When you’re writing in a genre where you’re dealing with a mix of real people, real events, real chronology, and invented characters, you’ve got to get the facts right and somehow come up with a marriage of the smallest details that’s going to leave the reader turning the pages.Īs a reader, the minute that I hit a wrong note-this can apply to wars or relationships or contemporary politics-a little bell sounds in my head. To try and get the small details, the nuance, the body language, the background right. As a writer, you owe it to your fictional characters, wherever they may have come from, however old or young they may be, to try and get them right. How important to you is historical accuracy? What’s the interaction between fact and fiction in a good World War II thriller? I know you do a lot of research for your books.

That holds true as a reader, and as a watcher of TV series or movies. If you look at it in those terms, there’s limitless scope-if you’ve got the curiosity and the right mentality-to go in whichever direction you want. It occurred to me, as I wrestled with my agent and tried to find a new publisher for a change of genre direction, that the Second World War had been the biggest crime scene ever. My writing career took a long detour into crime fiction. The question is why that fascination has been sustained. When I became a writer, I belatedly recognised that this war and the fact that things happen to people-these are plot-led thrillers-became all important. Most of those books had emerged from the Second World War, and they began to fuel my appetite for reading about it.

I used to haunt the Clacton-on-Sea library, and I’d come back every weekend with armfuls of books. However, what is incontestable is that things happen to people in wars. I know a lot about wars from my years as a maker of TV documentaries. My mum had been in London under the bombing, and she’d spent many nights in various shelters. That was evident to me, even as a child, and in fact it was the period of his life that he most treasured when he got older. He’d been in the RAF and had quite an exciting time. My dad had fought in that war, as most dads had. Foreign Policy & International Relationsīefore we get to the thrillers you’ve recommended, why do you think we remain so fascinated by World War Two?.

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