Alec Marsh on Cut and Run
Alec, another book so soon – what’s going on?
It’s like the rural bus network – you wait for years for one to arrive, and the two turn up at once…
The truth is that Cut and Run is a story that I’ve been working on for a very long time. It was well over a decade ago that I began researching and creating it, inventing its protagonist – an injured ex-serviceman named Frank Champion – and settling on the precise location and timing of the book. It’s taken me a long time to get it right, but I’ve also been busy with my Drabble and Harris series. I can only say that I hope it’s been worth the wait.
Where are we with Cut & Run?
We are in northern France in the British Army garrison town of Béthune in March 1916. A young woman who works as a prostitute at the brothel for British Army officers has been found dead – her throat cut. Frank Champion, an ex-serviceman with some form in investigating, is asked to go back to France to find the killer who is believed to be a British Army officer.
Where did the idea come from?
The impetus for the book came from a conversation with my agent who asked me if I’d considered writing a story set against the backdrop of the First World War. I immediately found the idea incredibly appealing and threw myself into reading about the war and researching it. That’s when I found out about the licensed brothels – the so-called Red and Blue Lamps for British Army soldiers and officers in France, and I thought that they offered a fascinating opportunity for a crime story.
Who is Frank Champion?
Frank is a former district officer in the colonial service in Kenya. He is 37 or 38 when the events of Cut and Run takes place and we know that at some point he was obliged to give up his career in Kenya and return to Britain. When the war breaks out in August 1914 Frank enlists – along with millions of others – in answer to Lord Kitchener’s call to serve, and he joins the Essex Regiment. Frank then serves in France and fights and injured at the ill-fated battle of Loos in September and October 1915, when some 60,000 British soldiers were killed. Frank is one of the lucky ones, but the battle leaves it mark.
It involves the murder of prostitutes, and set in 1916 we’re within living memory of Jack the Ripper, was violence against women common for the time?
Certainly the German invasion of France and Belgium occasioned sexual violence against women – acts that became part of the propaganda story that drove recruits to serve king and country. The context of total war is important in Cut and Run in other ways, too – because of the profound social upheaval it caused. Millions of men were taken from their homes and civilian work and put in uniform elsewhere, while women entered the workplace as never before and were required to carry a greater part of the burden of the home front. This was also a time when there was a massive growth in another industry – prostitution. By 1917 there were 137 licensed brothels across 35 French towns and cities dedicated to the needs of British servicemen – and largely deemed to be essential for morale and for preventing any civil unrest. The brothels in one street in Le Havre, it is said, received 171,000 visits in 1915 along. And I would guess that the licensed brothels were only part of the story.
Are you in the Gary Sheffield camp on WW1, or the Blackadder one?
I don’t think you can read The Donkeys, Alan Clark’s history of the military campaign in 1915, without feeling rage nor being brought to tears. But do I think Britain’s First World War generals were Melchettesque incompetents? Absolutely not. My suspicion is that Britain’s record in the Great War was similar in some ways to its record in most of our wars. At times we exhibited impressive professionalism, at times we were playing catch up with the enemy as new methods emerged. We probably incurred an equal measure of good and bad luck. We doubtlessly suffered from backwardness by those in positions of command but there will also have been dashes of progressive genius. Was there an appalling acceptance of the gridlock on the Western Front and war of attrition that involved? Yes but that was probably no more than a hard-headed acceptance of the reality on the ground. It would become a question of who broke first.
Should Britain have entered the war at all, or should we have joined with the Germans?
If the German assault of 1914 had been successful and the Schlieffen plan had worked out, the Kaiser would have been victorious in both France and Russia. It’s hard to see how that wouldn’t have been a disaster for Britain and the rest of Europe. That’s a separate issue from the moral question of Britain standing by and doing nothing as its neighbours are subjugated – and likely brutalised. I would say that Asquith’s government had no choice but to take a side and, what’s more, to take the side that it did.
Will we see more Frank Champion thrillers?
I hope so. Certainly, I’ve got plans for second Frank Champion story set against the backdrop of the Somme. So we’ll see…
Alec Marsh is a journalist and writer and the author of Cut and Run, published by Sharpe Books in paperback and kindle and available through kindleunlimited.
