Guards! Guards!

First published on 1 November 1989 by Victor Gollancz. It is the eighth Discworld novel and the first in the City Watch sub-series.

It introduces Sam Vimes and the Watch, who anchor the most character-driven of Discworld's sub-series. The tone — satirical but emotionally serious — is representative of Pratchett's mature writing. Pratchett himself and many long-term fans pointed new readers here.

The novel strongly implies it — his birthmark, bearing, and origin all point in that direction. Pratchett deliberately left this unresolved as an ongoing element across the Watch books.

The Watch is set up as the city's least important institution — deliberately marginalized because a functional police force would disrupt Ankh-Morpork's organized crime ecosystem. Pratchett uses it to ask what makes a person try to do their job with integrity when every incentive points the other way.

'Guards! Guards!' is the traditional call made when summoning help — a cry that is utterly futile in Ankh-Morpork, where the Guards are the ones who need help. It is also a direct reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet, where the same cry appears.