Geoff Habiger and Coy Kissee are the self-published co-authors behind The Constable Inspector Lunaria Adventures. Featuring snarky, fantasy police procedurals and noir historical fiction, these stories focus on the ordinary folks caught in the crossfire of adventurers and their epic escapades. What We Reading sat down with Geoff and Coy to talk about everything from the inspiration for their series to their hopes for big-screen adaptations!
Thanks for speaking with us guys! First off, tell us a bit about yourself and what led you to the world of writing.
We are the dynamic writing duo of Coy Kissee and Geoff Habiger. We both grew up in Manhattan, Kansas and have been best friends since high school. We became friends over our enjoyment of comics, baseball, and role-playing games – D&D initially, but all RPGs appealed to us. We’d spend long hours talking about our favorite franchises and what we’d do differently in them, and often made up games to play to just pass the time. Even after all of these years, we still enjoy nothing better than spending a weekend playing TTRPGs and board games. We also spend a lot of time talking about what we liked and didn’t like about particular games and what we’d do differently.
Finally, in the early 2000s, we decided to stop talking about it and do something, so we created a company to design our own games called Tangent Games. We developed a couple of card games, started creating some board games, and wrote TTPRG material for the 3/3.5 editions of D&D. One of the things we created was our own campaign setting – Ados: Land of Strife, a world dominated by the gods that were all playing a great game in which the mortals were just the pawns. We created a lot of material to enhance the game and even put out an adventure module, a book of creatures, and a sourcebook for one of the gods. All of that was the groundwork for what we do now, writing novels, especially for our Constable Inspector Lunaria Adventures.
And like we did with our interest in games, we decided that instead of just talking about the books and stories we liked, we should actually write the kind of stories that we wanted to read. Thus, Habiger/Kissee Authors was created.
Talk to us about The Constable Inspector Lunaria Adventures. How did it come about, and how does it differ from your other works?
Since we created the world of Ados for D&D, Geoff had been pondering one very simple idea: in a world filled with magic and monsters, how do the police solve crimes? It was a simple question, but it has spawned a book series to begin to answer it. We love high fantasy and epic fantasy and sword and sorcery fantasy and everything in between, but almost all fantasy (with some exceptions, of course) is about a band of intrepid travelers who must save the world. Whether they must find a legendary item to defeat the army of dragons, or help a king or queen retake the throne, or to toss some cursed artifact into the heart of a volcano, most fantasy stories focus on big, sweeping stories and epic adventures.
While we love these kinds of stories, we wanted to know more about the mundane people, the ones who must try and keep the peace when it seems like every adventuring party that comes into town is armed for the next epic battle and would have no trouble taking over if they wanted. That was the genesis for Constable Inspector Reva Lunaria and our series.
Our other series is quite different, as it is historical supernatural noir fiction. The Saul Imbierowicz trilogy includes prohibition, gangsters, and vampires. It’s about as different as you can get from a fantasy police procedural.
Our two main characters in each series are almost opposites of each other. Reva Lunaria is a strong-willed, no-nonsense constable that doesn’t take guff from anyone. She’s stubborn when it comes to finding the truth, and she can’t stand people who lie or just try and skate by, doing the bare minimum to get the job done. She’s also fiercely loyal to the people she allows to be her friends. Saul Imbierowicz, on the other hand, is hesitant; he’s naive about the world and he’s in way over his head in most of the trilogy. He stumbles a lot, and makes a lot of mistakes as he takes on Al Capone in Chicago. One thing that both Reva and Saul have in common, however, is a strong bond and love for their families. Woe on anyone – vampire or wizard – that tries to do them harm.
What is the number one goal you want your work to have with readers?
We want our readers to have fun. We love writing our stories, and we love reading our stories. We hope our readers do, too. We try to fill them not only with a great plot, but with strong and dynamic characters that you will root for (or against, in the case of the villains). We want our readers to discover all the hidden nods and Easter eggs in our books and to get just as much fun out of finding them as we did by putting them in there. Mostly, we want readers to enjoy our books well enough to recommend them to their friends.
What do you think makes you stand out as an author?
We hope that it is our work that makes us stand out rather than ourselves.
What would you say has been your biggest success so far?
Our biggest success has to be getting critical approval for our books. A couple of the Constable Inspector Lunaria Adventures have won awards – small awards, to be sure, but they’re still recognition for our work.
We also got a wonderful review from Kirkus Reviews (notoriously stingy with giving out praise) on our first Lunaria Adventure, Wrath of the Fury Blade, that said, in part, “In this marriage of fantasy and procedural thriller, the team of Habiger and Kissee gives fans of both genres a master class in worldbuilding. Everything from idioms (“But tread carefully, Inspector. You are on a narrow branch here”) to fascist racial doctrines mesh in a narrative that pulses with innovation on every page.”
We also got a wonderful review from Publishers Weekly about our first Saul book, Unremarkable: “The premise invokes classic black-and-white noir, while lurid supernatural details add a touch of blood red.” We love those quotes for our books.
If you could go back in time to one book you read for the first time, what would it be and why?
Coy: I was a teenager when I read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, and that was the first time that I really identified with the main character in a novel that I read. When the twist came, I was just as shocked as Ender, and I don’t recall anything else that I have ever read making that type of impact on me.
Geoff: I’d want to go back to the first time I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as that book really ignited my love for fantasy stories. After I read the book I made a helmet from a 5 gallon ice cream container and a sword from cardboard and aluminum foil. It sparked a lifetime of reading, and writing, fantasy.
What’s one tip you would give your younger self if you had the opportunity?
Geoff: Follow your dreams. Don’t get tied up in chasing what everyone else is telling you to do, but explore how to turn your passion into what you want to do.
Coy: Just because you’ve never done something before doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. Trust in yourself and believe in your capabilities.
And finally, what do you hope the future holds for you and your writing?
Hopefully more stories. We have three novels in various stages of being written or plotted right now, and there are more stories after those that we want to tell. And if anybody has any connections with producers at Amazon Prime or Netflix on adapting our stories into a series please let us know. We’d love to see them adapted for the big (or small) screen.
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Check out our interview with Eva Asprakis here!
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
