In Conversation with Zach Miles, author of Snakebite: Last Orders Before Sundown

 

Interviewer: Today we’re joined by Zach Miles to talk about his debut novel, Snakebite: Last Orders Before Sundown, the first book in The Zemblanity Saga. Zach, how do you describe the novel now?

 

Zach Miles: It’s difficult to put it neatly into one box, and I’ve realised that’s actually one of its strengths. At heart, it’s a thriller set in Hong Kong during the final years of British rule. There’s a murder mystery, political conspiracy, espionage and a love story. But running underneath all of that is another current involving coincidence, prophecy, ancient mythology and the possibility that events Daniel thinks are random may not be random at all.

 

So you can read it as a conspiracy thriller. You can read it as a psychological story about a man whose perception of reality begins to fracture. Or you can believe that something much older really is guiding him. I deliberately don’t tell the reader which interpretation is correct.

 

Interviewer: The title has obviously changed since you first began talking about the novel. Why Snakebite: Last Orders Before Sundown?

 

Zach Miles: Snakebite is actually a drink in the novel, and it appears at the moment Daniel first hears about a horrific double murder involving a British barrister and a young Russian woman. That conversation changes the direction of his life.

 

But snakebite also became a metaphor for the whole story. Daniel is bitten by something he initially doesn’t understand. Curiosity, obsession, love, perhaps fate. The venom gets into him slowly.

 

Last Orders Before Sundown is about the clock running down. British Hong Kong has an expiry date. Everyone knows exactly when it ends. Daniel just doesn’t realise that another clock is running alongside it.

 

Interviewer: Hong Kong itself feels almost like another character.

 

Zach Miles: It has to be. The Hong Kong I wanted to capture is 1995, not the city people know today. Kai Tak, Queen’s Pier, Government House, the old bars of Wan Chai, junks in the harbour, the colonial institutions, the Masonic lodges, the banks, the military presence. But also temples, gods, fortune tellers, feng shui and this extraordinary coexistence of modern capitalism and ancient belief.

 

You could walk out of one of the most technologically advanced banks in the world and, minutes later, be standing beneath coils of incense in a temple that’s been there for generations. That collision became incredibly important to the novel.

 

Interviewer: And Daniel Sagar arrives right in the middle of that collision?

 

Zach Miles: Yes. He’s twenty-five, fresh out of university and has effectively won the lottery. He’s been given this extraordinary opportunity with an American investment bank in Hong Kong. Then he falls in love with the Governor’s daughter. His career is taking off. He’s living in this incredible city. Everything suggests he’s extraordinarily lucky.

 

Except the book gradually asks whether he’s lucky at all.

 

That’s where zemblanity comes in.

 

Interviewer: Explain that word.

 

Zach Miles: Zemblanity is the opposite of serendipity. Serendipity is making a fortunate discovery by accident. Zemblanity is making an unhappy, unlucky or inevitable discovery.

 

Daniel’s life becomes a chain of both.

 

A chance encounter leads to another encounter. Missing one boat puts him aboard another. A murder story he hears over a drink won’t leave him alone. People appear at precisely the wrong or right moment. Numbers repeat. Predictions begin coming true.

 

Initially they’re coincidences. Eventually there are too many of them.

 

And that’s really the engine of The Zemblanity Saga: at what point does coincidence stop being coincidence?

 

Interviewer: That brings us to the supernatural or mythic side of Snakebite. How important is that?

 

Zach Miles: Increasingly important, but I wanted it to enter almost unnoticed.

 

The first chapter contains a dust devil that appears seemingly from nowhere. When Daniel reaches Hong Kong, he encounters a mysterious woman in Man Mo Temple. We later discover she’s Tala, a Babaylan, part of the pre-colonial Filipino spiritual tradition.

 

She appears again and begins telling Daniel things she shouldn’t possibly know.

 

Then some of those things happen.

 

The rational response is that it’s coincidence. Daniel certainly wants to believe that. But after he suffers a traumatic brain injury, he begins experiencing increasingly disturbing visions. Now there’s another explanation available: his brain is damaged.

 

That’s where I wanted the reader trapped. Is Daniel experiencing neurological symptoms? Is his subconscious connecting things he’s already seen? Is he becoming obsessed? Or is Tala right?

 

I don’t want to take that uncertainty away from the reader.

 

Interviewer: So would you call it supernatural fiction?

 

Zach Miles: No. That’s important. The real world remains real.

 

The murders matter. The politics matter. The approaching Handover matters. The financial and technological changes happening in Hong Kong matter. The conspiracy Daniel uncovers has human beings behind it.

 

But another mythology is gradually surfacing alongside that investigation, involving old spiritual traditions, ancient secrets and figures whose existence is much harder to explain.

 

Those two stories begin separately. The deeper Daniel goes, the harder it becomes to tell where one ends and the other begins.

 

That’s the territory I’m interested in.

 

Interviewer: There’s something almost Angel Heart about that.

 

Zach Miles: Absolutely, in the sense of atmosphere and uncertainty rather than story. Angel Heart is one of those films where an investigation into something external gradually becomes an investigation into the protagonist himself. I love that idea.

 

Daniel thinks he’s investigating a murder.

 

Eventually the more frightening question becomes: why has this investigation found him?

 

Interviewer: But there’s also a major romance at the centre of the novel.

 

Zach Miles: Very much so. Louise isn’t there as decoration between thriller scenes. Their relationship is one of the engines of the entire saga.

 

She’s the daughter of the last British Governor of Hong Kong, so falling in love with her puts Daniel inside a world he would otherwise only observe from outside. Government House, political power, military circles, colonial privilege.

 

But I wanted their relationship to be passionate and messy and funny as well. They’re young. This isn’t two spies exchanging coded messages over martinis. They’re falling desperately in love while the adult world around them is becoming increasingly dangerous.

 

And Daniel’s obsession eventually threatens the very relationship that gave him access to that world.

 

Interviewer: Technology also seems surprisingly important for a novel set in 1995.

 

Zach Miles: Hugely. Because we know what’s coming and the characters don’t.

 

The internet is emerging. Records are being digitised. Financial institutions are investing billions in technology. Information that once existed in separate filing cabinets can suddenly be cross-referenced.

 

Daniel begins to understand that before some of the people around him do.

 

That creates another interesting collision: ancient prophecy at one end and digital data at the other. Both are essentially methods of finding patterns. Daniel is caught between them.

 

Interviewer: Why set the story specifically against the Hong Kong Handover?

 

Zach Miles: Because everyone knows the ending.

 

Midnight, 30 June 1997.

 

You almost couldn’t invent a better dramatic clock. A great colonial experiment has a precise expiration date, and millions of people are living beneath it wondering what comes next.

 

The book counts toward that moment, but Daniel’s personal countdown becomes increasingly entangled with Hong Kong’s.

 

The sunset isn’t metaphorical. It’s coming.

 

Interviewer: How much of the novel comes from your own experience?

 

Zach Miles: The fiction is fiction, but the world around it comes from lived experience. I spent many years living and working in Hong Kong and knew the atmosphere of that period: the bars, banking culture, expat life, extraordinary wealth, uncertainty surrounding the Handover, and the sense that East and West were colliding and combining in ways neither completely understood.

 

I never wanted to write a memoir. Daniel isn’t me. But I wanted somebody who lived through that period to recognise the smell of the place.

 

Interviewer: This is your debut novel, but not your first career as a writer.

 

Zach Miles: No. I’ve spent more than thirty years telling stories for other people as a copywriter in advertising.

 

Advertising teaches you discipline. Every word has to earn its place. You learn rhythm, persuasion, imagery and, most importantly, how quickly you can lose an audience.

 

Writing a novel gave me a much bigger canvas, but strangely I found myself using many of the same instincts. What’s the hook? What’s the emotional promise? Why should somebody turn the page?

 

Snakebite is my debut novel, but storytelling certainly isn’t new to me.

 

Interviewer: Why Zach Miles?

 

Zach Miles: Distance and freedom. A pseudonym allows me to separate the writer from the person and let the fictional world stand on its own.

 

There are fragments of history, places and experiences in these books that are very close to me. Zach Miles gives me permission to take those fragments somewhere completely different.

 

Interviewer: Why call this The Zemblanity Saga rather than simply a trilogy?

 

Zach Miles: Because I’ve realised the larger story isn’t simply three consecutive thrillers.

 

Snakebite: Last Orders Before Sundown begins the pattern. Ghost Trap takes Daniel into a different Hong Kong and a different psychological space. Dragon Eye brings threads that may initially seem unrelated into alignment.

 

Things introduced almost casually in the first novel acquire completely different meanings later.

 

That’s why “saga” increasingly feels right. The conspiracy is one strand. Daniel and Louise are another. The mythology is another. Hong Kong itself is another. They’re all moving through time together.

 

Interviewer: So what ultimately sets Snakebite apart?

 

Zach Miles: I think it’s the collision of worlds.

 

A murder investigation collides with a love story. Colonial politics with ancient belief. Investment banking with espionage. Emerging technology with prophecy. British Hong Kong with Filipino mythology. Rational evidence with visions produced by an injured brain.

 

And sitting in the middle is a young man desperately trying to decide which things are connected and which aren’t.

 

Perhaps none of them are.

 

Perhaps all of them are.

 

That’s zemblanity.

 

Interviewer: And what do you hope readers feel when they finish it?

 

Zach Miles: I want them to look backwards.

 

I love stories where reaching the end changes the meaning of things you barely noticed at the beginning. A gust of wind. A number. A stranger’s words. Someone appearing at exactly the right moment.

 

If a reader finishes Snakebite and thinks, “Hang on. When did all of this actually begin?” and goes back looking for the first sign, then I’ve done what I wanted to do.

 

Interviewer: What’s next?

 

Zach Miles: The sequel.

 

Snakebite was always intended to lay the foundations for a much wider story. Last Orders Before Sundown is deliberately restrained in places: the world is being built, the characters established, the mythology introduced and the pieces moved onto the board.

 

The sequel is where things become intense.

 

The mythology deepens, the violence escalates and the characters we think we understand begin to change. I love what Game of Thrones did with the idea that nobody owns the story forever. Key characters evolve, some die, and new ones emerge from the ashes. I want The Zemblanity Saga to have that same sense that the world is bigger than any one character. And hanging over everything is the question that started it all: who killed Roger and Sasha? By the end of Snakebite, Daniel thinks he’s getting closer to the answer.

 

In the sequel, it becomes much harder to know whether he’s been uncovering the truth at all.

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Interviewer: Zach, thank you.

 

Zach Miles: Thank you.