T is for TUNNEL & TRAIN

One of the concepts for Afrika Reich was to make it an action thriller. Obviously this requires action! Lots of it. Beyond individual chases and fights, however, I wanted to put in a couple of big set-pieces, sequences that would last several chapters. The first of these, where the Burton and Neliah strands connect, is the TUNNEL scene.

I wrote in a previous blog how writing is as much to do with logical deduction as it is with inspiration – so it was with the tunnel. I didn’t start with the tunnel battle and work the plot around it, rather the other way round. Early on in the planning of the book I introduced the concept of the PAA (Pan African Autobahn). However, I wanted it to be more than just a background idea; I wanted it to be integral to the story.

Initially I planned to have a battle set on the tarmac itself but soon realised I needed something more claustrophobic, something from which the characters couldn’t easily escape. And this is where the logical deduction bit comes in. The most obvious way to combine roads, battles and claustrophobia was with a tunnel.

As for the TRAIN sequence, well, this proves the maxim that nothing is ever wasted for a writer.

Back in my teens I wrote a screenplay called Fortress Europe. This was set in the last winter of World War 2 and was about a heist of Nazi gold. The climax of the film was a big action set-piece on a bullion-loaded train hurtling through a frozen landscape (itself inspired by the Monet picture above). Obviously nothing came of the screenplay but the idea stuck with me... even if by the time I used it again snow and ice had been replaced with the heat of Angola. The helicopter gunships were a later addition inspired by Apocalypse Now (again!).

T is also for TRILOGY

Trilogy – the unmentionable word. From the outset Afrika Reich was conceived as a three part story with a definite beginning (Book 1), middle and end.

I’m often asked how much of it I’ve already planned. I’d be exaggerating if I said I had every nuance of the three books sorted, nevertheless I know all the key moments and the general arc of the story. The final chapters of the final book have been worked out in detail...

But there’s a twist.

For commercial reasons my publisher only committed to the first two parts (i.e. they want to see how successful they are), so I need to keep selling in decent quantities if I’m to finish Burton’s and Hochburg’s story. Which is why I’m always grateful when readers recommend their friends to buy a copy!

W is for WALTER HOCHBURG

If Burton seemed to emerge from the ether, then WALTER E HOCHBURG was based on Kurtz from Heart of Darkness – at least to begin with. I wanted a character who was a mixture of the messianic and murderous, a man with an obsession to ‘civilise’ Africa. Unlike Conrad’s character, however, and because of the genre I was writing in, he is much more clearly flagged as the villain.

That said, I wanted to create a carnivalesque villain, one who combined the elements of mass murderer with all the best jokes. I also wanted to portray his backstory as sympathetically as possible. Some readers have commented on their moral queasiness about this – but that’s exactly the effect I was aiming for.

Physically, my initial instinct was to play against type with Hochburg and make him a slight man (I always had in mind the British stage actor Michael Pennington). I was intrigued by the idea of so much energy, power and violence emanating from such an inconsequential figure. However, when I wrote the book and pictured Hochburg in my mind, he was always a bigger, broad-shouldered character; the type of person who fills a room with his physical presence. I resisted this depiction of him for ages, till finally – in the fourth draft of the book – I relented and changed his description to what we have now.

His baldness comes from Brandon’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, another source for the character. This is also where he gets his first name (never mentioned by Conrad) and initial. The latter was an in-joke between John Milius and George Lucas (the writers of Apocalypse) and was a reference to Walt E. Disney. I like this type of layering of references; in fact my book is packed with them which I’m sure discerning readers are picking up on.

As for the name Hochburg... well, I don’t want to give away all my secrets! But if you look up ‘Hoch’ and ‘Burg’ in a German dictionary I’m sure you’ll get the allusion. (NB – please don’t post the answer in the comments section.)

A is for APOCALYPSE NOW

Books, like wars, rarely have simple origins; rather they are a confluence of events. So it was with The Afrika Reich (TAR). Although the book was published in February 2011, the first stirrings I had for a story set in Nazi-occupied Africa go back to the 1990s. I began with a title.

I remember a day shopping in London. I was browsing in Dillons (a defunct book store) and came across a new edition of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Half an hour later I was in Dorothy Perkins in Oxford Street - though can I add not shopping for myself! Inside the store there was a huge TV screen with the BBC news playing. Some story from Africa came on and the newscaster said (I recall this vividly), ‘Now over to our Africa correspondent, Tim Hewitt’.

Africa correspondent. The Third Reich... Somehow the two fused in my mind – and I had ‘The Africa Reich’! I thought it would make a good title and so duly scribbled it down in my note book (I don’t go anywhere without one).

Jump forward a couple of years and I was on the beach in Rio de Janeiro (where I used to live) reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. On page 17 of my Penguin edition there is a fleeting reference to Africa: ‘He thought of Africa, and the Nazi experiment there. And his blood stopped in his veins...’ What could ellicit such a response? The thought intrigued me and I remembered my Dorothy Perkins moment.

Gradually an idea for a novel took root and somehow grafted itself on to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one of my favourite books. I imagined a character journeying up river though Nazi Congo to find a Kurtz-like character waging a war of genocide against the native population. As I began sketching out a plot it was a simple progression from Heart of Darkness to APOCALYPSE NOW (which I’m sure you’ll know is loosely based on Conrad’s tale). At that point the engine of my imagination began to rev up.

Inspired by Coppola’s masterpiece I created a hellish and hallucinogenic version of Nazi Africa, interspersed with journal entries from a world-weary war correspondent called Burton Cole. He was going up river to find the scoop of the century: an interview with the enigmatic Walter Hochburg, architect of the Africa Reich. After more than a year’s writing I submitted it to my agent who said it was brilliant: a fusion of the literary and thriller, philosophical musings and big action sequences.

It was also utterly unsellable.

And so the manuscript joined that pile of other rejected books I have stored away in my office. It was the end of 2002, but although I didn’t know it at the time, not the end of The Afrika Reich.

A is also for ARNIM

Field Marshal Hans-Jürgen von ARNIM was appointed head of the Afrika Korps in March 1943. One of the things I wanted to do with the book was mix fact and fiction and to that end several real people appear in the narrative. I like the sense of verisimilitude this brings, though as you’ll see when we get to ‘H is for...’ I didn’t want to introduce any major historical figures.