragement and have a good community. So finding that early on can be really useful.” 

He remembers the second book in the series, “Dead Man in a Ditch”, being a joyous and pure writing experience, as the first hadn’t yet been released. “The first one where you don’t know anyone will read it at all is kind of exciting and then the second one where you’re riding high on the fact that you actually get to do this. They’re two experiences that you want to appreciate while they happen,” Arnold said. 

“Dead Man in a Ditch” is, in part, about how disastrous it can be when lines between private corporations and state officials blur. Arnold finds it easiest to write about issues and things he’s passionate about, rather than actively conveying political messing. He recommends the example of George Saunders’ “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” a book about how some of the great moments in Russian art and literature were followed by terrible moments in history, a phenomena that Arnold continues to observe today. 

“I still am not sure about the effectiveness of fiction and narrative on actually changing anyone's mind about any issue. I think a lot of times people, we're seeing it very much now, with huge great groups of people, who would define themselves as being geeks and nerds, who grew up on the same kind of media that I grew up on. The messages of all those books felt like somewhat left-leaning, socially conscious, stories about how you [should] care about other people, the dangers of fascism, and all these things that the same people who grew up on that, seem to have not taken any of those messages,” Arnold explained. 

Nonetheless, Arnold thinks it’s important for any author to focus on their inner thoughts and opinions if they ever experience a lack of motivation, and enjoys testing out the pros and cons of potentially-political views in his work. 

“I do think that hopefully leads to interesting fiction where we take some kind of catchphrase idea about the culture, society, the political environment of the moment, and play it out in this fantasy world and get to explore it in the safety of a book or fictional world.” 

"One Foot in the Fade" is the third Fetch Phillips novel, and the first with (some) titled chapters, an intentional choice from Arnold, who says the book is largely about Fetch succumbing to the temptation of being the archetypal fantasy hero. He enjoyed playing with the expectations of readers who may have been wanting a more typical adventure story, as the series has continued to mix genres. 

As for genre mixing, Arnold wanted to find a healthy balance of the melancholic themes typical in noir, but combined with spurts of optimism and magical energy. “I think the thing for people who like this series, out of everything, at the heart of it, those kind of dark twists of fate that happen in this world, throwing this kind of sacred, imaginative magic into a world where things are often twisted back on themselves in a dark way makes for really interesting little moments,” Arnold said. 

Looking beyond "Whisper in the Wind", and how the series may culminate, Arnold finds that some plot elements were always there, but others evolved, or were created, throughout the writing, rewriting, and editing processes. 

He says that this openness to allowing characters and plot details to change as they’re put into new situations provides an extra challenge: tying the situations of side characters to the main narrative so their role in moving the plot forward does not supersede their well-roundness as a character. “What you want at the end is everyone’s journeys to all kind of come together back towards a central goal.” 

The series also follows multiple characters whose nostalgia for their past prevents them from enjoying any of the pleasures of the present and future. “You cannot stop it, things move forward and we are not in control of that. And so being somewhat at peace with that is the only way to actually make your way through the world, and that can be tough to do when it feels like the present and the future [are] not as magical as the past was,” Arnold says. 

Fittingly, the novels take place in a fantasy world devoid of magic, where creatures who have enjoyed being made of and utilizing magic for centuries, are forced to live without it. Many of them, understandably, want to find any way possible to rekindle the literal and metaphorical magic of the past, often to terrible and/or inauthentic results. 

Generally, Arnold finds questioning how to move forward much more beneficial than attempting to preserve the past, which he still deems important. “We’re getting into a time in history, and who would have thought it, where the actual rewriting of history is becoming a conversation. Going back and deleting things and throwing things out to control the story of the moment is a worrying trend,” Arnold said. 

Along with "Whisper in the Wind," Arnold also released "Essentials" this year, his first graphic novel. About the process, Arnold said that he and co-writer Chris “Doc” Wyatt felt like their role was to inspire great artists to do some beautiful work, after-which they could rescript based off of the art, all of which would then be interpreted by letterers. “So it's kind of a very different experience as far as that kind of level of ownership you have over it and how many other people are kind of between your initial writing and the reader.”

He contrasts it with the “huge privilege” and “daunting responsibility” of writing a novel in prose, where solely the author controls what the reader gets. 

A non-creative experience that Arnold is sure influenced his novels in prose was his work with Save the Children Australia, when he had a high access to media (having done Black Sails and the INXS miniseries), which made him beneficial for NGOs that serve the plights of the oft-ignored.

He recalls the importance of “those moments where you're there with people on the ground, and whether that's people who've fled Syria, or [are] in Nepal after an earthquake, or during the food crisis in South Sudan, people who are giving you their real story and asking you to go back to your country and share that story so that what they're going through can be seen and assistance can be given.” 

When it comes to the understanding he had of how connected Australian (or American) politics and society could be to the lives of people suffering internationally, Arnold sees how the privilege of learning may have influenced the Fetch Phillips series. “When you're writing a character who's very much working out what good he can do in his world and how that affects everyone around him, I think that's definitely had an influence,” Arnold said. 

"Whisper in the Wind," all other entries in the Fetch Phillips series and "Essentials" are available for purchase wherever you buy books, including The Book House, a local bookstore. UAlbany students can request to borrow copies of these books through an inter library loan on the University Libraries website.