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Football and the NazisThink of the Nazis and sport and it’s usually the 1936 Berlin Olympics which comes to mind, with the Games turned into a sophisticated in propaganda exercise, which the International Olympic Committee and too many participant countries happily went along with.But ...
Benson Railton Metcalf Freeman looked every bit the archetypal English officer and gentleman: serious, smartly dressed, complete with the moustache that was so fashionable among RAF officers in the early days of the Second World War. Born in 1903, the son of a Royal Navy officer, public school ...
The Warsaw Ghetto UprisingIn all my novels, there are a number of plot lines which converge at the end of the book, but in my new book, Agent in Peril the core plot is based around the Battle of the Ruhr in 1943, the RAF’s bombing campaign from March-July that year targeting Germany’s ...
Book Reviews
I’m not sure who it was that first used this particular formula for good historical fiction – and especially espionage fiction. The idea is that you choose a peculiarly mysterious or ambiguous moment in recent history and then you weave your plot around it.William Boyd did it very ...
As the coronation of Charles III approaches, Action This Day ploughs us back into a time of risk, uncertainty and unthinkable steaks. The era of the Second World War might’ve been rife with struggle, but there was more than just that; individual stories, people, humour, murder, mystery.. With ...
Well, I don’t know about you, but I thought Jack Miller and Sophia von Naundorf had made it through to peacetime at the end of Agent in Peril.Not a bit of it – they still have their most exciting and dangerous mission before them, and what could be their most effective operation.But, ...
Author Interviews
Alex Gerlis, Agent in Berlin opens with the attack on Pearl Harbor – you’ve described it brilliantly – did you research provide you with first hand accounts of this shocking event?
With Pearl Harbor I was more concerned to get the details of the day correct, especially the chronology and the names and locations of the ships that were hit by the Japanese. I try to avoid eye witness accounts of specific events because I’m always concerned that I could subconsciously use those experiences instead of those of the characters in the book. I relied on my imagination for much of this chapter, helped and inspired – by my research.The 1936 Olympics also features. We now view it as unprecedented, a blatant propaganda exercise by Hitler. Was that how it was viewed both prior and during the Games?My sense is that most of the participants probably realised they were being ‘played’ but didn’t really care too much about it. They were most likely just grateful that the Games were well organised and with state-of-the-art facilities. Unfortunately, we’ve seen that too often with events like the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, where the organisers and participating countries seem happy enough to turn a blind eye to the excesses of the host country. After all, a year from now the World Cup will be taking place in Qatar, of all places.Frank Foley was an amazing man, could you tell us a bit about him?
He really was quite an extraordinary man. He rose from a fairly humble background in Somerset to become an officer in the First World War and in the 1920s joined MI6, eventually becoming the head of the MI6 station in Berlin. He remained in that post until the war began, by which time he’d issued thousands of visas to German Jews desperate to leave the country – it’s estimated he saved 10,000. He was helped in this by his cover in Berlin, which was running the Passport Control section of the British diplomatic mission, which was on Tiergartenstrasse. He was expected to do this job in addition to his espionage duties. Foley also had to deal with the negative attitude of the embassy in Berlin and the Foreign Office, which was probably a combination of snobbery and an establishment disdain for espionage, unless it was to deal with communists. Frank Foley died in 1958 at the age of 73, long before his work in the 1930s became public.The plot of the novel is set around the development of the Focke-Wulf 190 – what was the potential of this aircraft, and how could have changed the war?The development of the FW 190 is one of the plots of Agent in Berlin and I’d be wrong to set myself up as a military aircraft expert. I was more interested in the plane as a device for espionage rather than go into detail about its capabilities, but as I understand it, air forces took the view that they should not rely on just one model of aircraft – so the RAF had the Hurricane and the Spitfire and the Luftwaffe felt that as successful as the Messerschmitt 109 was, they needed an alternative to it too.FC Schalke 04 was the Bayern Munich of the day, but interestingly Bayern (nowadays the archetypal Bundesliga club – hugely successful, both domestically and in Europe), at the time it was viewed very differently by the Nazi leadership, despite many of them having Munich connections. Why was that?Bayern Munich certainly wasn’t the archetypal German club under the Nazis: 1860 Munich was the club which attracted the support of the Nazis. Although Munich didn’t have an especially large Jewish population Bayern did have strong Jewish connections and was called the Judenklub or ‘Jew club’ by the Nazis. The club had a Jewish president - Kurt Landauer – and two Jewish coaches, Richard Dombi and Otto Beer, all of whom fled to Switzerland after the Nazis came to power.There’s rigidity in the upper or upper middle classes that you capture well in the novel – was it a challenge to get that detachment and formality right during the writing?It is a challenge but then it’s a challenge to make all characters feel authentic. I think this is especially tricky when the story is set some eighty years ago. If the setting was hundreds of years ago that would be one thing, but with it being in the relatively ‘recent’ past I think it’s especially challenging because the reader will quickly sense if the dialogue is not quite right – they’ll be more or less familiar with the type of language used, even if they can’t quite put their finger on it. The challenge for the writer is to try and set the dialogue in that period without it coming across as parody. My background as a television producer helps, I’m quite comfortable writing the spoken word. I’m constantly checking and re-checking what I write to root out what I’d describe as contemporary language.Pearl Harbor resulted in Hitler declaring war on America – but do you think if he hadn’t done that, America would limited their involvement to the Pacific, thereby leading to a major problem in the European theatre?
I know less about the Second World War in the Pacific than I do about it in Europe – where all my novels are set. Having said that, I wonder if the United States would have entered the war at all had it not been for Pearl Harbor? It’s important to remember that while President Roosevelt was in favour of entering the war, that was not the majority view in the USA at the time. There is a theory, which is unproven but which I do allude to in Agent in Berlin, that Roosevelt knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor but was prepared to let it go ahead so as to give him an excuse to enter the war. The decision to enter the war in Europe was really taken out of Roosevelt’s hands when Hitler declared war on the USA on 11th December, just a few days after Pearl Harbor, which is regarded as a big error on Hitler’s part.Many events are well-known to readers – how do you keep the story exciting when the reader knows the Allies win?Good question and it probably goes to the heart of why the Second World War has such enduring appeal in terms of literature and TV/film so long after the event. I think that the fascination the war holds for readers is not the eventual outcome as such, but more the stories of what happened during it. I always look for one or two real events that happened in the war for my stories and build the plot around them, sticking as closely as I can to known facts. I’d hope that the excitement comes from the plot and the storylines and an uncertainty about the fate of the main and the secondary characters. That latter point is an important one: I don’t believe in comfortable and convenient endings; my stories don’t end happily ever after – mainly because life’s not like that.Were there any books you used for research that you’d recommend to readers?I’ve not dared count how many history books I have in my study but it has to be hundreds and I’d say that for each novel I use around a dozen all the time. I also have around twenty ‘reference’ books on WW2 which I refer to constantly. A few random titles from that stack of books … The Second World War (Antony Beevor); History of the Gestapo (Rupert Butler); World War Two Infographics (remarkable French book published in UK by Thames & Hudson); British Aircraft of the Second World War (John Frayn Turner); Total War (Calvocoressi/Wint); Berlin at War (Roger Moorhouse) and the official histories of MI5 (Christopher Andrew) and MI6 (Keith Jeffrey) – but there are literally dozens more. I also have half a dozen original Baedeker Guides from the 1930s, which are invaluable to my research – and my extensive map collection from that period, some originals, some reproductions.Which other espionage writers inspire you?I read less WW2 espionage fiction now because I worry about sub-consciously absorbing plots and characters – plus I spend so much time reading non-fiction books on the war. But I’d unhesitatingly name two other espionage writers: John le Carré and Alan Furst. Le Carré is unquestionably the master of espionage fiction, though of course he never set any of his novels in the Second World War. Alan Furst writes beautifully about Europe before and during the war. Midnight in Europe in particular is a magnificent book.I’d like to mention two other books which have had a profound effect on me, even though neither comes into this category. Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankel) – the experience of the time this very eminent psychiatrist spent at Auschwitz and The Ghetto Speaks (Marek Edelman). I have a personal connection with the Warsaw Ghetto as we’ve relatively recently discovered that a cousin (and not that distant either) was a fighter in the Uprising and almost certainly was responsible for killing the first German troops in it. This book is the account of the Uprising by one of its leaders, one of the few to survive. Marek Edelman was orphaned at a young age, went on to be a leader of the Jewish Socialist Bund in the Ghetto and after the war became an eminent cardiologist in Poland and a leader of Solidarity.This is the first in a series, how many more do you think you’ll write?Three in this series – that’s the deal with my publisher Canelo, at any rate. I’m probably going to send the follow-up to Agent in Berlin to Michael Bhaskar at Canelo in a fortnight and then the notes and editing, proof-reading process etc follows. In the normal course of events, I’d start on no 3 straight away, not least because that way I feel I keep the continuity and energy and behaviour of the main characters on track. However, the plan is to set the majority of this third book in and around a city I’ve never been to (apart from when we drove through it one August Saturday by mistake many years ago, but that’s another story). I can’t write the book without going there and I’m been planning a research trip, but I’m worried COVID may prevent that, so am thinking around a new plot for no 3 at the moment just in case … 
Alex Gerlis is the author of the acclaimed Spies series of four Second World War espionage thrillers. Agent in Berlin is his latest book.Aspects of History Issue 6 is out now.
Photograph taken from a Japanese plane during the attack on Pearl Harbor
Frank Foley
Roosevelt declares war on Germany
Alex Gerlis is the author of the acclaimed Spies series of four Second World War espionage thrillers. Agent in Berlin is his latest book.Aspects of History Issue 6 is out now.
Alex Gerlis, what prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in?The Best of Our Spies was the first of my (nine) novels and I wrote it after I covered the 50th Anniversary of D-Day for the BBC in 1994. I spent some time out in Normandy and became fascinated by the story, not least the fact that the Allies victory in the Battle of Normandy owed so much to the extraordinary deception campaign. This was designed to trick the Germans into thinking the Allied invasion would be in the Pas de Calais region rather than Normandy – and is at the heart of the plot of my book. So, in that sense the period chose me.What is your approach to researching your novels? Has the process changed over the years?
I have literally hundreds of books about and relating to the Second World War and they give me ideas for the plots and I also use them for research. If I’m writing about the Allied bombing of the Ruhr for example (the plot of my new novel due out in 2022) then I’ll read at least half a dozen books on that subject, as well as using another dozen or so core research books that I consult all the time. Another important research source for me is maps: I have dozens of them, many being originals and facsimiles from that period. I also have an invaluable set of Baedeker guides from the 1930s covering Germany, Switzerland and France – the three countries I tend to use most as locations in my book. I also try and visit all the major locations featured in my books, or at least I did when travel wasn’t the big deal it has now become.Historical fiction is a great introduction to history. Can you recommend any historians to our readers to learn more about your period?Antony Beevor’s The Second World War is a general history that I always come back to and his books on Stalingrad and Berlin are masterpieces. Martin Gilbert’s Second World War books are excellent and Mark Arnold-Forster’s World at War is a very useful concise chronological account of the war – sometimes one wants a summary version of an event rather than too much detail on it. The Holocaust is a theme in most of my books and I’d recommend David Cesarani’s Final Solution and Saul Friedlander’s The Years of Extermination. Marek Edelman’s The Ghetto Fights is a powerful account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and books like Roger Moorhouse’s Berlin at War give a powerful sense of what the war was like away from the front lines.What three pieces of advice would you give to a budding historical novelist, looking to write and publish their first book?1: Do your research, which means reading around the subject and try and get a real sense of what life was like for ordinary people. Avoid too much military detail.2: Find a balance between the factual context of the book and the fictional elements of it – the plot, the characters. You need to establish a subtle dividing line in the book, where the reader understands – subliminally perhaps – what is fact and what is fiction.3: Try and visit the locations you’re featuring. This has its limitations of course because places change and evolve enormously over time and you’ll be visiting somewhere decades if not longer after the period you’re writing about. But having said that, it does help give you a sense of place which is very important to bring across in any historical novel.If you could choose to meet any historical figure from your period, who would it be and why? I guess Winston Churchill is too obvious an answer, in which case I’d probably go for Sir Stewart Menzies who took over as the head of MI6 a couple of months into the war in 1939 and remained in charge until 1952 – so throughout the Second World War and well into the Cold War. I’d have plenty of questions but whether he’d answer any of them is another matter.Similarly, if you could witness one event from history, what would it be and why?I’d choose between one of two ‘liberations’. The first would be the liberation of Paris on 25th August 1944 when General von Choltitz surrendered the city in defiance of Hitler’s orders to destroy it. The city was liberated by units of the French Resistance, Free French forces under General Leclerc and the US 4th Infantry Division. The drama and excitement of that August must have been extraordinary to witness, as would have been what followed it.The second liberation came five months later and would have been very different and even more dramatic – the liberation of Auschwitz by units of the Red Army on 27th January 1945. Other death camps, like Treblinka and Majdanek, were more or less abandoned by the time the Red Army reached them, but Auschwitz was largely ‘intact’ and around seven thousand prisoners still alive there. One of those was Primo Levi who subsequently wrote about how exhausted the prisoners were and nervous this would be a trap. They only realised they were free when a Jewish Red Army colonel assured them in Yiddish, they’d come to liberate them.Which other historical novelists do you admire?The one I admire most is unquestionably Alan Furst. He brilliantly captures the atmosphere and tension of Europe during and just prior to the Second World War. I’ve read all of his novels: The World at Night and Night Soldiers are particularly powerful.When first sketching out an idea for a novel, which comes first - the protagonist, plot or history?When I start thinking about a new series, I’m looking first for a couple of strong and interesting characters, ones who’ll be able to sustain the reader’s interest over at least three books. At the same time I’m also thinking about the history and the location and how these characters will fit into that – and often the location will dictate who the character’s are. The plot then follows, but from the very outset I’m striving to look for stories, characters and locations that feel both credible and authentic. That requires a fair amount of planning and a lot of work on the back story and the timelines before I even start the first book.Do you have a daily routine as a writer? Also, how important is it to know other writers and have a support network?Not sure how helpful I’m going to be here because I don’t have a routine as such and nor do I really know other writers or have (or need) a support network. My writing day depends very much on where I am in the process, but broadly speaking the most creative and enjoyable part is writing the first draft and I’d say broadly speaking I start writing around nine thirty and then write for four hours and possibly another three to four hours in the afternoon/evening. I aim to write two to three thousand words/day, though there’ll also be days when I pause and review what I’ve written or plan the next three or four chapters. As far as other writers go, I know a few and that’s very nice but I wouldn’t say that’s essential to the writing process. As for a support network – well, I have my publisher, my agent and my wife (in reverse order, of course) but as for the actually writing I prefer to go it alone, so to speak.Can you tell us about the project you are working on at the moment?I’m currently in the middle of a new series for Canelo, The Wolf Pack novels featuring two unlikely but highly effective British spies: Sophia von Naundorf, the wife of an SS officer and Jack Miller, an American sports journalist. Agent in Berlin was published in November 2021 and the second in the series has just gone to my publisher and is due to be published in June or July 2022. I’m now at the planning and research phase of the third and final one in the series. I like to start that process before the preceding book is finished, in case I need to change dates etc. It’s important to ensure the continuity of the back story, for example, makes sense.
Alex Gerlis is the author of the bestselling Spies series. His latest novel is Agent in Berlin.
Alex Gerlis is the author of the bestselling Spies series. His latest novel is Agent in Berlin.In your new book Every Spy a Traitor you move away from a World War II/Post War setting and focus purely on a ‘Cold War’ with the Soviet Union in the 1930s. What was it that attracted you to the period?I liked the idea of a series that covered a longer time span, because in the Second World War, particularly in Europe you’re dealing with a 5/6 year timescale. I fancied the idea of something that was a bigger sweep of history. So the series starts in the mid-thirties with Stalin’s Great Purge and also the rise of Nazism.Then the second book is set in 1940. The third book will be set in 1945 and that will be the end of the Second World War and the very beginnings of the Cold War. There was a period at the end of 1945 really up until the Berlin Air Lift, when it wasn’t quite a cold war. It’s those early tensions that I want to get into. Then what is planned as the last book that’s going to finish in 1956, when it’s a fully complete Cold War. 1956 was when Communism lost a lot of its support, after Khrushchev made his speech denouncing Stalin and then of course there’s the uprising in Hungary.I liked the idea of taking the series over a twenty year period and seeing how it felt. At the heart of it is the main British traitor, Agent Archie, I’ve got to have him at the forefront of the stories, but I’ve also got to keep his identity secret through four books and that’s a hell of a challenge.The Secret Intelligent Service was penetrated by Soviet moles in the 1930s and it also failed to recognise the full threat of Nazi Germany, why do you think it was so easily deceived?Well I think they were deceived as far as the Nazi threat was concerned because they never rated it. They were obsessed with the idea of a Russian threat, but their perception of a Russian threat was Communists in this country; so people in trade unions, people standing on street corners selling the ‘Daily Worker’. I don’t think they ever had a grasp of the fact that the real infiltrators, the real traitors were their own type.I think we forget how much of a class system it was. You look at the British traitors Philby, Maclean, Burgess and Blunt. They were all the same class, all from the same background as the people that would have been involved in running the Foreign Office and running the Secret Intelligence Service. So they never clocked that was where the threat was coming from, but instead they were very good at making long-lists of who got the ‘Daily Worker’ and who was going to what meeting.In truth some trade unionist shop steward in Bolton, who joined the Communist Party was no more of a threat to this country than the next person, but I think that’s how they saw it. They were obsessed with the Communist threat.If you look at what was going on in Berlin, the British Passport Office which was the front for MI6 was relegated to an office in Tiergartenstraße. The head of it Frank Foley didn’t even have diplomatic status, they regarded espionage in a slightly disdainful way. It wasn’t quite the done thing.So I think it was a mixture of ineptitude and bias and also class warfare if you like, that might be the wrong way of putting it, but it was certainly class attitudes.There is a nod and a wink to Kim Philby in Every Spy a Traitor, with your character ‘Agent Archie’, but you have featured real historical people in other novels like Klaus Barbie, The Butcher of Lyon and Admiral Canaris the Head of the Abwehr. How do you decide whether to use a real person or a fictional character and how difficult do you find it to get the tone of a real person right?I’ve thought about that a lot. There are some people I won’t use, I don’t think I would use Churchill as a character. He is too big and too well known. I do have him as someone in the wings, so some other character will say Winston said this or Winston said that.In terms of real people that I use, Klaus Barbie is a very good example. ‘Agent In The Shadows’ was set in 42/43 to the end of the war, in Lyon. So anyone that will know anything about it will know that Klaus Barbie ‘The Butcher of Lyon’ was brought into run the Gestapo there. If I’d created a character modelled on Klaus Barbie it would have felt odd. So I thought in that case I’ve got to use him. In terms of tone I don’t think I said anything that Barbie was unlikely to have said. I just go with it and use my judgment. I always have an author's note at the end where I flag up what is real and what isn’t real in the book.There’s a dry humour that underpins Every Spy a Traitor. One of the characters, Charles Cooper, even has the codename ‘Bertie’, which he hopes isn’t a reference to Bertie Worcester. I was wondering if you drew much influence from P.G. Woodhouse and other writers from the 1930s like Evelyn Waugh and Eric Ambler?No I don’t think so, I haven’t read a lot of 1930s stuff, one or two Somerset Maugham. I like to feel that’s my own voice. I like to have a bit of humour, its difficult too much humour in an espionage novel. Cooper is a little bit of an innocent abroad and I wanted to reflect that. I don’t think I was particularly trying to copy a 1930s dialogue, but I try and write in that time. I’m not a big fan of that era although I do think Eric Ambler is a great writer.I wouldn’t take any inspiration from P.G. Woodhouse because I think he was a traitor. He was a Nazi collaborator and he should have been punished at the end of the war. The guy collaborated with the Nazis he appeared on Berlin radio. I’m not saying he was a Nazi or a spy but he was certainly a collaborator.There is a lot of trade craft and interrogation techniques portrayed in your books, how much of it is based on research and how much of it is artistic license?I do a lot of research, I read about it and talk to some people in that world, although I’ve never been in it myself. Then some of it is me going for it. I think about it quite a lot, because it must be such an extraordinary existence that they’re leading, this kind of clandestine life. I sometimes think about it walking down the street you see other people and you have no idea what they’re going through or thinking. By and large people are fairly impassive and don’t wear their hearts on their sleeve. If you’re working in the world of espionage it’s like that the whole time. It’s all consuming and I imagine what it must be like and the pressures that brings. One mistake and you’re potentially done for, so having to keep up that degree of pretence.Every Spy a Traitor is your 12th novel, how do you manage to be so prolific, and does the writing ever get any easier?I start with the story and roughly know where I’m going. You have to know where you’re aiming at and then let how you get there develop organically. You’ve got to be loose enough to let characters emerge and then as they emerge develop in their own way. I wouldn’t say it gets easier, but I don’t think it gets harder. The key thing is getting into the groove. I found the book I’m writing at the moment difficult to start with, but I went to Hamburg to do some research. When I came back I was ready to go. I find writing is like reading, if you’re reading a really good book you want to keep reading it and you want to turn the page over. In that sense I don’t find writing hard.A lot of it is to do with the process. I think that writing a series brings up a lot of challenges. First book is fine the fourth book is fine, but the second and third books are very difficult, because you’ve got to think ahead, and you’ve got to think back as well. You’re constantly referring back and are constantly making plans because what you can’t do is have something happen halfway through book two that you bitterly regret towards the end of book three, or into book four.So, there’s a lot of process around it there’s a lot of planning and I try to have intricate plots, three or four storylines that come together and that’s a complex way of writing; particularly as I might write three or four different chapters at the same time, to cover a particular storyline. I might write chapters 8, 11 and 14 first. Its Juggling especially with espionage, you have to keep quite a lot of things up in the air and that’s a difficult thing to do whilst keeping the reader satisfied that they’re actually reading a book. That’s the less fun part, but when you’re really into a chapter and it’s all coming together nicely it’s just brilliant. So, I don’t think I would say it becomes easier every book is a challenge.Every Spy a Traitor is the first in a new ‘Double Agent’ series, could you tell us a bit more about Book Two?Book Two is the one I’m writing at the moment and it carries on with the main characters, we still don’t know who Archie is obviously. The core of the story is Operation Sea Lion, the planned German invasion of this country. The plans were fairly advanced and it works well for the plot because the Russians wanted the Germans distracted. Deep down most of the Russians, not Stalin, knew that sooner or later Germany would turn Eastwards and pay attention to them. So Operation Sea Lion was in their interests and it was in Churchill’s interests as well. The threat of invasion was something Churchill could plug into, he took over remember as Prime Minister at a very bad time. There’d been Dunkirk and the defeat in Norway. Hitler had swept all before him. So Churchill could use the threat of invasion to really concentrate people’s minds in this country and that was very important.
Alex Gerlis is the author of Every Spy A Traitor. Alan Bardos is the author of Rising Tide.
Alex Gerlis is the author of Every Spy A Traitor. Alan Bardos is the author of Rising Tide.