'And so the sky falls...'

For the second time this year I’ve been to the cinema, on this occasion to see the latest James Bond film, Skyfall. Normally I wouldn’t comment on it but so many people have compared Afrika Reich with Bond – comparisons that usually leave me scratching my head – that I thought it deserved a blog.

I’ve never been much of a 007 fan. I used to like the Roger Moore films as a kid but by my teens the allure was fading. This is the first time I’ve been to the cinema to see a Bond film since 1989s Licence to Kill. So what did I think of the new movie?

Beyond the galling amount of product placement, the casting was impeccable, photography sumptuous, editing bombastic but suitably explosive. There was enough intrigue to keep me engaged (though I felt the plot was a bit thin and the whole hard drive strand seemed to be forgotten half way through), along with plenty of action and some extraordinary stunts... even if some of the visual effects – the blowing up of Vauxhall Cross, the komodo dragons – were a bit dodgy. Despite all this, I was left cold. The film didn’t engage me on any emotional level.

The principle reasons for this explain why I don’t recognise the link some readers have made between my book and Bond. Firstly, there’s the glamour: Daniel Craig’s sculpted body and tailored suits, the women who are perfect from their eye lashes to their heels, the cocktails, fast cars and glittering cities. This type of glamour doesn’t do much for me. It’s one of the reasons I like Leone’s films so much: half the time his characters are filthy and dressed in rotting clothes. There’s very little glamour in the world of Afrika Reich: I can’t ever imagine Burton wearing a dinner jacket. Indeed, returning to the previous blog (‘E is for…’), Madeleine was initially a plainer woman and I was asked to make her more attractive.

For me, Bond also lacks a ‘mythic’ quality. There’s no primordial conflict between good and evil. Each film is just another mission and even in the case of Skyfall, where the revenge strand has a parallel with my story, it’s dealt with in a much more grounded way. Guns, gadgets and quips will suffice rather than that irrepressible desire to triumph no matter how battered the soul is. I’m sure plenty of people will disagree with me!

Two final points: 1) One of the carps I get about Afrika Reich is that Burton couldn’t endure all he does. It was therefore with a certain irony that I watched Bond survive a lot worse, starting with his spectacular fall from the bridge in the opening sequence. 

Burton isn't the only one who fights on train tops

2) There’s a line of dialogue I’ve written in Book 2, and long before Bond 23 had a title, that may have to be changed. It comes when Hochburg surveys a cataclysmic scene and responds by saying, ‘And so the sky falls.’ It was meant as a reference to Hans Christian Anderson though I suspect now people will think it is a nod to James Bond. Readers of this blog will know different.

E is for EDITOR

If you’ve trawled the bestseller charts in the past twenty years, chances are you’ve read a book my editor was behind. He’s worked with thriller veterans Len Deighton and Gerald Seymour; launched new writers like Conn Iggulden and Philipa Gregory; and most recently guided David Nicholls to a mega-hit with One Day. I was also delighted to discover he used to be Flashman’s editor! His name is Nick Sayers and as another publisher once told me, ‘he’s the best in the business’.

Nick & I at Clays where TAR was printed

1) Nick wanted the structure of the book tweaked, so that the reader would get to the alternative history sections more quickly. There are two extended passages of them (one explaining Britain’s peace with Nazi Germany, the other about the Casablanca Conference). In my edit these appeared, respectively, in chapters 8 and 12. Ultimately this became 3 and 8. I have to say that although I found my original structure more elegant, I can understand why getting some explanation in early was beneficial.

2) He also suggested that further context be added: details about Nazi Africa. I had already included plenty, but Nick insisted on more, everything from agricultural policies in Kongo to the ethnic mix of the conquerors. This had an implication on the text which I’ll come back to in ‘F is for...’

3) The use of the word ‘nigger’. I realised this was a contentious and sensitive subject so had employed it sparingly despite the virulent racism of the characters; originally it appeared 42 times (in a 120 000 word book) Nick felt this was too much, so I trimmed it to 26. Any more and the Nazis would start sounding a bit too PC, something one could never accuse Hochburg of!

4) Finally, and perhaps this was the point Nick was most adamant about, he wanted Burton to be more morally upstanding. My original vision of him was in the Leone mould. He was utterly amoral, disinterested in what the Nazis were doing, a man who killed for money with little principle. His assassination of Hochburg had nothing to do with right or wrong, simply a desire to avenge. The only chink in this was Madeleine: I liked the juxtaposition of his amorality with love. Patrick was similarly unscrupulous. Nick said he struggled to work out who was good and who bad and that the ‘heroes’ had to be more clearly defined as good guys. I tried to argue my case but was advised it would be commercially risky, so I relented and made Burton the more morally buoyant character who appears in the novel (though hopefully as I’ve shown there remains a certain ambiguity to his character). In retrospect this is the one change I have some regret over. My original plan for the trilogy was to have Burton begin as amoral and gradually change till the final showdown at the end of Book 3. By then, and influenced by his experiences, he would be attached to a more Manichean code.

Once implemented, the above changes amounted to less than 2% of the book. I think they were the right ones for the time (remember I was struggling to get my first publishing deal!) and in retrospect I don’t think they harmed the book, they simply made it different from my original. Whether readers would have reacted differently to that vision is something I’ll never know...

E is also for EL REICH AFRICANO

Once the book had been commissioned in the UK the next question was whether it could be sold abroad. To date four territories have bought the translation rights, not bad given that many big book markets such as Germany, Russia, Poland etc had understandable issues with the Nazi content. I’m reliably informed that one German publisher blanched when they got to the Schädelplatz!

The first to buy it was Spain where the book went to a three-way auction. Whether it was because of this… the superb trailer my Spanish publisher (Ediciones B) made for it… the publicity tour I went on to Madrid and Barcelona… or just because the cover matched my original design, EL REICH AFRICANO has a special place on my bookshelf.

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!

X is for XAVIER MARCH

If you’re reading this blog there’s a high chance you’re interested in alternative history. If you’re interested in alternative history then there’s an even higher chance you’re read Robert Harris’s Fatherland. In my opinion it’s the apogee of the genre and a damn fine thriller to boot.

(As a quick aside, I should say a word about alternative history. The ‘definitive’ novel of the genre is The Man in the High Castle and it’s noteworthy that this is a work of science fiction. Purists would argue that Fatherland isn’t really alternative history, only its milieu is. I tend to agree – which is why I see Afrika Reich as foremost a thriller, not alternative history.)

One of the reasons Fatherland is such a satisfying read is because of the main character: XAVIER MARCH, an investigator with Berlin’s criminal police (and a God send for author’s writing A-Zs and wondering what they’ll do with those tricky last letters of the alphabet). It was a lesson for me. If Afrika Reich was going to succeed beyond the setting and plot, the characters would have to be people readers cared for.

That said, there’s no Xavier March equivalent in my book. March is a more morally straightforward character than Burton. Although a member of the SS, he’s motivated by a desire to know the truth about the world he lives in, and uncovering corruption and murder at the heart of the Reich. In many ways he’s a crusader. Burton’s motives are entirely personal; he’s indifferent to the Nazis’ plans for Africa apart from when they intersect his individual needs. As I once said to my editor: ‘the bad guys are bad, but the good guys aren’t necessarily good’. I’ll come back to this subject in ‘E is for...’.

Returning to Fatherland, in essence it’s a crime thriller, you could even go so far as to say a whodunit. Harris’s book followed in the tradition of Len Deighton’s SS-GB which is an espionage thriller. It occurred to me that the victorious Third Reich element of these books (although intrinsic to the plot) is a backdrop to variations on thriller. Since the crime and spy sub-genre had already been done, I wanted to do something fresh with Afrika Reich – hence the reason I chose to make it an action/adventure thriller, more of which next time...

PS – just in case you’re wondering why I’ve included a picture of Rutger Hauer here dressed in black, he played Xavier March in the HBO adaptation of the novel.

M is for MEN ON A MISSION

Before I start, a quick apology for not replying to people’s comments until today. For some reason Blogger kept locking me out of the system – hence my silence. I think I’ve sorted it so hopefully will be able to respond from now on. Anyway… M.

When I say I had to start from scratch, I mean it. The only elements I kept from the original version were the title (see also ‘K is for...’), setting and two character names: Burton Cole and Walter Hochburg, more of whom shortly.

I began by jettisoning the idea of Burton as a journalist looking for a scoop. It worked in the original version of the book but was insufficiently dramatic for a thriller. An obvious alternative suggested itself. Instead of going to interview Hochburg, Burton should plan to assassinate him. This in turn lent itself to a ‘MEN ON A MISSION’ (MoM) plot, something in the vein of The Wild Geese or Where Eagles Dare, two of my favourite MoM books/films.

MoM plots have an established structure. The hero is offered a mission (usually by an enigmatic figure); he recruits his team (a combination of old friends and new blood who squabble incessantly); they train, then are dropped behind enemy lines. At this point something goes terribly wrong (often involving a double-cross). The team now have to ‘overcome and adapt’, some are killed, before finally – impossibly – they pull off the mission. Then it’s back home for tea and medals.

This is how the new version of TAR originally began... then I had a flash of inspiration.

Instead of following the old clichés, wouldn’t it be more interesting to subvert the genre? Rather than ending with ‘mission accomplished’, what about beginning the book that way? MoM stories rarely show you how the heroes get home (think of that last scene in Where Eagles Dare when Smith and Schaffer just doze off in the plane). What if the journey home took up the majority of the narrative? What if all the twists and betrayals and action followed the assassination of Hochburg – rather than leading up to it?

It was a moment of inspiration and the start of more than two and a half years of work.

M is also for MADELEINE

In the past couple of years I’ve noticed a lot of Madeleines appearing in fiction. I wonder if this is to do with the publicity surrounding Madeleine McCann. My Maddie was christened many years before and drew her name from Madeleine Albright (former US Secretary of State) – although she didn’t look like her! I often get asked who I’d cast in a film version of TAR. The honest answer is I don’t really think about it... apart from Maddie who I always saw being played by a Romanian actress called Alexandra Maria Lara. Indeed I used to keep this photo of her on my desk and every time Burton flagged in his journey home I’d look at it and urge him on.

Y is for YOUWRITEON.COM

After the 2002 version of Africa Reich was rejected I wrote another two novels (one on Barbary pirates, the other a dark love story about forgery) neither of which found any success. Every time I looked around for a new project, however, I kept coming back to TAR. Should I rewrite it as a thriller? Surely the idea was full of potential? In the end, the impetus to start again came from a totally unexpected event.

YOUWRITEON.COM (YWO) was set up in 2006. Funded by the Arts Council, it was the first of the peer-review sites for writers. The idea was (indeed still is) that you upload the first 10 000 words of your novel for others to review and score. The top five rated chapters of each month then receive a critique from an industry professional as well as being selected for the ‘Book of the Year’ award.

I joined YWO a few months after it started. I didn’t have a WIP at the time (sorry about all these acronyms!) so thought I’d upload TAR just to get a sense of the site and see what others thought. To my surprise it made the top five books of the month and then, to my even greater surprise, won ‘Book of the Year’. Some publicity followed, including a piece on the BBC for which I garnered additional notoriety due to a penchant for sunglasses, wide-brimmed hats and jungle backgrounds (see photo).

Then something strange happened: a rare occurrence in the world of publishing. An editor at Orion came to me. She read the book and although her response was the same as those who had rejected it in 2002, she thought the idea was strong and that I should re-write the book as a straight thriller: i.e exactly what had been in the back of my mind for the past four years. I talked it over with my agent but with the interest of a major publisher it seemed a no brainer.

My original idea was to turn it around quickly: take the existing manuscript, cut out the literary elements, beef up the thriller bits and have it read for submission in a couple of months. I soon hit a snag, however, what I came to describe as the apricot-and-peach-lattice-pie conundrum.

Imagine you serve a beautiful apricot and peach lattice pie to someone only to be told they don’t like apricots. You head back to the kitchen, thinking it will be no problem to remove the apricot pieces and then you can get on with dessert. The problem is that to get at the apricot you have to break through the lattice pastry – and by time you’re finished all you’ve got is a mess. So it was with the book. I couldn’t remove the literary elements without damaging the rest. I struggled for a month before realising it was hopeless. Then I took a brave decision. I decided to start again. From scratch...

PS – when I said A-Z, I hope you didn’t think I meant in order.