The New Forest Murders is set in the 1940s – what appeals to you about that decade?
I've spent a lot of time in the 1940s. I feel I'd know my way around if you dropped me there by time parachute. It’s the setting of Bookish – the UKTV detective series I’ve co-written with Mark Gatiss. But it’s also been the ground of much of my non-fiction, for which I’ve interviewed many people who told me all kinds of things about that decade that are hard to find in books. Most people know that in the war years many women rubbed gravy browning on their legs to give the impression they were wearing nylons. But I knew an MI5 secretary who danced at the Gargoyle club and had her gravy browning licked off her legs by Dylan Thomas. That detail is not in The New Forest Murders – my heroine and hero don’t move in those circles, and might even be shocked by such conduct, but some of their experiences are drawn directly from lives of people I knew. Captain Jack Strafford, the hero of the book, has danced at the Dorchester, and heard Lew Stone’s band duet with the Luftwaffe: when an eight-stick incendiary dropped near the hotel, they used to break into the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore, and let the bomb play every other beat. I only know about that because Lew Stone’s widow Joyce told me the story.
Were you inspired by crime writers of the period?
More by the filmmakers, to be honest. I love the films that Ealing studios made during the war. Films that spoke of desperate times and an imagined better future. Went the Day Well? is the one that means the most to me, and I think the reader who knows the picture will see its influence on The New Forest Murders. It’s about a secret Nazi invasion of an English village – carried out by German soldiers disguised as a British platoon. The audience knows from the outset that the platoon’s machine-gun posts and rolls of barbed wire are to be used to aid, rather than resist, an invasion, and that the tweedy, soft-spoken squire is a fifth columnist who has been promised power in exchange for his collaboration. But the villagers don’t. They slowly discover clues to the true nature of their guests - one man puts a Continental stroke through his number sevens, another carries a Viennese chocolate bar in a kit bag; an officer eats a cream éclair in two Fascistic gulps; one of his men professes to come from Manchester but knows only London’s Piccadilly. There is no uniformed invasion of Larkwhistle, the New Forest village in the story, but this is a similar process of discovery – there’s a Nazi agent living among them, and that agent must be unmasked.
Were there Nazi agents at work in England during the war?
During the Phoney War period Britain went a little crazy on this subject. A five-foot pile of reports on the activities of suspected Fifth Columnists tottered in the office of Vernon Kell, the director general of MI5: accounts of strange marks daubed on telegraph poles, nuns with hairy arms and Hitler tattoos, municipal flowerbeds planted with white blooms to direct planes towards munitions factories; Home Counties Quislings preparing to seize power as soon as the Germans made landfall at Dover. But they weren’t all phantoms. A Fascist in my home city of Hull painted a swastika on his roof to show whose side he was on. And although lots of harmless people were rounded up and interned, quite cruelly, under a bit of emergency legislation called Regulation 18B, some genuine Nazi agents were netted. One of the harmless ones was a man I knew called Ettore Emmanuelli. He'd been put behind barbed wire at the winter quarters of the Bertram Mills circus, with a lot of British Fascists and some Italian gangsters from Brighton. He was a boy from Wales who’d gone on a summer camp with Italian relations and come home with a scouts uniform which the authorities found very suspicious. Ettore showed me an autograph book he kept while he was interned. It contained the name of a man called Leigh Vaughan-Henry. Now as it happened I’d just managed to get hold of the declassified security files on this man. He was a composer and enthusiastic Fascist whom the state had three good reasons to intern: he had claimed to run a network of pro-Nazi ‘sergeants’ who would assume control after the collapse of British civil defences; he was believed to have played a minor part in the affairs of a Nazi spy named Anna Wolkoff; and evidence existed, apparently, that he had developed a notation system through which coded messages could be embedded in pieces of music and broadcast via the BBC to Germany. Truth is stranger than fiction.
