Frankie's Letter

I had some great news yesterday.  Severn House are going to publish my First World War spy story, Frankie’s Letter. So that was two bottles of champagne and some pretty hearty celebrating chez Gordon-Smith.

Incidentally, the first chapter’s on the Books page of the website, if you’d like a preview.

Frankie’s Letter was a real labour of love.  First and foremost a spy thriller, yes, and, I hope, a cracking good story, but also the result of a ridiculous amount of thought and research about the First World War.  For instance, I was lucky enough to attend a two-day conference at the University of Birmingham run by Professor Gary Sheffield, one of the foremost historians of WW1, and, over an absorbing couple of days, got some real historical insights that were reflected in the book.

One point I did want to make (and this fitted very nicely with the story) was that the people who actually fought the war didn’t think it was a futile struggle. They thought it was an essential fight for survival that couldn’t be avoided, anymore than the Second World War could have been sidestepped.  After the war was over, you’d expect, wouldn’t you, to have a flood of memoirs and war-based fiction.  In fact, there was a curious silence for about ten years.  Oddly enough, the same thing happened with the Americans and Vietnam.  That also took about ten years for the floodgates of war memoirs to open.

Maybe that length of time is needed to put such a massive event in perspective.  Anyway, ten years on from 1918 brings us very neatly to the start of the Great Depression and, as the Thirties progressed, it isn’t surprising, in view of the horrific casualties, that people wondered what it had all been for.  We’re still influenced by that view, but if you want to find out what it really was all for, I can heartily recommend Richard Holmes’ books Tommy and The Western Front, Gordon Corrigan’s Mud, Blood and Poppycock and Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory.