Eighty years on from the end of the Second World War our understanding of it ought to be sophisticated enough by now to appreciate that all was not necessarily as it seemed. As tempting as it is, one should avoid viewing the events in Europe in 1939-1945 in simplistic...
Alex Gerlis
The Holocaust: A Guide to Europe’s Sites, Memorials & Museums, by Rosie Whitehouse
One could be excused for thinking that a travel guide on the Holocaust would be in bad taste. Having read Rosie Whitehouse’s excellent, The Holocaust: A Guide to Europe’s Sites, Memorial & Museums I can assure you that nothing is further from the truth. One of the...
I Am André, by Diana Mara Henry
January 2025 will be the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, a single event which has come to symbolise the Holocaust. No-one could claim that in the eighty years since there’s been a shortage of literature on the Holocaust: a search on...
France in the Second World War: An Enduring Myth
I’ve written extensively on the Second World War in Europe. My eleven books may be works of fiction but the plots are all based around real events that unfolded during the war. That history and the locations I use are all carefully researched. I scrupulously avoid...
Episode 161
Every Spy A Traitor: Alex Gerlis Interviewed by Alan Bardos
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,...
Agent in the Shadows, by Alex Gerlis
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...
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising In 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...
Action This Day: A WW2 Short Story Collection
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,...
Episode 42
Alex Gerlis on Espionage during the Second World War | RSS.com