Crime in the First World War

 Why set a crime story against the backdrop of the First World War? 

There are many good reasons, of course – not least the moral ambiguity and jeopardy that war provides – but the real reason, for a writer, is that one is drawn to it. 

And in my case that began a long time ago with a handful individuals, who led me on a path that would end with Cut and Run, my new crime thriller about an injured ex-serviceman named Frank Champion who goes to back to France in 1916 to solve a murder.

I’ll start with the maiden aunts. Did you ever have a maiden aunt? They don’t make them anymore, not in the sorts of numbers that they did back then. I had three – sisters – who lived in Edmonton in North London in a house without, seemingly, a television set and where the dining table was always laden with the sort of high tea that an Edwardian would have recognised – and relished. 

Olive, Dorothy and Alice were unmarried because their would-be husbands had been killed in the First World War; young men who were part of Vera Brittain’s famous lost generation, following a conflict which claimed the lives of one in four junior officers. What’s more, for my three maiden aunts, that lost generation included their elder brother, whose photograph was framed surrounded by the flags of the allied nations, and proudly displayed on the wall on the upstairs hall.

He never came home, was all Olive would say, when I did what a five-year-old like me would do and ask about him. I dare say it was conveyed with what we would now regard as resolute understatement, but that’s what people were like then. 

Another first-hand recollection of the world of the Great War came from my grandmother who remembered seeing the Tommies going off to fight on the trains. In my memory they are waving through at the windows at her. One of her strongest recollections was being called into the playground and told to told by the headmistress that at 11 o’clock precisely that the war would end and the guns would fall silent across Europe. The joy and import in her words travelled through time. 

Then there was my grandfather – my dad’s father, who fought and was injured in the war, but survived. He was in the horse artillery and there are pictures of him in the 1970s carrying around an enormous hearing aid. A decent man, I’m told, but hard to know, my father said. What the experience taught him was that the most important job of a junior officer was to protect their men against the senior officers. Which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic. And surely it informs the outlook of my book’s protagonist Frank Champion.

The final – and probably the most important – personal interaction that informs the backdrop to Cut and Runis my meeting with a Great War veteran Smiler Marshall who died in 2005, before his 109^th birthday. I interviewed him in 2000 when he was 104. 

A farrier by trade, he had joined the Essex Yeomanry after shaking hands with Lord Kitchener at a recruitment event in 1914 was a cavalryman who would fight at the Somme – and much else, serving until 1921. During our conversation, in between singing wartime songs, he told me, with tears in his eyes, about the horrors of what he’d seen, about going out into no man’s land and seeing his mates killed. He left me in no doubt that war was a dreadful, profound waste of life. 

Smiler was one of the last Great War veterans to die. He was followed by Harry Patch who died in 2009 at 111. ‘When the war ended, I don’t know if I was more relieved that we’d won or that I didn’t have to go back,’ Patch recalled in 2004. ‘Passchendaele was a disastrous battle—thousands and thousands of young lives were lost. It makes me angry. Earlier this year, I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany’s only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We’ve had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it’s a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?’ 

But it happened and some 900,000 British and British Empire were killed in the process, out of around 20 million worldwide.

So before the slaughter and loss of the Great War recedes from our memories and the folklore of our shared culture, joining the Crimean, Napoleonic or the Seven Years war in the archive – I wanted to bring that world back. Because it’s only a few handshakes in to our past, a great-grandfather or a maiden aunt away. And that is but a blink in the eye in time.

Cut and Run by Alec Marsh (Sharpe Books) Out Now

March 1916, The Great War rages across Europe. In the British Army garrison town of Bethune in northern France, a woman’s body is found in a park. Her throat has been cut. Marie-Louise Toulon is a prostitute at the Blue Lamp, the brothel catering exclusively to officers of the British Army stationed in the area. Wounded ex-soldier Frank Champion is brought in to investigate the crime - to find the killer believed to be among the officer corps. But almost before his investigation gets underway another woman from the Blue Lamp is killed, her throat also cut. A third prostitute, meanwhile, has gone missing. Then two more bodies are uncovered, including that of a British Army captain who appears to have taken his own life with his service revolver. But all is not what it seems… Champion must face a race against time to save the life of another woman - at the risk of dying himself.

Cut and Run by Alec Marsh is published by Sharpe Books in paperback priced £8.99 and Kindle, priced £3.99. It also available in KindleUnlimited: 

More information about Alec Marsh and his books can be found on his website. You can also find him on X @AlecMarsh and on Instagram @marsh_alec. You can also find him on Facebook.

Alec Marsh - A True Crime Story from the Annals of His History

The inspiration for ‘Ghosts of the West’, my new Drabble and Harris mystery, came during a boat trip on the Thames. We had just passed Rotherhithe and voice on the loudspeaker pointed out the Mayflower pub – named after the famous ship that took pilgrims to North America in 1620. The 102 would-be migrants aboard founded what would become the oldest continuously occupied settlement on the continent at Plymouth Bay in Massachusetts. (Another crowd founded Jamestown in Virginia 13 years before, but that was temporarily abandoned giving honours to Plymouth.)

As the title of ‘Ghosts of the West’ implies, the plot has at least something to do with the West – and as you’ll discover if you read it the Great Plains of the United States. Unsurprisingly it therefore has a strong Native American dimension.

Which soon fed into my motivation for writing the book. For as well as having the opportunity to venture into the Western genre – and who doesn’t like a Western? – but I also wanted to highlight what one could argue is one of the greatest crimes in American history. 

A great deal of important soul-searching has gone on in the US and elsewhere in respect of the Atlantic slave trade and in the US, the plight and legacy of Southern slavery. But there’s been less attention on what happened to the original inhabitants of North America.

When those first colonists landed in North America, it is estimated that around 500,000 Native Americans lived across the vast continent, though some people believe it was much higher than that. By 1900, however, most are agreed however that just 300,000 Native Americans were left. At the same while the European immigrant population had risen from zero to more than of 76 million. 

In addition to seeing their population decline through warfare, outright oppression and having their ecosystems destroyed – I’ll come to that – the Native American popular had by then been shepherded into several hundred reservations. Today the United States has 574 federally recognised tribes spread over 326 Indian reservations covering 15 million square acres, an area of territory a littles smaller than Latvia (and you don’t need a geography degree to know that compared to the expanse of the Pan-Continental United States that’s not much.) 

So while ‘Ghosts of the West’ is set in 1938, the wider story of what happened between 1600 and 1900 is very much part of my narrative. In the book it is personified in the character of an aged chief named Black Cloud, who is in part inspired by Red Cloud (1822-1909), a real life chief of the Oglala Lakotas, a branch of the Great Sioux Nation, who was described by one prominent contemporary as ‘the Red Man’s George Washington.’

This means that, whatever the ostensible crimes at the heart of my story, the greatest crime touched on by the book is that committed by generations of European-white migrants. And it took hundreds of years. In a sense the stage of the ‘Indian wars’ that took place in the 1860s and 1870s in the great plains of the West, was the last major campaign in war last several hundred years.

Ultimately, it was won by exterminating the source of the Native Americans food and shelter, the buffalo – they ate its meat, used its hide for clothing and to weatherproof their tepees. American military strategists and leaders –President Grant among them – saw the annihilation of the buffalo as the solution to the ‘Indian problem.’ As a result some 30 million bison were massacred from 1850, with the last of the great herds destroyed in 1883-84. (Much of it was to feed the demand for leather in Europe, too.) With the bedrock of their civilisations destroyed Plains Indians had no choice but to accept life as farmers on the reservation.

That the lands set aside for reservations were often those that whites did not want will tell you something of the quality of the land. (‘The Wasichus [white men] had slaughtered all the bison shut us up in pens,’ said the medicine man Black Elk, bemoaning his starving people. ‘We could not eat lies.’) But in addition to coping with hunger and the enforced dependence on inadequate handouts, the Native American’s whole culture and belief systems were under grave assault. If you are a semi-nomadic warrior and a hunter who is forced overnight to become a farmer, what do you teach your children?

Of course the United States is not alone in having done horrific things in the past: Britain ruled an empire covering a quarter of the world’s population at its fullest extent in the 1920s, and sadly the long term effects of that corrosive colonialism can be observed still. But there is a point of difference: Britain, either willingly or at gunpoint, finally quit its colonies. As did the other European colonial powers, (with varying degrees of magnanimity). But the ancestors of immigrants Americans are still there and – for obvious reasons – aren’t going to go anywhere. 

‘The past,’ L P Hartley famously wrote, ‘is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ Thank goodness for that. One of the benefits of fiction is that it helps us to remember and revisit our stories, including crimes of such enormity and general cultural acceptance that we sometimes don’t even see them for what they are. It also offers the chance to ask, ‘What if?’ And that’s an opportunity, too. 

Ghosts of the West by Alec Marsh (Headline Accent) Out Now

When daring journalist Sir Percival Harris gets wind of a curious crime in a sleepy English town, he ropes in his old friend Professor Ernest Drabble to help him investigate. The crime is a grave robbery, and as Drabble and Harris pry deeper, events take a mysterious turn when a theft at the British Museum is soon followed by a murder. The friends are soon involved in a tumultuous quest that takes them from the genteel streets of London to the wide plains of the United States. What exactly is at stake is not altogether clear - but if they don't act soon, the outcome could be a bloody conflict, one that will cross borders, continents and oceans... Meanwhile, can Drabble and Harris's friendship - which has endured near-death experiences on several continents, not to mention a boarding school duel - survive a crisis in the shape of the beautiful and enigmatic Dr Charlotte Moore?

More information about Alec Marsh and his Drabble and Harris series can be found on his website.  You can also follow him on Twitter @AlecMarsh

Books To Look Forward To From Headline Publishing

June 2021

Death on Stage is by Caroline Dunford. It is 1914 and war is underway. A group of French actors has become trapped in Britain and some of them are seeking political asylum, among these is a mathematician with whom Euphemia's friend, Mary, has been corresponding. He joined the troupe with the express intention of making it to Britain and to Mary before the war began. Euphemia's new commander sends her undercover to the theatre where the company is finishing its run, and he instructs Fitzroy to remain on medical leave. But Fitzroy has never been one to obey orders. Meanwhile, Euphemia's husband, Bertram, lies critically ill in hospital and Euphemia must employ all her strength to stay focussed on her mission. With actors and agents playing roles both on and off stage, the toughest challenge is knowing who to trust...

July 2021

Rogue Asset is by Andy McDermott. Alex Reeve was Operative 66. A former special ops soldier and one of the UK's deadliest weapons, he was a member of the secretive SC9 - an elite security service with a remit to neutralise the country's most dangerous enemies. Falsely accused of treason, Reeve was forced to hide in the shadows as the brutal assassins he once trained alongside sought to eliminate the 'rogue asset' at any cost. But tricked into revealing himself, Reeve is suddenly dragged into a lethal conspiracy involving the British state, shadowy Russian agents...and his own father. If there's one man who can survive...it is Operative 66.

Seven friends gather at a castle in the Scottish Borders. One last girls' weekend before Georgina's wedding. Near the castle, through a path in the woods, is a loch. After a few drinks, they head down to the water to take photos. The loch is wild, lonely, and stunningly beautiful. They set their camera to self-timer and take some group shots. Later, looking back at the pictures, they see something impossible.Behind them, eyes wide, a small, drenched boy emerges from the water. But none of them saw him, and nobody knows where he went. They're miles from the nearest town. How did he get there? Where did he go? As the weekend unravels and terrible secrets come to light, it soon becomes clear that their perfect weekend is turning into a perfect nightmare. They're desperate to leave - but someone won't let them. Down by the Water is by Elle Connel.

The Shetland Sea Murders is by Marsali Taylor. While onboard her last chartered sailing trip of the season, Cass Lynch is awoken in the middle of the night by a Mayday call to the Shetland coastguard. A fishing vessel has become trapped on the rocks off the coast of one of the islands. In the days that follow, there's both a shocking murder and a baffling death. On the surface there's no link, but when Cass becomes involved it is soon clear that her life is also in danger. Convinced that someone sinister is at work in these Shetland waters, Cass is determined to find and stop them. But uncovering the truth could prove to be deadly . .

I Know What You've Done is by Dorothy Koomson. What if all your neighbours' secrets landed in a diary on your doorstep? What if the woman who gave it to you was murdered by one of the people in the diary? What if the police asked if you knew anything? Would you hand over the book of secrets? Or ... would you try to find out what everyone had done?

Mother Midnight is by Paul Doherty. 1312. Sir Hugh Corbett, Keeper of the Secret Seal, has returned from the West Country to find Westminster in chaos. Edward II has fled in an attempt to protect his favourite from the wrath of his noblemen; and a royal clerk has been found dead, poisoned in a locked chamber. Drawn into a maze of murder both at Westminster and at the Convent of Saint Sulpice, where young novices have started to disappear, Corbett quickly establishes a connection between the two mysteries. As other killings follow, Corbett's investigation leads him to a high-class brothel and its sinister owner, Mother Midnight. Challenged to a duel and hunted by a guild of ruthless assassins, Corbett and his loyal henchmen, Ranulf and Chanson, face a sea of troubles. And Corbett must call upon his wit and ingenuity to halt the tide of disaster that threatens to engulf him.

A black father, a white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance. Ike Randolph left jail fifteen years ago, with not so much as a speeding ticket since. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid. Ike is devastated to learn his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah's white husband, Derek. Though he never fully accepted his son, Ike is broken by his death. Derek's father Buddy Lee was as ashamed of Derek being gay as Derek was of his father's criminal past. But Buddy Lee - with seedy contacts deep in the underworld - needs to know who killed his only child. Desperate to do better by them in death than they did in life, two hardened ex-cons must confront their own prejudices about their sons - and each other - as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys. Razorblade Tears is by S A Cosby.

The Truth-Seekers Wife is by Anne Granger. It is Spring 1871 when Lizzie Ross accompanies her formidable Aunt Parry on a restorative trip to the south coast. Lizzie's husband, Ben, is kept busy at Scotland Yard and urges his wife to stay out of harm's way. But when Lizzie and her aunt are invited to dine with other guests at the home of wealthy landowner Sir Henry Meager, and he is found shot dead in his bed the next morning, no one feels safe. On Lizzie's last visit to the New Forest, another gruesome murder took place, and the superstitious locals now see her as a bad omen. But Lizzie suspects that Sir Henry had a number of bitter enemies, many of whom might have wanted him dead. And once Ben arrives to help with the investigation, he and Lizzie must work together to expose Sir Henry's darkest secrets and a ruthless killer intent on revenge...

The House of Death is by Peter Tremayne. Ireland. AD 672. The Feast of Beltaine is approaching and the seven senior princes of the kingdom of Muman are gathering at Cashel to discuss King Colgu's policies. Just days before the council meets, Brother Conchobhar, the keeper of the sacred sword, is found murdered. Sister Fidelma and her brother Colgu fear that the killer had been trying to steal the sword that symbolises the King's authority to rule. And as rumours begin to spread of an attempt to overthrow Colgu, news reaches Cashel that a plague ship has landed at a nearby port, bringing the deadly pestilence to its shores. Amid fear and panic, Fidelma, Eadulf and Enda must work together to catch a killer as the death toll starts to mount...

August 2021

Murder at the Seaview Hotel is by Glenda Young. In the charming Yorkshire seaside town of Scarborough, a murder is nothing to sing about... After the death of her husband Tom, Helen Dexter is contemplating her future as the now-sole proprietor of the Seaview Hotel. There's an offer from a hotel chain developer to consider, but also a booking from a group of twelve Elvis impersonators, a singing troupe called Twelvis. Tom loved Elvis and for Helen this is a sign that she should stay. But the series of mysterious events which follow, suggests that the developer is not going to give up easily. Then, shortly after Twelvis arrive, one of the group disappears. His body is found floating in a lake, with his blue suede shoes missing. Could the two be connected? With the reputation of the Seaview on the line, Helen isn't going to wait for the murderer to strike again. With her trusty greyhound Suki by her side, she decides to find out more about her guests and who wanted to make sure this Elvis never sang again.

I Shot the Devil is by Ruth McIver I used to think that I'd escaped Southport . . .Now I realised, Southport had been coming for me all this time. Erin Sloane was sixteen when high school senior Andre Villiers was murdered by his friends. They were her friends, too, led by the intense, charismatic Ricky Hell. Five people went into West Cypress Woods the night Andre was murdered. Only three came out. Ativan, alcohol and distance had dimmed Erin's memories of that time. But nearly twenty years later, an ageing father will bring her home. Now a journalist, she is asked to write a story about the Southport Three and the thrill-kill murder that electrified the country. Erin's investigation propels her closer and closer to a terrifying truth. And closer and closer to danger.

Death Comes to Bishops Well is by Anna Legat. When Sam Dee moves to the beautiful Wiltshire village of Bishops Well, he expects a quiet life of country walks and pub lunches. OK, so his new neighbour, Maggie Kaye, is a little peculiar, but she's very nice - and his old pal Richard Ruta lives just down the road. But when Richard throws one of his famous parties, things take a sinister turn. Sam, Maggie and the rest of the guests are dumbfounded when Richard falls down dead. A horrible tragedy - or a cunningly planned murder? With a village full of suspects - and plenty of dark secrets - just who exactly would want to bump off their host? Is there a connection to another mysterious death, nearly twenty years before? Armed with her local knowledge, Maggie - with Sam's reluctant but indispensable help - is soon on the case. But when the body count starts to rise, will sleepy Bishops Well ever be the same again?

A mother walks into the sea... and never comes back. Why? One perfect summer day, mother of two Alice walks into the sea . . . and never comes back. Her daughters - loyal but fragile Lily, and headstrong, long-absent Marietta - are forcibly reunited by her disappearance. Meanwhile, with retirement looming, DI Fox investigates cold cases long since forgotten. And there's one obsession he won't let go: the tragic death of an infant twenty years before. Can Lily and Marietta uncover what happened to their mother? Will Fox solve a mystery that has haunted him for decades? As their stories unexpectedly collide, long-buried secrets will change their lives in unimaginable ways. Mssing is by Erin Kinsley.

The Ex-Husband is by Karen Hamilton. Charlotte and Sam were partners. In life, and in crime. They never stole from anyone who couldn't afford it. Wealthy clients, luxury cruise ships. It was easy money, and harmless. At least, that's what Charlotte told herself, until the world caved in on her. But now, years after she tried to put that past life behind her, it comes rushing back when her estranged ex-husband Sam suddenly goes missing - and someone threatens to expose what they did. Desperate to escape whoever is tormenting her, Charlotte takes a job as events planner for an engagement party onboard a superyacht in the Caribbean. For a while, her plan seems to have worked, nothing but open ocean and clear skies ahead. Until it becomes clear that she's no longer a thousand miles away from harm. Because whoever is behind it all is onboard too. And now there's nowhere left to run.

The closer you get to the truth, the more dangerous it gets. FBI Agent Tom Hunter has been chasing down leads to find the brutal cult that damaged some of his closest friends. They managed to escape to tell their stories, but Eden's location has always remained a mystery.Liza Barkley is struggling with her feelings for Tom and wonders if their friendship can survive the secrets they've kept from one another. But they may be forced to confront the truth when a chance to help the investigation puts Liza directly in the line of fire. When the perpetrator of an attempted sniper attack on Liza and her friends is discovered to be one of the cult's leaders, DJ Belmont, it becomes clear that he is out to get revenge on the victims who escaped Eden's clutches.But there is one person who has always had control over DJ, and who no one outside of Eden has ever glimpsed: cult leader Pastor. When a serious injury forces Pastor to seek help outside the confines of the Eden, Tom and his team finally have a chance to bring the cult down. But DJ Belmont has his own plan, and is not going to stop until he gets what he wants... Say Goodbye is by Karen Rose.

The Night Singer is by Johanna Mo. You've no idea what you're dredging up. You're going to ruin everything. Hanna Duncker has returned to the remote island she spent her childhood on and to the past that saw her father convicted for murder. In a cruel twist of fate her new boss is the policeman who put him behind bars. On her first day on the job as the new detective, Hanna is called to a crime scene. The fifteen-year-old son of her former best friend has been found dead and Hanna is thrown into a complex investigation set to stir up old ghosts. Not everyone is happy to have the daughter of Lars Duncker back in town. Hanna soon realises that she will have to watch her back as she turns over every stone to find the person responsible...

Also published in August The Great Shroud by Vera Morris and Murder After Midnight by Lesley Cookman.

September 2021

The Last Train to Gipsy Hill is by Alan Johnson. Gary Nelson has a routine for the commute to his rather dull job in the city. Each day, he watches transfixed as a beautiful woman on the train applies her make up in a ritual he now knows by heart. He's never dared to strike up a conversation . . . but maybe one day.Then one evening, on the late train to Gipsy Hill, the woman who has beguiled him for so long, invites him to take the empty seat beside her. Fiddling with her mascara, she holds up her mirror and Gary reads the words 'HELP ME' scrawled in sticky black letters on the glass. From that moment, Gary's life is turned on its head. He finds himself on the run from the Russian mafia, the FSB and even the Metropolitan Police - all because of what because this mysterious young woman may have witnessed. In the race to find out the truth, Gary discovers that there is a lot more to her than meets the eye...

Daniel Pitt is defending an old college professor from Cambridge, who has been accused of plagiarism, when a series of brutal murders occurs on the streets of London. The rainy-day slasher, as the crazed killer becomes known, violently attacks his victims in the pouring rain and then removes one of their fingers before leaving the bodies. Daniel's dear friend Miriam fford Croft, newly qualified as a pathologist, is tasked with examining the bodies for clues and when Special Branch warn the police to stop investigating one of the victims, Daniel finds himself reluctantly drawn into this haunting mystery... Three Debts Paid is by Anne Perry.

Last Seen Alone is by Laura Griffin. When they face the most baffling missing person's case of their careers, a fiercely ambitious lawyer and a homicide detective have no one to turn to for help except each other.Up-and-coming attorney Leigh Larson fights for victims of sexual extortion, harassment, and online abuse. She is not afraid to go after the sleaziest targets to get payback for her clients. Leigh is laser-focused on her career - to the exclusion of everything else - until a seemingly routine case and a determined cop turn her world upside down. Austin homicide detective Brandon Reynolds is no stranger to midnight callouts. But when he gets summoned to an abandoned car on a desolate road, he quickly realizes he's dealing with an unusual crime scene. A pool of blood in the nearby woods suggests a brutal homicide. But where is the victim? The vehicle is registered to twenty-six-year-old Vanessa Adams. Searching the car, all Brandon finds is a smear of blood and a business card for Leigh Larson, attorney-at-law. Vanessa had hired Leigh just before her disappearance, but Leigh has no leads on who could have wanted her dead. Faced with bewildering evidence and shocking twists, Leigh and Brandon must work against the clock to chase down a ruthless criminal who is out for vengeance.

Ghosts of the West is by Alec Marsh. When daring journalist Sir Percival Harris gets wind of a curious crime in a sleepy English town, he ropes in his old friend Professor Ernest Drabble to help him investigate. The crime is a grave robbery, and as Drabble and Harris pry deeper, events take a mysterious turn when a theft at the British Museum is soon followed by a murder. The friends are soon involved in a tumultuous quest that takes them from the genteel streets of London to the wide plains of the United States. What exactly is at stake is not altogether clear - but if they don't act soon, the outcome could be a bloody conflict, one that will cross borders, continents and oceans...Meanwhile, can Drabble and Harris's friendship - which has endured near-death experiences on several continents, not to mention a boarding school duel - survive a crisis in the shape of the beautiful and enigmatic Dr Charlotte Moore?

Prisoner is by S R White. 24 Hours after leaving his cell he was dead. Can she find out why? When a man is found savagely 'crucified' amidst a murky swamp in northern Australia, detective Dana Russo and her team are called to a shocking scene. The victim is a convicted rapist, just released from prison, who years earlier committed an atrocious crime yards from where he was killed. Who murdered him - and why? With several potential leads, the investigation quickly becomes more complex, and sinister, than anyone imagined. And Dana realises she'll have to confront her own troubled past to understand the true motives of the killer...

October 2021

A Christmas Legacy is by Anne Perry. Gracie Tellman is preparing for Christmas with her husband and three young children when Millie Foster calls upon her. As a maid at Harcourt House, Millie is terrified that sinister goings-on, including the disappearance of food from the kitchens, will lead to her unfair dismissal, and she begs Gracie to investigate the situation. With the promise that she will be back in time for Christmas, Gracie takes Millie's place in the Harcourt household, never imagining the discovery she then makes. For the servants have been keeping a secret and their efforts are about to be rewarded in the most extraordinary way...

November 2021

Vine Street is by Domnic Nolan. SOHO, 1935. Sergeant Leon Geats's patch.A snarling, skull-cracking misanthrope, Geats marshals the grimy rabble according to his own elastic moral code. The narrow alleys are brimming with jazz bars, bookies, blackshirts, ponces and tarts so when a body is found above the Windmill Club, detectives are content to dismiss the case as just another young woman who topped herself early. But Geats - a good man prepared to be a bad one if it keeps the worst of them at bay - knows the dark seams of the city. Working with his former partner, mercenary Flying Squad sergeant Mark Cassar, Geats obsessively dedicates himself to finding a warped killer - a decision that will reverberate for a lifetime and transform both men in ways they could never expect.

Also published in November Good Cop, Bad Cop by Simon Kernick and Deadline by Quintin Jardine.

 

Alec Marsh on Enemy of The Raj

 

I decided to set my new Drabble and Harris novel, Enemy of Raj, against the backdrop of British India because, as well as making for a thoroughly entertaining thriller, I wanted to explore the phenomenon of the Raj.

The history of Britain in India, which one can date from the formation of the East India Company in 1600 (through grant of a charter by Elizabeth I) right up until 1947 when the country gained independence, is longer than most people probably realise and reflects the rise and decline of Britain as a world power. 

But the long association and the relative amicability of post-colonial relations obscures a genuinely troubling narrative, (one that William Dalrymple, for example, has done an important job in exposing in his recent book The Anarchy). Importantly, therefore, I also wanted Enemy of the Raj to be an opportunity to debunk the prevalent swathe of nostalgia about British rule in India – what one might call the Merchant Ivory view of history. 

It was not the benign costume drama depicted in popular culture. It was as most know already, a thoroughly ghastly and morally repugnant example of societal exploitation, the dominance of one culture over another. Not only that but it’s one that when it reached its zenith in the early 1900s was based on pretty diabolical notions of white racial superiority, the consequences of which we are still living with today as the BLM campaign this summer has highlighted.

And in this, the title of the book is particularly deliberate – for today, we are all enemies of the Raj. But when the story is was set in 1937 supporting the Raj was an absolutely respectable position. Don’t forget that when Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940 he declared that he had not ‘become the King’s first minster in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire’. And when he said that he chiefly had India in mind. 

So it was important for me that the book correctly locates the British where they were in the 1930s – which is, I’m afraid to say, on the wrong side of history. 

But when you consider that 100,000 Brits were running India – which then had a population of 300 million – you realise it’s not a simple matter at all. 

For a start, 100,000 Brits can’t all be bad. In the book, I have several British colonial figures, many of whom I firmly believe to be a thoroughly good people – really no different to you or me – but doing what is bad work, as diligently and efficiently as he could. But understanding that perfectly decent, ordinary people can be involved in collective evils and behave monstrously is a vitally important part of understanding how things like the Raj – or horrors such as the Holocaust or the transatlantic slave trade for that matter – can come about. 

So, notwithstanding the fact that Enemy of the Raj is primarily an entertainment (as Graham Greene put it) and is conceived as a gripping, light thriller, there is a very serious point that I wanted to highlight.

The second book in the Drabble and Harris series (the first was Rule Britannia, published last year) story follows London newspaperman Sir Percival Harris (he hates his first name and is known simply as Harris) and his old friend Ernest Drabble, a Cambridge professor of history and amateur mountaineer, in India to interview a famous (and real life) maharaja, named Sir Ganga Singh. Pretty quickly after arriving in Delhi, however, they discover that forces are at work and soon they become involved in an audacious assassination plot...

As well as offering an opportunity to demonstrate the unpleasant side to the whole matter, the story also offers the opportunity to indulge in counterfactual speculations. In an early conversation with another (pro-empire) British journalist they discuss how long British rule has got left. Now, we all know the game was up in 1947, but the outlook in the late 1930s didn’t look like that. The British journalist in the story then suggests that Britain could possibly hang on until 1984 – ‘If we play our cards right.’

Playing our cards right included decades of policies which deliberately sought to divide Hindu and Muslim opinion, to play one set of communities off against another. This ultimately led to the appalling massacres of partition in 1947 when up to two million were killed and 14 million people displaced. As the late historian Norman Stone remarked, when empires fail, bad things happen. But in this case the British were complicit – unwittingly or otherwise.

During one argument in the book, Drabble – who is a good old fashioned leftie and very much the voice of today – asks Harris, a dyed in the wool imperialist, how far he would be prepared to go to maintain British rule in India? Would he shoot people?

The moment he’s confronted with this Harris knows the game is up – he’s not going to pull the trigger. But it takes something else to happen to him before he can admit it to himself because, after all, he’s been indoctrinated with the racial superiority nonsense.

But admit it he does. And in the same way I tend to agree with those who say that Britain still has some way to go before it admits to itself properly that what was done by our forefathers in India was wrong. Even if many of them were thoroughly decent people, just like you and me. 

Enemy of the Raj by Alec Marsh is published by Headline Accent priced £9.99 in original paperback and available as an ebook

India, 1937. Intrepid reporter Sir Percival Harris is hunting tigers with his friend, Professor Ernest Drabble. Harris soon bags a man-eater - but later finds himself caught up in a hunt of a different kind... Harris is due to interview the Maharaja of Bikaner, a friend to the Raj, for his London newspaper - and he and Drabble soon find themselves accompanied by a local journalist, Miss Heinz. But is the lady all she seems? And the Maharaja himself is proving elusive... Meanwhile, the movement for Indian independence is becoming stronger, and Drabble and Harris witness some of the conflict first-hand. But even more drama comes on arrival at Bikaner when the friends find themselves confined to their quarters... and embroiled in an assassination plot! Just who is the enemy in the Maharaja's palace? What is the connection to a mysterious man Drabble meets in Delhi? And what secret plans do the British colonial officers have up their sleeves?