Books
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Articles
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Does Historical Fiction Ruin Our Historical Understanding?The Guardian newspaper used to have a column called Reel History in which the writer and historian, Alex von Tunzelmann, reviewed films in the context of historical accuracy. In her articles a host of minor or major errors were ...
I write crime thrillers set in World War Two London. My hero is Frank Merlin, a tough and rugged police detective heading a Scotland Yard serious crimes unit. There are now five books so far in the series. It is my plan to follow Merlin’s adventures from beginning to end of the war. The first ...
I write a series about a Scotland Yard detective, DCI Frank Merlin operating in World War Two London. To date there are five books in the series with the fifth, Dead In The Water, coming out this month from Headline. My aim has always been to set the series against a historically accurate ...
Author Interviews
What prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first book in?World War Two loomed large in my life for the significant reason that my father died when I was quite young (7) because of it. While on naval service in West Africa during the war, he contracted a wasting lung disease from which he eventually died in 1960. For this reason alone I developed a keen ...
Mark Ellis. Can you tell us more about Frank Merlin, and the inspiration behind Let Sleeping Dogs Lie - your short story in the Action This Day WW2 short story collection?Frank Merlin is a half-Spanish Scotland Yard detective working in WW2 London. His dark good looks have a hint of the Mediterranean about ...
Mark, you’ve created quite the character in Frank Merlin. What sort of man is he?Frank Merlin is a man in his early 40s as the series starts. He holds the rank of Detective Chief Inspector and heads a Scotland Yard serious crimes unit. Merlin is an extremely, brave, deep-thinking and insightful investigator of crimes working ...
William, your new book The Romantic is drawn on a very broad historical and geographical canvas. How did you go about researching it? Did the pandemic make some research difficult?One of the reasons I set the book in the nineteenth century is that I have this great, pretty much unused, store of knowledge about the Romantic ...