Simon, A Death in Berlin is the latest in your new series featuring Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke. It’s a very pacey and compelling novel. Would you like to start by giving an overview of the plot?

I was looking at the underworld in Weimar and Nazi Germany. One of the interesting things I found was how closely intertwined the Nazi Party were with organised crime. Particularly in the early years and even after they came to power, they still indulged criminals because they were useful for making people disappear and they were also great when the war started for supplying black market goods. The Nazis had a particular appetite for luxuries and they needed these people to supply them. The Nazis also needed the nightclubs that they were running, because these proved to be useful intelligence gathering places. A lot of people went to clubs to let their hair down, because there was an understanding that what was said in the clubs stayed in the clubs. In a lot of cases there’s people in the clubs gathering intelligence for the SS. So they served a really useful purpose and I thought this is really interesting and did some research into these crime gangs that were in Berlin at the time and what happens when they’re involved in a turf war. So that’s where the idea of the book came from.

So your ideas come from the research, is there anything specifically that inspired you?

Well you know, with the Second World War there’s not month that goes by without at least 20 new books on the subject appearing, that take a slightly interesting new angle. So there’s plenty of reading research. The other thing that’s very useful, I find is to go to the place where the books are set. So that you get a sense of the ambiance of Berlin, for example, or if it’s a Roman book, somewhere like Petra or Egypt, where basically a lot of the housing on the Nile hasn’t changed for about 5,000 years. So you get a sense of the smells, the feel. And of course in Berlin, you can turn the corner of a street and suddenly you’re faced with this façade that still carries the scars of the Second World War. So there’s a lot you can glean in terms of atmosphere and ambiance by visiting the place where the book will be set.

I think Liebwitz, an introverted Gestapo man attached to Schenke’s team, is a fascinating character, I particularly like his interaction with Schenke and the hard boiled Hauser. Did you set out to make a sympathetic Gestapo man, or did he evolve?

He evolved, his original point was to be a go between, between Heydrich in the Reich main security office and Schenke. Then he evolved into this rather interesting character, purely as the story unfolded. I don’t plan things out meticulously. About half a side of A4 is my outline for writing a book, because I want to see what happens. I want to see how things are going and if it takes a particular direction I’ll follow it and see whether it goes well or not. Just let the story evolve and he’s one of the characters that grew in the telling.

You have included some interesting cameos from Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich among others. How hard was it to write some of the most reviled men in history?

One of the issues for anybody reading this series is going to be hindsight. We all know how things turn out and in a way that empowers the reader over Schenke. I think what’s really important is to create a contingent sense of what it was like to live in Nazi Germany. Living moment to moment, because Schenke doesn’t know how things are going to turn out. So when he turns up at this party and Hitler’s there, I was thinking, okay, so what is Hitler going to be like in terms of how he interacts with Schenke? And of course with Schenke’s motor racing past, Hitler was actually a nut for motor racing, as soon as he recognises Schenke he goes into fanboy mode. I think this is one of those things where you can round the character out a bit, he doesn’t have to be a harsh super villain, even though he is. I don’t think there’s any evil person in history where there isn’t at some point an aspect of their personality that a lot of people will identify with. So I think it was an interesting approach route for that meeting between him and Schenke. Then Hitler slips back into what he’s planning for the next stage of the war. To remind the reader what else is going on in this guy’s head. He’s about to do some pretty horrific things. I think that’s a more realistic depiction than just as a sort of standout villain.

The first three Schenke books are set over relatively short periods of time, a few weeks or months, will that continue through the course of WWII? Will this series be as epic in scale as your Eagles of the Empire series, with 23 books?

I really don’t know, because I don’t know how long Schenke’s gonna survive carrying on the way he does. But my preferred plan is to have a story arc that covers the entire war and immediately afterwards. So that we get that sense of the ups and downs in Germany’s fortunes. We’re a year or so off the point at which, a lot of these police officers would be volunteering for the Einsatzgruppen forces that carried out all the atrocities on the Eastern Front. There’s a very good book called Ordinary Men [by Christopher R. Browning], its about a police battalion that was sent to the East. These were professional police officers, loads of integrity, policing careers and who had volunteered to join these police battalions in the Eastern Front. If you’re a police officer in a regime like Nazi Germany, you can tell yourself you’re being professional and you’re fighting criminals. The problem comes when the regime fundamentally redefines criminality to include political opponents, trade unionists, gypsies and Jews. Then at what point do people say, that ‘s not right and at what point do some people say okay they redefined criminality, but their job’s still the same. And they suddenly find themselves basically having a go at people who previously weren’t criminals. And there is that kind of incremental change that happens in quite a lot of functionaries, that ultimately ends with them committing pretty horrendous crimes. So that’s very much going to be part of the background.

You’ve sold six million copies of your books, what’s the secret of your success?

I think it’s characters more than anything else. If you create characters that people can identify with and start liking or admire then you can take them for the long haul. We’ve seen this across many historical series like Hornblower and Sharpe and I think the ones that have the longest legs and engage people the most tend to be based around very admirable and sympathetic characters. I think story can take you a long way, but I think ultimately what makes a series successful or not is just how far you can create characters that people really want to be closer to, to identify with and to follow.

So what’s next for Schenk?

Well we’re on the cusp of the invasion of France so obviously that’s going to be the background. There are a number of plots I’ve worked out, but what I think I may do next, might put the focus on the Hitler Youth because they really scared me. In the sense that you can take kids, you can indoctrinate them and basically turn them into war criminals pretty easily. One of the things that we see from doing the research is when we talk about all the atrocities that were committed by German armed forces during the Second World War. There’s a certain amount of exploitation that goes on for the Wehrmacht because the SS were the real bastards and the Wehrmacht were okay. That’s just not true. What actually happened is those soldiers who joined up, who had been school kids and been educated and indoctrinated under the Nazi regime since 1933 were quite easily biddable in terms of committing crimes.

You’ve mentioned Ordinary Men were there any other books that particularly inspired you or that you would recommend?

There was a really hair raising book called Stella by Peter Wyden, about Stella Kübler. Who was a Jewish woman trying to hide out in Berlin. She was captured by the Gestapo, tortured and turned so that she would help them track down other Jews. They did it by telling her that unless she cooperated her parents would be sent to a concentration camp and be gassed. So she turned and worked for them and of course they’d already killed her parents. After the war this guy who had been in love with her when they were both children and had served in the American armed forces, wondered what had happened to her. He discovered what she had done and he’s full of this kind of moral opprobrium for what she did: but I’m thinking in similar circumstances, what would he have done? I think it’s very easy to judge people with hindsight in history, when you have no idea what it felt like to face the sort of immediate contingent pressures these people were under. That’s also one of the things in the Schenke series that I want to get across. He’s not going to be some sort of idealistic anti-Nazi. He doesn’t agree with them and he’s got his personal code of integrity, but there are going to be points at which that is going to be tested. I think we need to be a little bit more aware of the contingency of the historical experience rather than the retrospective history that we tend to make all our moral judgments based on.