With the release of the third book in the series, this month we're shinging a light on the Martin Hench Novel series by Cory Doctorow. Exploring Silicon Valley from the perspective of the eponymous forensic accountant, this series offers bounty hunting thrills from the world of tech corporations, startups, Fortune 500s and so much more. 

We're thrilled to share these books as our Series of the month so keep reading to learn a little bit more about where we are with Martin Hench's Story...

The Martin Hench Novels so far

Starting with Red Team Blues this 2024 Locus Award Finalist for Best SF Novel introduces Martin Hench. It's a sensational sci-Fi techno-thriller following the most accomplished forensic accountant. Hench's carreer in tech is nearly as old as Silicon Valley and now he's on the trail of a stolen key that unlocks an illicit backdoor to billions in Crypto. In cyber security, the Red Team plays attack and Blue Team plays defence. Hench was born to play attack but while on the search for the stolen ket he'll have to play defence to save his skin. 

Described by our Editorial Expert, Joanne Owen as a "super-succinct, super-thrilling ride of a read set in the moneyed microclimate of Silicon Valley". 

The second book in the series is The Bezzle. It's 2006 and Marty Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant. During a vacation on Catalina Island Marty disrupts an innocuous scheme and kicks off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life. 

"Told in retrospect, with occasional interjections from Marty later in life, The Bezzle is an entertaining story that makes many pertinent critiques of capitalism along the way." The Bezzle is a red-hot follow up to Red Team Blues.

Picks and Shovels is Cory Doctorow's third Marting Hench novel, set at the birth of Silicon Valley in San Francisco in 1986. In a company-eat-company city, Martin is an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way round a city still reeling from the invention of revolutionary new tech. Hired by a Silicon Valley startup to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitior, hench realises he's on the wrong side, but he has no idea of the depth of the evil they're seeking to uproot. 

"It’s entertaining, and often thought-provoking, as it lays bare crime and corruption in the sneakily cut-throat spheres of finance and tech, with this third novel arguably the most enjoyable Hench novel yet."

We're also thrilled to have had the opportunity to ask author Cory Doctorow some questions about the Martin Hench series...

The latest book is another sensational sci-fi techno-thriller following the most accomplished forensic accountant. Tell our audience about Martin Hench please, he’s a cracking character.

When  we first meet Marty Hench (in 2022’s Red Team Blues), he’s a 67 year old semi-retired forensic accountant who has spent 40 years in Silicon Valley unraveling every weird finance scam any tech bro has ever thought up. He’s ready to hang it up, but he gets called in for one last job.

Red Team Blues was conceived of as a weird experiment: what if I wrote the grand finale of a long-running, beloved crime fiction series, without writing all the previous volumes? It was successful – too successful, because my editor commissioned two more Hench books! 

That left me with a conundrum: how to tell more Hench stories without disturbing his well-deserved retirement? The obvious solution: tell the Hench saga out of order, with books dipping into his 40-year history of busting tech scams. 

Marty’s a two-fisted, high-tech sleuth who was present when the first spreadsheet was weaponized by grifters, and he’s better than anyone at finding the fortunes that are made to disappear in spreadsheet cells.

How long did it take to develop Martin Hench from thought to fully-fledged character? Has he changed from your initial ideas as the series has progressed?

I write when I’m anxious, and the pandemic lock-ins made for a very fertile time in my writing career. I wrote nine books from my backyard hammock in the years between the first lockdown order and the lockdown lifting.

Red Team Blues was one of them. I wrote the first draft in six weeks flat. After all, I’ve lived through most of what Marty’s seen, and I have 25 years’ worth of blogging behind me, which means I’ve got my detailed notes on this century’s entire run of events and happenings to refer to as I write.

The two books I’ve written since (and the several more I have on the drawing board) flesh out Hench’s character. Writing the series out of order offers me lots of leeway here: as I write his previous adventures, I can make up any events that explain his later views, traits and memories as already written. It turns out backshadowing is a lot easier than foreshadowing. It’s very satisfying!

Give us a snapshot of the series so far…

In Red Team Blues, we meet Marty as he embarks on his last adventure: unraveling a cryptocurrency heist. Like everyone smart, Marty thinks cryptocurrency is bullshit, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. It’s very useful... for crime.

In The Bezzle, Marty lives through the Obama years and the Great Financial Crisis, working to help a friend of his who has been sentenced to life in a brutal, overcrowded California penitentiary, victim of a vindictive prosecutor, the wildly corrupt LA Sheriff’s Department, and California’s “three strikes” law. 

While working that case, Marty and his incarcerated friend Scott discover a scheme to extract millions from prisoners and their families with high-tech “alternatives” to libraries, continuing ed, mail, packages, and in-person visits. As they dig further, they learn that the private equity looter behind the scheme is connected to LA Sheriff’s gangs and violent prison gangs. 

What follows is a tale of ice-cold revenge, Dungeons and Dragons, prison violence, and vintage computer restoration.

Picks and Shovels returns to the 1980s for Marty’s first adventure when, as an MIT dropout with a CPA from a community college, he arrives in San Francisco, seeking his fortune at the dawn of the PC era. 

Marty lands his first job, working for Fidelity Computing, a PC company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. Sounds like a joke, right? But the joke's on their parishioners, who are recruited into a pyramid selling faith scam that exploits social bonds to sell junk PCs that are locked in – from the gimmicked floppy disks that only work with their high-priced drives to the gimmicked tractor-feed paper that only works with their high priced printers.

Marty's job is simple: figure out how to destroy Computing Freedom, a rival company started by three women who broke away from Fidelity, whose products are designed to unlock every customer the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity have locked in. Marty isn't that far into this assignment when he realizes that he's on the wrong side, and he throws his lot in with Computing Freedom's founders: a queer orthodox woman who's been expelled from her family, a nun who's thrown in with antiimperialists liberation theology radicals resisting America's dirty wars, and a Mormon woman who's left the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.

But when Marty sends his resignation to the Reverend Sirs, he learns that Fidelity isn't just a weird PC company running a faith scam: it's a violent criminal enterprise. Suddenly the stakes get a lot higher.

Cory, you are a science fiction author, activist and journalist and the author of many books, including The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a Big Tech disassembly manual. Bearing in mind this series is set in Silicon Valley, what fascinates you about this world of tech?

Science fiction asks the most important question of all: not “what does this tech do?” but “who does this tech do it to and whom does it do it for?” This is also the role of an intelligent and effective tech critic – to explore and challenge the social relations of our technology. Science fiction rebuts the Thatcherite maxim that “there is no alternative” (AKA “resistance is futile”) and instead says, “How about all of these alternatives?”

Which kind of scenes flow most freely as you write them? And which are more challenging to write?

I find all kinds of scenes equally difficult and equally easy to write. The biggest predictor of how I feel about writing isn’t what I’m working on – it’s how I feel about everything else: my relationships, my career, the climate, politics, finances, my health, etc. Realizing this was profound because it let me work through days when the writing felt terrible, because I recognized that this feeling was about the external world, leaking into my internal creative process.

Do your characters stay with you after you finish writing or do you leave them on the page?

I often run into baroque, ghastly tech scams and find myself idly wondering how Marty Hench would rip them to shreds.

Which books do you like to read? What was the last book that you read and would recommend?

I just finished Pat Murphy’s “Adventures of Wendy Darling,” a feminist retelling of Peter Pan, with extensive cameos by Sherlock Holmes. It’s absolutely amazing! It’s not out until May (I read it for a blurb, which I’ll be providing later today, along with a review to run on the on-sale date).

Murphy has a long history of retelling classic genre stories in which women are confined to the periphery in such a way as to put them front and center. Her best-known example of this is There and Back Again, an all-female retelling of The Hobbit (in space!). Shamefully, Christopher Tolkien intimidated Murphy and her publisher into withdrawing the novel, so it’s very hard to get a hold of today, though it is brilliant (and also unequivocally legal under both US fair use and UK fair dealing – the fact that you’ve got the law on your side is cold comfort when the other side has billions of dollars).

Have you always written?

I started writing when I was six years old, feverishly retelling the story of Star Wars, which I’d just seen at the cinema, over and over, like a kid practicing scales at the piano.

I benefited immensely from the kindness – sometimes protracted, sometimes momentary – of writers who spoke to youth groups, served as writers-in-residence, guest-lectured to my summer D&D camp.

Above all, I benefited from Judith Merril, a towering writer, critic and editor who went into voluntary exile in Toronto after the Chicago police riots of 1968, and opened the Spaced Out Library, now the Merril Collection, the largest public science fiction reference library in the world.

Judy didn’t just serve as writer-in-residence, reading my manuscripts when I took the subway downtown to give them to her. She also did writer-in-the-schools programs, founding serious writers’ workshops that endured for decades.

My high-school workshop was one such; I kept attending it for years after I graduated (I wasn’t alone). Judy also steered the writers she critiqued into peer groups, like the still-thriving Cecil Street Irregulars, which I joined in the early 1990s.

Other writers were likewise kind and generous with their time. Tanya Huff worked behind the counter at Bakka bookstore; she sold me the first science fiction novel I ever bought with my own money (H Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy).

Tanya was immensely patient with me, and even read manuscripts I shyly brought down to the store, giving me encouraging – but unflinching – feedback. When Tayna quit to write full time, I got her job in the store.

Ed Llewellyn and Ed Greenwood were guest speakers at the D&D summer camp I attended. Both were incredibly encouraging when I approached them after their talks to tell them I wanted to write.

Parke Godwin was guest of honor at the first con I ever volunteered at; when I brought him his coffee, he patiently listened to me as I told him I wanted to write and took me seriously, telling me about the importance of good habits.

These writers didn’t have any career advice for me per se, but I wouldn’t have had a career without them – without them taking me seriously, even at a very young age. 

Can you tell us a bit about your writing process? Where do you write and do you have any writing habits? Do they change with each book you write?

My first novel came out while I was working as European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; I was on the road 27 days/month and working a brutal schedule – I was in 31 countries in 3 years. I learned to write whenever, wherever I was, focusing on writing a little bit, but every day. Back then, it was 250 words (one page) per day. For the book I just finished, it was 750 words/day. I stop in the middle of a sentence so that I can write a few words as soon as I sit down the next day to pick things up again. Knowing that how I feel about the work is more reflective of the external pressures on my life, and not the quality of the work, lets me press on every day. 

Has there been a highlight so far on your storytelling journey and the publication of your books?

In Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary about Edward Snowden, there’s a scene where Snowden is packing up his personal effects in his Hong Kong hotel room, getting ready to flee the country for Ecuador (then Secretary of State John Kerry cancelled his passport while he was on the first leg of his trip, a flight to Moscow, stranding him in Russia, where he’s been stuck ever since). 

As Snowden is packing up his shoulder bag, he grabs the book he’s reading from his bedside table and puts it in his bag. It’s my novel Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother.

Ed has become a pal since. He even wrote a fantastic introduction for an omnibus edition of Little Brother and Homeland.

What have we got to look forward to reading from you next? And what’s next for Martin Hench?

I’m just getting through the final edits on my next nonfiction book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, which Farrar, Straus, Giroux will publish in October:

“Cory Doctorow's Enshittification takes a witty yet incisive look at the tech landscape, where platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Google start off great – before they inevitably turn terrible. In this contemporary moment of digital decline, Doctorow explores how tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, squeezing profit at the cost of user experience. With a mix of sharp humor and deep insight, he unveils the slow creep of ‘enshittification,’ turning the online world into a worse place, one algorithm at a time.”

I’ve got at least three more Hench books in some stage of planning but they’re a ways off. There’s an Enshittification graphic novel and documentary to get through first, as well as a new Little Brother story that will be the lead tale for a new collection. My kid’s off to uni in the fall, and I’ve got a bunch of book tours in 2025/6, so it’s not clear when I’ll get back to Hench, but I sure hope to!

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Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a Big Tech disassembly manual; Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, non-fiction about monopoly and creative labour markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

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