Kester Grant

I don't know if I'm explaining myself rightly there very clearly.

But the folk tales of Renat and Isengrim come from medieval Europe.

And it's the story that's quite well known in other forms of the wily fox that is always outwitting the wolf and various other animals that get in the way in between.

I thought to myself, okay, this subculture, they're non-religious because they're a mix of all different religions and all different outcasts from Parisian society.

So what is the difference in their language and in their beliefs?

So I thought to myself,

Instead of cursing by the devil, which we often do, or cursing or blessing or taking an oath according to religious things, they would speak using the words of their ancestors.

So the first person who created the Miracle Court would be that Wiley Fox Renat, the first criminal who gathered a gang of criminals together and laid the foundation for the Miracle Court.

And the first policeman of Paris...

who was based on Nicolas de la Reine, who went in and cleaned up the slums of Paris, he would obviously be Renat's counterpoint, his enemy's arch nemesis.

And so he became Isengrim.

I had used wolves elsewhere, so Isengrim became a boar.

But throughout the book, then all the miracle court, they don't say go to the devil, or they don't damn people in that way.

They say, isn't grim take you because isn't grim being that first policeman that persecuted them so much is the devil in their eyes.

And they refer to these myths and legends and these folk tales.

And all of this was pulled straight from that old tradition throughout the world.

Even I was I read the Pankhatantra, which is

your Indian equivalent of Aesop's fables.

I took it from that tradition of storytelling of those folk tales that were telling stories of especially animal stories.

I really wanted to base it in that because the Jungle Book was my starting point.