The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
If you love crime fiction and a detective tale, Watching the Detectives is for you. Watching the Detectives is an anthology that brings together thirteen short stories, alongside interviews with each author. Each story transports the reader to a different time in...
Operation Berlin is the first of a new historical mystery series set in 1930s Europe which is to be known as The Foreign Correspondent series. Its author is Michael Ridpath, an extremely accomplished one, several of whose previous books I have read and enjoyed. I...
Congratulations on your new mystery novel Operation Berlin, Michael. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have read several of your books. You started out with a series of financial thrillers, which I read and remember with pleasure, but I am less familiar with your more recent...
Mark, the main protagonist of your popular detective series is Frank Merlin, a Scotland Yard detective in WW2 London. Can you tell us about him? Of course. Frank Merlin is a man in his early 40s as the series starts. He holds the rank of Detective Chief Inspector and...
The History behind the DCI Frank Merlin Books I write a series about a police detective called Frank Merlin working in World War Two London. The sixth in the series, Death Of An Officer, is being published later this month. I am often asked where I get my story ideas...
I was not completely sure, when asked to review this book, whether 300 pages or so on Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen would be my sort of thing. I am interested in Georgian and Regency History but that interest tends more towards the political and the...
I thoroughly enjoyed Rule Britannia, the first of a series of cracking historical thrillers set in the 1930s. It features an oddball couple of adventurers, Ernest Drabble, a Cambridge historian and mountaineer, and his old schoolfriend, Percival Harris, who is a Fleet...
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,...
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,...
Dead in the Water is the fifth outing for DCI Frank Merlin, based in Second World War London, and the plot is complex. Leon van Buren, a refugee from occupied Holland, brings to Britain two priceless works of art, and hopes to sell them. The most likely purchaser is...
