Alec Marsh, many congrats on the new book. This is your fourth Drabble & Harris thriller. What’s happened to our two heroes since Ghosts of the West?
The big development is that Ernest Drabble has got married to Charlotte Moore whom he met in Ghosts of the West. And as a result, he and Charlotte, plus Harris – who was their Best Man and obviously can’t be left behind – are all in Istanbul on their honeymoon. Which is where After the Flood begins, with their arrival in Istanbul on the Orient Express.You’ve had a revamp of the cover which shows Mount Ararat in the background. What can we look forward to in After the Flood?
It’s 1938 and with the world moving towards war, Istanbul is a hotbed of spies and intrigue. Very soon the honeymoon go awry – there’s a break-in at Harris’s room and then Charlotte vanishes – and the three are plunged into a conspiracy that will have a bearing on the future of Turkey and the world. And, as the cover makes clear, it’s all got something to do with Mount Ararat, the legendary landing place of Noah’s Ark.
Why the shift to Turkey in 1938?
I lived in Istanbul for the year in 2015 and have always wanted to set a novel there. So when Drabble – who’s a historian – and his wife, Charlotte, also a historian, needed somewhere to go on honeymoon, it seemed like the obvious choice. The truth is it would exactly the sort of destination that would be at the top of their list, given their passion for the past but also for travel. What’s more, in the era before mass commercial air travel, Istanbul was one of those places that was still comparatively easy to get to in the 1930s, albeit with a four-day train journey.
Surely there’s no trace of Noah’s Ark is there – it’s a mythical tale?
For decades, centuries, certain people – so-called Ark hunters – have been searching Mount Ararat and almost certainly other places for the Ark or signs of its presence. Over the course of the past century photographs have appeared showing shadows or dark smudges reputed to be part of ship near the summit – the Biblical equivalent of shady images of the Loch Ness monster. After the Flood turns on one particularly famous sighting which reportedly took place in 1917 by a Russian military aviator and which was followed by a Tsarist unit being sent up to investigate. The whole affair seemingly got lost within the Russian revolution but has excited Ark seekers ever since.
Aside from all that, the Ark story and variations of it feature in the Islamic as well as Judeo-Christian traditions and is even referred to in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, which itself dates back 4,000 years. If you go online you’ll find no shortage of people discussing the physical evidence of Genesis-style flood, which makes for fascinating reading.
For those unfamiliar, how would you describe our two heroes, Ernest Drabble and Percival Harris?
Our protagonists Ernest Drabble and Percival Harris are old school friends and as close a brother. But they’re very different. Drabble is a youthful professor of late medieval and early modern history at Cambridge – he’s also a mountaineer of some international repute, although retired since a failed attempt on the North Face of the Eiger. He’s a lapsed Marxist but has modern outlook. Meanwhile Harris – he hates his first name and forbids its use – is someone who sees the world through the prism of the past; he’s a Fleet Street journalist, a drunkard, which even he would probably accept, and is very much a man of his time. He’s a cavalier to Drabble’s roundhead. The two have survived a few adventures together and After the Flood is undoubtedly their toughest one yet.
Turkey in ’38 is reeling from the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of the new state of Turkey, wasn’t it?
Yes, and that’s another reason why I chose Istanbul for the book, because in May 1938, Ataturk was dying. In fact he had just months to go before he died of cirrhosis of the liver in November 1938 – by which point you can imagine that Turkey would have been in the grip of succession battle royal. Here was the man who as its first president had moulded and formed the new Republic of Turkey, declared in 1923. He was a revolutionary and transformed the country – and whoever replaced him would likely have pivotal impact on the future of Turkey as well as the wider region.
Why did Turkey remain neutral in WW2 – was there a risk of an alliance with the Axis powers?
One of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s great slogans was ‘peace at home, peace in the world’. It summed up his approach of determined neutrality for Turkey as the world around them was riven by ideology and the division between democracies on the one hand and autocracies on the other. When Ataturk died his longstanding deputy, Ismet Inonu, became president and continued Ataturk’s policy, albeit Turkey was courted by both sides when the war came, and there was indeed Turkish nationalist support for joining Germany in fighting Russia. In the end, Turkey joined the war on the side of the Allies in February 1945.
Will we see a fifth Drabble & Harris?
Yes! Book five is to be set against the backdrop of the Munich Crisis in September 1938. It will begin with Drabble in a dusty archive at Prague castle, where he makes a breathtaking historical discovery… Any more than that, my lips are sealed!
Alec Marsh is a journalist and writer and the author of After the Flood, the first of the Drabble & Harris Thrillers.
