text:
Previously in Readers Write...
#1 March 09
from the author, now and then.
Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
#2 May 09
Listen, I just write the books. Who knows where they end up? I've
had mail from Norwegians on oil platforms, and from a pilot who
flies jumbos for a South Pacific airline, and from Jim in Alberta
where it's often 30 or 40 below. I'm told the U.S. Marines in
Iraq enjoy my WW2 desert story, A Good Clean Fight.
Nothing surprises me, not even the email from Tim in Australia that
began: "The first book I stole was
Piece of Cake." He
nicked it from the school library when he was 16. "I probably
read it another six or seven times before it fell apart." By then
he was old enough to pay for books, so he bought another copy.
Should have bought two, and given the other to the library.
These thoughts are prompted by the steady stream of letters (and
cheques or PayPal requests) that followed
Lezard's corker of a review of
Hullo Russia, Goodbye England
in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago. David in Maryland ordered a copy
and wrote that he came across Goshawk
Squadron over 35 years ago and still re-reads it, along with other
yarns of mine. Helen in Dublin said she 'enjoyed' my writing,
then thought that 'appreciated' was a better word, and finally upgraded
that to 'enthralled'. W.B.T. in Southampton has read and re-read all my
books, and (he says) so has his wife, which is pleasing.
Paul in Dublin ranks me as "one of 3 or 4 authors all of whose work I
own"; and Matt in London "recently read
Goshawk Squadron on my
honeymoon and absolutely loved it." (Let's hope that marks the
start of a long relationship.) And many more
letters, saying more of the same, including the nice lady in
Wales who addressed me as 'Dear Sir or Madam'.
Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
#3 June 09
Thomas Keneally
is a very good researcher, By chance, he met the owner of a Californian
leather-goods shop who was one of the Polish Jews rescued from the
German death camps by Oskar Schindler. After that, Keneally worked hard
to find the facts that became
Schindler's Ark, which became the film Schindler's List. He
could have written another Holocaust history. Instead, he wrote his
book as fiction - not because he wasn't sure of the truth, but because
he didn't want it to end up on the packed shelves of Holocaust volumes.
Keneally wanted his story to be read by people who never look at World
War Two histories. And he succeeded.
I think I know how he feels. I parted company with one publisher
because my fiction always ended up in the Military History section of
the shop. That wasn't why I wrote it. I wrote it for the Keneally
reason, so that people might get an idea of what war is like at the
sharp end. Not the daily scores in, say, air combat in the desert war
(which is how military historians tend to see the battle) but how a
fighter squadron lives, kills and dies in the sand, flies and blood of
the Western Desert. A Good Clean Fight is good history; I
researched it thoroughly. But it takes you where the military histories
never go. I hope that's true of all my flying stuff.
Including the latest, Hullo Russia, Goodbye England. I've had
some feedback from former Vulcan pilots and groundcrew. Chris in London
flew Vulcans and said: "It was a good read, and took me back." Brad in
Lincoln said, "Have just finished it. Grand read!" Having been
front-line ground crew for 15 years, he noticed a couple of places
where I slightly bent the truth - for instance, each Vulcan airbase was
either a Blue Steel or a bomb station, but not both. My mistake.
And here's another detail I might have included: "There is no mention
of the dreaded P Tube, a rubber bladder with a fitted chrome receptacle
into which you could pee, if you really had to. After a sortie, each
crew member emptied their own, normally at the side of the Crew Chief's
hut on the pan." I suspect that's the kind of info my readers like to
know. Some people thought Baggy Bletchley bought it in a portable loo
at the end of Piece of Cake, and were pleasantly surprised to
meet him again in Hullo Russia. He survived
Cake, and A Good Clean Fight; he may surface again.
I was happy that Brad confirmed the problems of arming a Vulcan with
the Blue Steel missile. The fuel (HTP) was so toxic that any groundcrew
splashed with it had to dive into a nearby plunge bath instantly, or
his clothing caught fire. And loading the missile meant 230 gold studs
(the Butt Connector) made perfect contact; if not, download and start
again. An exercise involving Blue Steel began hours before take-off. A
far cry from the famous 'four-minute warning' of an attack.
Peter, a former Vulcan captain now in France, got the book and
wrote: "I sat in a deckchair at the week-end and I pretty much read it
straight through. I think that says a great deal, and I found it a good
read. The story perhaps stretched the imagination a little in some
areas. Certainly our hero Silk could not have been disposed of quite so
quickly." Well, endings are often the most difficult part. Peter adds
that he joined the Vulcan OCU eight years after Silk. By then, the
aircraft was a truly low-level machine, Blue Steel had long gone, and
so had the WW2 veterans in the aircrew. (Maybe some of the mindset of
those who had bombed German cities went with them.) But Peter also read
Piece of Cake. "I think you have caught the repartee and banter
of aircrew magnificently," he says. "My first Vulcan squadron used the
Snow White party trick." (That's the one with everyone in line astern,
marching on their knees, arms folded, singing 'Hey Ho!' - it's in Cake,
page 75.) "With 55 aircrew on the squadron, there were sometimes more
than seven dwarfs!"
Thanks to all who wrote. And welcome to several public libraries who have bought copies, including Enfield (in London), Hartlepool, North Yorkshire, Dorset and Wrexham. Glad to have you on board.
Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
No Guinness in Mongolia,
a shrink's view of Silko,
and "Jag tycker om det," in spades.
Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
how many people steal books, especially books by me. I've heard from
upright citizens who wouldn't think of cheating on the golf course, but
admit that they stole a copy of 'Piece of Cake' or 'Damned Good
Show'. Often it was the school or college library
that was plundered. That's how Jan in
Am I?
Aren't most
authors? Before I wrote 'Goshawk
Squadron', for instance, I worked hard on the research, and learned all
I could
about what the R.F.C. was doing in
Now for something brighter, as they don't say on TV
news. Imagination. I
use it all the time. How it works, beats
me. I'm just grateful.
Take a story of mine called 'Kentucky Blues'. It's about a small,
not-too-bright town called
episode came
partly from my imagination and largely from my experience when I was
for the Manhattan Rugby Club in
round-up of some readers' messages. Ron in Walthomstow
found 'Hullo
Many thanks to everyone.
Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
Readers Write #6 October 09
Tin Pan Alley,
and a First from
Someone remarked
that there are no heroes in my books.
Plenty of courage, no lack of sacrifice, a lot of death. But
The word itself has been done to death.
I was in New York when US soldiers, marines and airmen returned from
the First Gulf War, nearly twenty years ago, and they got a
reception. New Yorkers called them all
'heroes', and many servicemen looked uncomfortable with the
label. In any army, for every frontline fighting man
there are six or seven or even ten men behind
him, providing support. Cooks,
medics, dentists, truck drivers, guys organising supplies, keeping
sending signals. All doing essential
jobs, but are they all heroes? When
everyone is heroic, the word has lost all meaning. Let's save it
for those who truly deserve
Moving on: I've always believed
that a good writer can
write convincingly in any style that's needed
- tabloid journalism, song lyrics,
boring bureaucratic jargon,
whatever. I'm sometimes disappointed by
crime novelists who include chunks of newspaper
reporting for the sake of plot.
They've obviously never worked on a paper. When I wrote 'The
Network' -
which is
about a double agent reporting allegedly secret info -
his style often had to be boring in order to be convincing. The facts seemed more exciting because the
writing was so dull. I worked hard on
that, just as I did in 'A Good Clean
Fight' where I wanted to quote the lyrics of a certain popular song. (Good contrast with the bleak
When you don't care...
I'm bound in iron bands.
When you don't care...
I'm lost in desert sands.
In this wilderness, with none but you to guide me,
I'm in heaven with your tenderness beside me...
And if you think any
fool could have written that, just try
writing the next verse. But don't steal my
words. They're my copyright now.
Fresh insights from
readers' messages. Anthony in London
bought 'Hullo Russia...' and mentions what a pleasure it is "to find a
novelist who is able to produce books that you can't put down - I
finished 'Piece of Cake' in a few days and felt totally wrung out
by the sense
of tension and fatigue you managed to sustain..." By
contrast, a different reaction from John,
somewhere in
And Richard in
My thanks
to you all.
Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
Readers Write #7 November 09
Viewers are smart,
readers are far-flung,
The television adaptation of Piece of Cake still attracts questions. (It was first shown in 1988, so if you're under 25, ask your parents.) All five hour-long episodes are now available on DVD, at what strikes me (and I can be impartial because I sold the rights and so I don't make a penny from the DVD) as a very low price. If you can't find it locally, try Ian Allan Publishing - that's where I bought mine. For a drama, the TV showing pulled in a big audience. I think the final episode attracted 13 million viewers in the UK, and LWT sold the series around the world. In the US it went out on Mobil Masterpiece Theatre, a much respected viewing slot. And don't tell me they spell it 'Theater' over there. Mobil called it 'Theatre', and I have the poster to prove it.
Tim in Victoria, Australia was 12 at the time, watched Cake with his Mum, bet her that Moggy would survive, "which of course ultimately resulted in my having to make both our beds for a week." This throws an interesting light on the novel and one reason why I think it keeps on getting re-read (and re-shown): it's the unpredictable nature of events. A good story should surprise. I set out to tell the events of the Phoney War, the Battle for France and the Battle of Britain, just as they might have happened to one RAF fighter squadron. All the research I did (and that was a lot) confirmed one thing: many pilots got killed, some in battle, some not, some by inexperience, some by sheer bad luck. Flying was risky in those days. On a typical fighter squadron, of those pilots who had begun the war, most would not be flying a year later. Sometimes none.
This is the unpredictable element that keeps Piece of Cake on edge. When the television series was being cast, I was pleased to see that I recognised hardly any names. Viewers are smart. They know that the star they meet in episode one is not going to be killed in episode two or three, and probably not at all - television has paid that actor a ton of money and it's not going to be wasted. Nearly all the pilots in Piece of Cake were played by young unknown actors. Some became better known later (Jeremy Northam, Nathaniel Parker) and Tom Burlinson had already made a name in Australia but not in Britain. So viewers could never guess who would live and who would die. Tim, aged 12, guessed wrongly, and that both reflected the truth of the war and upheld the dramatic tension of the story. Incidentally, I thought Neil Dudgeon, who played Moggy Cattermole, was excellent. An RAF fighter pilot who actually led a squadron in the Battle of Britain read the book, saw the series, and wrote to me. He had known men like Moggy, and he summed him up very neatly: "Bad for discipline, good for morale - every squadron should have one. Just one."
Other questions I get asked: (1) Did I write the screenplay? No, I didn't. I'd put four hard years into the novel, and I was very happy when Leon Griffiths (who created Minder) wrote the screenplay. (2) The novel says Hurricanes, so why use Spitfires? Very few Hurricanes survived, and none were aerobatic, so it was Spits or nothing. (3) Did I like the TV version? Well, naturally I pefer the book, but it's a long story and if they'd shot the whole of the printed word, the series would never have ended. It's pretty good. The music is haunting. I wish it were on CD.
Back to readers write. Among the more exotic messages have been those from Bernice, who runs Crooked Timber Books in what sounds like a very rugged corner of Nova Scotia; Jarmo in Finland (ordering the RFC trilogy); Anette in Sweden (ditto); plus Karen in Switzerland (Hornet's Sting), Jules in Holland, Charles in Prague and Werner in Vienna (all for Hullo Russia, Goodbye England).
Which prompts two thoughts. First: that I'm lucky to write in English, a global language. When an Egyptian airliner talks to Bulgarian air traffic control, they talk in English. I'm sure Finland is a delightful country, but if I'd been born there, writing in Finnish would not have made my career any easier. And my second thought is that there are translations of my work sitting on my shelves that might make an unusual gift if you have a friend in another country. I have copies of Goshawk Squadron in French (Les Abattoirs du Ciel), in Spanish (Escadrilla Azur), and in Dutch (Het Havik Squadron). There's The Eldorado Network in Spanish (El Spia Dorado) and in Dutch (Het Eldorado Netwerk); and Kramer's War in Finnish (Luutnantti Kramerin Sota) and in what may be Belgian but is probably Dutch (Kramer's Oorlog). I've even got Polish versions of A Good Clean Fight (Pustynny Ogien), and of The Eldorado Network (Siatka Eldorado) and of Artillery of Lies (Artyleria Klamstw). If you're interested, email me and we'll take it from there.
My thanks to all who have written.
Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
Readers Write #8 December 09
Rumblings in Cornwall,
the Forgotten War,
and three helpings of 'Cake'
I sense a smouldering impatience in Cornwall. K.M.D. of St Ives writes to say how much he's enjoyed my previous books, especially the RFC/RAF trilogies. 'Damned Good Show' meant much to him because his father-in-law was in Bomber Command in WW2, got shot down in a Wellington, spent four years in Stalag Luft III, and then in the 1950s instructed at RAF Finningley, a V-Bomber base. Which is why K.M.D. particularly wanted to read 'Hullo Russia, Goodbye England' - it echoes much of his father-in-law's experience.
But then he adds: "I've been disappointed that there aren't more of your RAF books. After all, there's still a lot of WW2 left for Hornet Squadron after 'A Good Clean Fight', and there's also Korea, Suez etc."
Well, I wish I could oblige. The money would be nice. I see other writers who, year after year, produce a succession of novels that play variations on the same tune, and a small voice inside me says: Why don't you do that? Dick Francis writes a horse-racing novel a year. His fans love him. Write an RAF novel a year and your fans will love you. Why not? And a loud voice inside me says: Because you'll be bored rigid. Even the great Conan Doyle grew to loath Sherlock Holmes and tried to kill him off. His fans wouldn't wear it and Doyle went back to grinding out more variations on a tune that must have made him want to throttle someone. If not Holmes, then Watson. Or Inspector Lestrade. Or Mrs Hudson.. Or, ideally, the whole gang.
I'm not in the grinding-out business. I write novels because I find an idea that strikes me as different, even surprising. I try to write a story that I enjoy - something fresh and unusual, maybe something that upsets what most people think they already know. Every novel is a gamble. I like risk. So I can't do what K.M.D. of St Ives suggests, which is to put Hornet Squadron into Suez or Korea simply because those wars happened. I need an idea as well, a hook to hang the story on.
One of the hooks I found, and used in 'Damned Good Show', is the forgotten war waged by Bomber Command from the outbreak of war to 1941/2. Say 'Bomber Command' to most people and they think of Lancasters flattening German cities. But the Lancs weren't much seen on ops until mid-1942, and not in large numbers until 1943. Take the Thousand-Bomber Raid on Cologne on 30th May 1942; only 73 Lancs took part in that, as compared with 79 Hampdens, 131 Halifaxes and 602 Wellingtons (plus others). In fact, Bomber Command's first operation was on the very day that war was declared, 3rd September 1939. During the next couple of years, the Command learned how (and how not) to take the battle to the enemy homeland.
So I was very pleased to hear from someone who was there at the start. Lawrence Wheatley in Bude, Cornwall. He qualified as an Air Observer (soon to be renamed Navigator) in summer 1939, and joined 'B' Flight of 144 Squadron. The squadron flew Hampdens, a compact twin-engine bomber that plays a big part in 'Damned Good Show'. Lawrence suffered from chronic air-sickness and was grounded by the medics, which almost certainly saved his life, because on 29 September 1939 'B' Flight was searching for targets north of Heligoland and ran into German fighters. All five Hampdens were shot down. Soon people were calling it the 'Phoney War'. It was real enough for the RAF. Throughout WW2, Bomber Command losses were heavy. Of the 48 men who completed Lawrence's Air Observer course, 28 died in action or in flying accidents.
Lawrence said he's enjoying D.G.S., "though slightly disappointed" that it's centred on the officers "and little is said about the Sergeants' Mess where the majority of the crew would live." It's a fair point. My problem was numbers. I told the story through the pilots, who were usually officers. That involved a dozen (or more) characters. If I had included the Sergeants' Mess too, it would have doubled the cast. That would be more than I, or most readers, could handle.
Meanwhile, my other flying stories have been prompting some mail. Bob in Ottery St. Mary flew Canberras and Buccaneers (both types were capable of carrying nuclear weapons) and he writes: "I don't know how you do it, but the atmosphere and the characters on the squadrons I've served on are often reflected in your books." Steve in Nottingham, having just read 'Hullo Russia, Goodbye England', says: "The flying descriptions - absolutely brilliant. I presume you leaned on some former pilots to get that right." Well, I certainly had my stuff doublechecked for accuracy, but in essence it all came out of what's left of my mind. Chris in the Borders "liked HRGE immensely. You have a way with character dialogue that, in my opinion, is second to none....Also the story had me from the start; these are characters that I may not necessarily care about, but I revel in their ups and downs, and ultimately they mostly win me over by the end; including Luis Cabrillo from 'The Eldorado Network' trilogy..." (It's actually a quartet, with the new book 'Operation Bamboozle', which Chris bought.) Jonathan in Basingstoke is now on his third copy of 'Piece of Cake', having worn out the other two: "Still an old favourite that I revisit every few years....and it has the rare gift of giving something different every time." While Susan of Colchester bought HRGE and 'Hornet's Sting' as a Christmas gift for her husband, "a devotee of your writing"; and when Richard in Kent got his copy of 'Operation Bamboozle', he was "really chuffed to have a shelf full of your produce." And I'm chuffed too.
Thanks to everyone who wrote.Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
Readers Write #9 February 2010
Barrel-rolling a Boeing, our forgetful MPs, and a nice line in scams.
For the filming of Piece of Cake, the Spitfires were flown by professionals, and they took it seriously, which is understandable when (a) the aeroplane was worth half a million pounds (more now), and (b) it was irreplaceable, and (c) your life depended on it.
Nevertheless, I remember a day when the weather was too gloomy for filming, and one pilot got very bored with hanging around. When the cloud-level lifted the light was still poor, but he was itching to fly, and so he took off and threw his Spit around for ten minutes. Just for fun. No charge on the producers. But the pilot got a big charge out of it.
I mention this because I imagine that inside every commercial pilot is the ghost of a fighter pilot who sometimes looks at his Airbus or his Boeing and wonders what it would be be like to perform a sweet barrel roll, or play leapfrog with the clouds. Just for fun. Then the fighter pilot gets firmly put back in his box and the pro pilot returns to another day in the cockpit. Or, as many call it, the office.
Maybe that explains why quite a few working pilots like to read my stuff. Rowland in New South Wales spent eight years flying in police helicopters, and he read his paperback Piece of Cake so often that it fell apart. He says: "Many of my vintage aircrew read it in our many and lengthy downtimes. We read parts of it to each other across the crewroom, office and hangar floor...Good memories." (He's now bought a hardback copy from me.) "A sincere thank you for the many hours of enjoyment Piece of Cake brought to very bored aircrew waiting for the telephone to ring." Robert in Cologne is another pilot (he's with Lufthansa) who keeps returning to Cake (now on his sixth reading). "For me, it is maybe the best book about flying fighters I have ever read," he writes, "apart from being a very good book." And he adds something it's always good to hear from a pro pilot: "You got the flying scenes right - and I'm very sensitive when it comes to that." But it's the humour and the characters that keep drawing him back: "I just read the part where Squadron Leader Rex elaborates on fighter tactics in October '39 - with Reilly (his dog) yawning and wandering away. That is so good." Dogs often make useful contributions in my books. My wife reckons that Othello, the elderly basset hound in Operation Bamboozle, has the best lines. Nobody hears him, of course, but he knows what he thinks.
Moving on: Gordon in Suffolk worked for Rolls-Royce engines until recently. He enjoyed Hullo Russia, Goodbye England, and he's not the first to tell me he's "absolutely appalled that you could not find a publisher. If you can't get this type of book published, who can?" It's a mystery to me too, but commercial publishers go their own sweet way, which is why I self-publish my stuff. Gordon, having found my website, says: "It was like discovering a treasure trove of undiscovered goodies." (He meant the books, not my author's photograph, which a friend said looks like a benevolent Balkans dictator. That's what friends are for.) Gordon passes on a story he was told by a veteran aerospace journalist who went to a reception given by a defence manufacturer. Many youngish MPs were there. The journo remarked to them that it was marvellous to see the Vulcan, greatest of all V-bombers, flying again. Blank looks. 'V-bombers....Vulcan, Victor, Valiant...Cold War... nuclear deterrent in the 1960s...' More blank looks. Gordon quotes Alan Bennett: "There is nowhere more distant than the recent past." Too true. It's one reason why I wrote HRGE. People forget. Even things like the motto of the nuclear powers - Mutual Assured Destruction - can slip their mind.
Readers continue to intrigue me by their sheer stamina. David in Barnes SW13 reckons he's read "just about every one of your books at least 5 times (beginning with Goshawk Squadron) and I have now recruited my present wife, my ex-wife, my two brothers, my daughter, her husband and soon, I hope, their two boys." To which, with the Cake DVD, he's just hooked his son-in-law. Truly amazing. John, somewhere in Oz, is reading Damned Good Show for the fourth time, and - because his dad flew in them - would like me to write about the dangerous, low-level work of four-engine Halifaxes dropping supplies to partisans in Italy, Jugoslavia, even Poland. Very hairy ops. And Peter in Ontario got a kick out of reading A Good Clean Fight, since his dad flew Kittyhawks with the Desert Air Force, went on to fly Spits in Johnson's Canadian wing at D-Day, and survived the war. Peter ("I'm a big fan") bought Hornet's Sting, Op Bam and Hullo Russia. Then Karen in Switzerland, having just read War Story and Hornet's Sting, says: "I loved both and 'missed' reading them when finished." She's always been interested in vintage aeroplanes and in photography (she sent me some fine airborne** shots taken at Old Warden, especially one of the Bristol Fighter), and her partner is a retired pilot. Add her interest in the history of both World Wars and (she says) "You managed to tick all the boxes that make the perfect book for me. I adored all the characters and found myself completely absorbed by the pilot psyche of the day." Lastly, Stephen in Nottingham "enjoyed Bamboozle, which managed to combine a page-turning plot with some lovely period detail (as ever), and a nice line in scams." He then raises an unusual point. In Cake, he says, I supply the background to every main character - except Moggy Cattermole. Stephen wants to know more about him. I'll give it some serious thought.
Thanks to everyone who wrote.
Derek Robinson Return to Homepage** If you would like to see Karen's pictures, Click Here
Readers Write #10 March 2010
Humour can be more dangerous than gunpowder. With gunpowder, you get a choice of two: either it explodes or it fails. With humour, the choice may be three. Ideally, people laugh. But some people may not see the point. When that happens, the silence is deafening. And yet others may find the alleged humour so unfunny that, for them, it backfires. It offends them. This is the risk you take, because there is no such thing as a joke that cannot upset somebody, somewhere. So humour is a gamble. Ask any stand-up comic. He'll tell you of nights when he had to fight the audience to make them laugh. Other nights, they would laugh no matter what he said, even if it was "Corrugated iron". Humour is a battlefield.
Maybe that's why it's such a big ingredient in
my books. I write about battlefields (some of them in the sky) and
humour keeps
cropping up, even in the most desperate situations. It might be gallows
humour. In my first novel, Goshawk Squadron, a very
fighter pilot is so twitchy about going on patrol that he can't face
porridge at breakfast. Woolley, the CO, comes in. "Are you going
eat that,
Briers ('The Good Life') is one
of the best comic actors in
fave is A Good Clean Fight,"
he writes. "Such vivid imagery!" He's a Flight Lieutenant,
RAAF, an Air Traffic Controller and amateur pilot, and his Aussie
grandfather fought tank battles in the Desert War (where AGCF takes
place), so it's no surprise that the book rang bells for
him. But
what strikes him especially is the humour. "Your wicked satire
is contagious, and I must control myself when dealing with difficult
people for
weeks after reading one of your books, lest I drop slightly too barbed
in response to their 'unhelpfulness'."
month I promised Stephen in
Thanks to everyone who wrote.
Derek Robinson Return to HomepageReaders Write #11 May 2010
Inedible Cakes,
and the shock of Woolley's Twin
he was being interviewed on television, Stephen Sondheim remarked that,
at the
opening of
West Side Story on Broadway, many of the audience walked
out. The
show wasn't what they expected. Their idea of a good musical was lots
of easy
laughs, gorgeous girls, and songs you could whistle on the way home. West Side Story,
by contrast, was about love and hate between street gangs, and it
changed for
ever the way musicals were written. Sondheim (lyrics) and Leonard
(music) - with some help from Shakespeare -
wanted to
stretch their talents and challenge the audience's expectations.
wanted to move on, to create something fresh and new and surprising.
is satisfying but dangerous. Bizet's Carmen was fresh and new and
it got
panned by the critics. When Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was first
performed in
knowledge only goes to boost my respect for those big-hearted
readers who strongly recommend my stuff to their children, wives,
working colleagues, neighbours, librarians, and someone they met in a
Peter, in
Some of the
emails I get rank me so highly amongst the Great Writers of
the World that I haven't the nerve to repeat them here. But Alan of W5
says, "Big fan - keep doing it!" while D.E.W. in
The obit ran
in The Guardian on
22 March 1995 and it was
written by Christopher MacLehose (by far the best editor I ever
had). It
was for Edmund Fisher, a brilliant figure in the publishing world,
described as
"fabulously intolerant of dead wood" and "militantly
unpompous" and "a severe trial to his corporate masters".
MacLehose also detected "an inadvertent likeness in him to Major
the RFC commander in Goshawk
Squadron by
Derek Robinson whom Edmund later published (and what a terrifying
airman he
would have made): a brave, passionate, rebarbative officer,
seeking out the best in his men, a tireless inspiration to them, always
about winning, having a huge appetite for combat, insufferable to his
superiors, a rattler of cages, a hater of pretentiousness and snobbery,
of swathes, not going to be forgotten."
Certainly not
by me.
Although he published Goshawk
when he was at Sphere, I never met Edmund. My loss.
Derek Robinson
Return to
Readers Write #12 June 2010
Shot down by Rex,
Lambs into Tigers
actors say they get inside the skin of the characters they're playing
by first
mastering the way that character walks. I knew an actor like
normally a charming chap but he couldn't get out of character during
the run of
the play; and sometimes that was rough on the family, especially when
he was
cast as a crude and selfish oaf. Every morning he would lurch
downstairs, slump
into a chair, curse the cat and demand a mug of tea in a voice made of
Not easy to live with.
Actors live the part. When the TV series of Piece of Cake was
filmed on location, Tim Woodward - a pacifist in his
years - played Rex, the squadron CO, a hard, ambitious and
man. During a break in the filming I unexpectedly met Rex, in
still looking hard, ambitious and arrogant. For a second, my
right arm
wanted to salute him. (I'd done my National Service, and you can take
the boy
out of the RAF but you can never take the RAF out of the boy.)
Woodward, as
Rex, looked right through me. Quite right. He was a squadron leader. I
was an
With authors, it's often names that help to create the character.
Rex was
perfect for the CO (we never know his first name). Before I could
begin Goshawk
Squadron I thought a lot about that CO's name, and until I
settled on
then there's Moggy Cattermole. I named him because he's lanky,
and it
helps if tall characters have long names. I knew someone at
school called
Cattermole, always nicknamed Moggy, and the combination seemed right
someone who is - as a
Which leads me to the Luis Cabrillo books, not so much lamb-into-tiger
as the
saga of Tell 'Em What They Want To Hear. It began with The Eldorado
inspired by the feats of a real double agent in WW2, codenamed Garbo.
He was
born in
Enter a man who sees the true worth of Luis. Graham Thorne, of
loved the classic Robinson opening paragraph, which brought me straight
the plot and made me want to know immediately what was going on. I also
the headlong twists and turns of the plot and the fact that, for ages,
I could
not figure out what on earth the map on the cover had to do with the
book I was
rapid-fire and amoral style in which the book is written seems to me to
perfectly what it would be like to know, and live with, Luis Cabrillo.
He has
immense charm and wit but also that whiff of danger - and
borderline lunacy - that makes us ordinary readers secretly
glad to
know him from a distance.
a joy to meet the gorgeous Stevie Fantoni again and a privilege to be
introduced to the Princess Chuckling Stream. Among the superb
supporting cast
of hoods and enforcers, I particularly liked the psychotic Vito
DiLazzari. He is the classic, indulged son of the tyrant,
so that he knows too much for his hereditary role -
instead of Hedgehog.
where now for Conroy and Cabrillo? I hope we hear more of them. For, as
gets older and that little bit slower, and as the world gets more
with less room for the maverick, then life for Luis will get steadily
tougher. Like a late Western, there is a great book to be written
about a
man running out of room, and Derek Robinson is the man to do it."
Well, time will tell. Are con artists an endangered
species? Recently,
an unemployed lorry-driver conned a property developer out of £1
million by
persuading him that the Savoy Hotel in
So: thanks to Graham, and to far-flung readers who recently
for books - Anders in Sweden, David in Malaysia, Matt in
Fred in Virginia, Christopher in Spain, Lars in Denmark, Blair in
and many more.
Readers Write #14 September 2010
Readers Write #15 October 2010
Snoopy dies again,
A quartet of Hurricanes,
And never enough Cake.
My thanks to all who wrote. Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
Readers Write #16 December 2010
Caesar's slave rides again,
Exploring the Canadian military,
and a double whammy from the US.
Hanging on the wall of my bathroom is a message I got in the mail when the series based on Piece of Cake was on television. I got quite a bit of hate mail then, but this one was a classic, being not only anonymous but also written in crayon and all in capitals. It said:HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED TAKING UP MORE SUITABLE EMPLOYMENT?
Not too subtle, perhaps, but I couldn't fault the writer for spelling or grammar, although a good editor might have queried the triple exclamation marks. I keep it on the wall for much the same reason that Roman emperors who were making a triumphal procession used to keep a slave standing behind them whose job was to whisper: 'Remember, Caesar, you are mortal.' In my case, the warning is: 'Remember, Robinson, some of the punters out there think your stuff is crap.'
And that's their
privilege. In the long run it's readers,
not authors, who decide whether or not a book makes the grade. I
mention this
because I get some very generous emails which may not be statistically
representative. Kieran in Buckinghamshire reckons that the RFC
trilogy is
'without doubt the best aerial combat books I have ever read'. From
Chris in
All that is on the plus side. I don't hear from readers who throw my book at the cat, say it's unreadable, and go down the pub instead. I don't hear from them because they're not going to waste a stamp on me, but I'm sure they exist. They probably won't read this, which is a pity because Chris Buckham, who is a major in the Canadian Armed Forces, found depths in the novels that surprised even me. He recommends that Junior Air Force Officers under his command should read them, and his analysis of Piece of Cake tells why:
'Dark humour underscores a theme throughout that speaks to the individual character's means of dealing with the realities of war. The strength of the book lies in its development of its characters and its insights into the human psyche. The Commanding Officers and Flight Commanders struggle with the changes that war brings in their relationships within the Squadron between themselves and the young line pilots. Conversely, the line pilots struggle themselves as they grapple with the deadliness of their chosen profession. Leadership strengths and weaknesses make themselves felt more keenly and shortfalls are quickly tolerated less or are forgiven. This novel captures the essence of the effects of combat on unit cohesion and command. It is stark and uncomfortable but it highlights lessons that are best learned and understood before the guns start firing.'
Which - as Chris points out - unfortunately doesn't always happen.
Finally, a double
whammy of praise in another unsuspected
place. John Sandford is an American novelist, much read on both
sides of
'The day was a nice one, the beginning of warmer weather, and the college girls were coming out of their winter cocoons, walking along with their form-fitting jeans and soft breast-clinging tops.
Maybe get a novel, Jake thought: he'd just read the first of a series of novels about British fliers during World War 1, by Derek Robinson, and was anxious to get another. And, of course, university bookstores were the most likely place to find his own books; like most authors, he always checked.'
(True. Jake finds a couple of his own books 'in what he thought was an obscure location', so he quietly reshelves them in a better spot. He also buys a copy of Goshawk Squadron.)
'With a sense of satisfaction, he walked across the street, got a bagel with cream cheese and sat on a bench in the sun and started reading about the Goshawks.'
Thanks, John. Always nice to get an unsolicited testimonial from someone in the same line of work.
My thanks to all who wrote. Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
Readers Write #17 January 2011
Bristle with pride,
The wide blue yonder in deepest Texas,
and hilarity from Surrey to Florida.
Back in the days
when I was fairly broke, I came up with a
spoof glossary of the
dialect in my home town,
spawned half a dozen sequels. Today,
forty years on, it's still in print; and
if I'm known for anything in
Which reminded me
of what happened ten years ago, when the
British Society of Paediatric Gastroenterologists, Hepatologists and
Nutritionists met in
Life is full of
surprises. I had heard that copies of A Good
Clean Fight, my SAS and RAF novel set in North Africa, found their
way to
US Marines serving in
A different kind of
surprise came from Joe in Austin, Texas, who
- having read most of my
books -
was "excited to find your website" and decided to
download Hullo Russia from
who supply Books On Tape. ("
Candidates for my Mile High Club keep appearing. Steve in Surrey, buying Red Rag Blues, says: "I've never read a book that even comes close to captivating me like yours do... I make a point of reading Piece of Cake at least once a year." And to prove it, he did something calculated to turn heads: "I laughed out loud on the train to work when I got to the point where Sticky reads out the cricket scores from the French radio truck." And there is similar laugh-aloud evidence from Edgewater, Florida, where Loraine writes that I'm her husband's favourite author, and she says, "I can always tell by the way he laughs that it is one of your books he's reading." (She bought Operation Bamboozle for him.) Alan in Wellington, New Zealand, bought Hullo Russia, having "recently done a mammoth re-read of all the RFC/RAF books and I loved them all over again." Penny,in Hertfordshire, a "big fan", wanted Hornet's Sting to complete her collection. And John in Portland, Oregon ("enjoyed many of your books very much") did the same.
My thanks to all who wrote. Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
Hornets in Yonkers,
Hilarity and brutality in New Zealand,
and Robinson-mania in the Netherlands.
may remember the report from a fan, deep in the American West, who
bought a springer spaniel pup, or it might have been a fox terrier, and
christened it 'Moggy', as a way of preserving the memory of that other
maverick creature, Flying Officer Moggy Cattermole in Piece of Cake.
(His girlfriend renamed the pooch to something she could shout in the
park without feeling embarrassed. Trapper, I think. Or
maybe Fang.
Now I hear from Jane, on
America's East Coast. She may qualify for my Double-Digit Club,
having read Goshawk Squadron
many times, and she adapts Woolley's
line: "Ah, bloody (insert name). I hate the bastard" when
she encounters bad drivers in up-State New York - and she
immediately feels better. Which just goes to show that fiction can be
powerful therapy.
More evidence of this from
an old friend, John Walsh (who actually lives in up-State New York).
He's teaching inner-city kids the basics of aviation by helping them
build model airplanes. As a way of developing a group allegiance, he
suggested they adopt a name, and so a dozen kids in Yonkers "call
themselves (very loud and very proud, by the way) Hornet
Squadron!". John is currently deep into my yarn of Hornet
Squadron, A Good Clean Fight,
for the third time. The book went with
him all through the second Iraq war and back, so it's no surprise that
the cover has fallen off.
Meanwhile, Tony in Nuneaton
put another of mine through its paces. He writes: "My copy of Kentucky
Blues has now been read by the whole family, including my
mother-in-law, who loved it as much as I did!" He bought copies
of Damned Good Show and Hullo Russia, Goodbye England. He
builds and
flies radio-controlled models and - perhaps inspired by
Goshawk Squadron -
decided to build an SE5a. Hendon air
museum let him take a close look at their RFC replicas. His
reaction: "Apart from the craftsmanship of it and all the other
aircraft, my overriding impression was of their frailty. Little
wonder the numbers shot down were far outweighed by accidents,
equipment failure and training." Too true. An excellent book on the
RFC, The First of the Few by Denis Winter (Allen Lane 1982) quotes the
official total of casualties at the end of the war: of 14,166 dead
pilots, 8,000 had died while training in the UK. No dual control
in those days. You were on your own, the first time you took
off. All too often it was your last.
They were young (18
or 19 was not uncommon) and the young laugh easily. So there was
humour to be found in every squadron - or, as Alan in New
Zealand sums up my war novels, "hilarious and brutal". Alan writes for
the Journal of the Wellington Science Fiction Society, but he casts his
net widely and it takes in non-sci-fi books as well. He's read
everything I've published and his review in the Journal of Hullo
Russia, Goodbye England - too long to print here in
full - is on http://tyke.net.nz
(go to 'wot i red' and then
go to February 2011). It's the first novel of mine to be set in a
time that he remembers. He was only a boy, but "I was nevertheless
strongly affected by the almost palpable sense of fear engendered by
the Cuban Missile Crisis. It seemed likely that the world I knew would
not be there when I woke up in the morning. If I woke up in the
And adds: "The thing that makes a Derek
Robinson novel stand out from all the others that surround it is his
impeccable understanding of history, his extraordinary ability to
re-live it in context through the eyes and minds of the people to whom
it is a contemporary happening, and the sharp, crackling and sometimes
breathtakingly cynical wit of his dialogue and of his observations; a
wit that is often laugh-out-loud funny but which makes you weep inside
even while you are laughing so very hard at the piercing truth of
it. Hullo Russia, Goodbye
England is a genuine tour de force."
arrives from elsewhere. Martin in SW6 has gone through all my books. He
read Hornet's Sting in the
office, "surreptitiously, almost under the
table" - even the most tolerant of offices might have
raised an eyebrow if he'd read it while completely under the
table. The image of the two Russian flyers in France, "playing
both the piano and poker fast and loose, demanding duels, has
remained with me for 10+ years." Now he's suffering what another
reader called 'withdrawal pains' and he asks urgently for "more needed
for the summer please!!" Well, I'm working on it, and I hope
something will appear in the summer, but - just as
Woolley predicted the war would be over by Christmas but which
Christmas he didn't know - I don't know which summer the
new book will be ready. I had a financial adviser called Lewis,
very good at his job, who used to ask me what I would earn next
year. I always said I hadn't the faintest idea, which caused his
brow to furrow. There are writerly types who crank out a novel a
year, fair weather or foul. If only. Goshawk Squadron took me
about nine months to write. (I was young and didn't know any better.)
Piece of Cake took four
years, and got derailed twice on the way.
Kentucky Blues was an idea
that refused to go away, but it took 25
years to germinate. How long will the new yarn take? As
long as it likes.
Paul in Deal discovered Piece of Cake
"when the children were young and to read half a chapter a night was an
achievement". Now they're off to University and he ordered
Hornet's Sting. Erwin in
Holland is one of my repeat offenders, having
read Cake for the 6th time.
He found a secondhand copy in the UK with
his girlfriend - now his wife - 20 years
ago. He's read all the rest ("wonderful books") and now
asked for Hullo Russia.
So did Joe,
three thousand miles to the west in Ramsey, New Jersey. He sends
thanks for my writing: "It puts me directly in a place in history I
never knew (I'm 30 years old), and is so rich and alive that I can
practically smell aircraft exhaust and fresh cut grass." Go back nearly
four thousand miles to the east, where Stian in Rogoland, Norway. wrote
his master's thesis on WW1 aviation and got "much enjoyment"
from Goshawk Squadron, so he
asked for the prequels, War Story and
Hornet's Sting. He served with the Norwegian Army, and says: "You
describe service culture quite well." Well, the military is the
military wherever you go. Streaking south by ten thousand miles
takes me to Steve in Te Anau, New Zealand. He found the same
satisfaction as Stian: "I'm ex-RAAF, so I could relate to the military
BS between squadron and upper echelon - it still goes on."
Of Goshawk Squadron he says:
"I couldn't put it down, really enjoyed
the banter between pilots and the black humour, interlaced with vivid
dogfight scenes." Zooming up to the USA and Michael in central
Indiana ("currently reading A
Good Clean Fight for the 10th
time") works in community theatre and would like to adapt my RFC
trilogy for the stage. I'm happy to give the project my
Finally, how about this...
the guy in the glasses and the slightly worried smile on the right. The
guy with the cheery grin is Bill Hitchings, confident that his camera
is doing its stuff. Bill flew from Melbourne (reading Damned Good Show
on the flight - "just as enthralling" as my other
books) and he dropped in for a cup of tea. Good to
meet him.
My thanks to all who wrote. Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
Going where no university dared,
Matching Woolley Guinness for Guinness,
and the Agony Aunt Flies Again.
sort of book is Goshawk Squadron?
One family read it and the
husband thought it was a great adventure, his wife found it a moving
love story, and their teenage son laughed his socks off. I think each
was right - it's a story of young men who fall in love when
they're not fighting for their lives, and make the blackest of jokes if
they survive.
As it was my first novel,
people sometimes ask me why I wrote it. Was it for the combat, or
the romance, or the humour? The answer is all of those and more. I
wrote it for the history. Nobody had written a brutally honest book
about the Royal Flying Corps and I wanted to fill the vacuum. I
wrote it for me, and if anyone else liked it, well, that would be
a bonus. Luckily for me, the bonus happened and Goshawk still
gets readers all over the world.
I realised
the wider truth about that vacuum when I saw a review by David
Aaronovitch of a book called 'Civilisation'
by Niall
Ferguson. One cause of the recent economic disaster, so
Ferguson claimed, was that few bankers knew anything about the 1929
Crash, and he blamed that failure on the last 30 years of
education. Aaronovitch shot that notion down in flames.
When he studied modern history at Oxford 35 years ago, he said, nothing
after 1914 was taught. He got Gladstone but not the Depression.
Same happened to me when I was studying history at Cambridge in the
Fifties. The biggest events of the century, the two World Wars, were
out of bounds. But they had influenced everyone's lives,
including mine, and they were exactly what I wanted to understand.
Later, when I could, I researched them. And wrote some books. My
fiction is based solidly on fact. The stories may be ripping yarns, but
they're also reliable history.
And if a reader prefers the yarn
to history, that's fine by me. Darren in New Zealand writes
that he gets unusual satisfaction from Goshawk. He "acquired a copy
25-odd years ago in a pub in South Wales after a bollox-freezing game
against some feral team from the valleys. I've carted that book around
ever since. To add a bit of realism to the story, every time Woolley
reaches for a Guinness, I do the same." The first chapter
is a bit of a challenge - Woolley sinks a few -
but "after that it's downhill all the way." Amazing.
impressive are the model-makers. Keith in Leeds bought a copy of
A Good Clean Fight. This
is a sequel to Cake,
and it
follows Fanny Barton and his Hornet Squadron in the Desert War, where
they fly the P40 Tomahawk. Keith plans to build scale models, and
asked my permission to use my initials as squadron recognition letters
on the planes. I'm flattered. And Peter in Nottingham
bought Cake and Hullo Russia, Goodbye England (he
describes himself as
"a complete Vulcan nerd - I've been in the cockpits of six
of the survivors"). He's a semi-pro in the model business
- he's sold a few of his WW2 tanks to film companies
- and, inspired by A Good
Clean Fight, he's not only built models
of the Tomahawk but also photographed them flying low over the
desert. Look closely and you might see the shark's teeth on the
nose. Very convincing.
next? I'm Stone Age Man when it comes to the more exotic workings
of the Internet, so the doings of Steve in Victoria, Oz, leave me
gasping. He bought Hornet's
Sting (thus completing his
trilogy) and told me that he and a group of like-minded
enthusiasts are "flying Rise of Flight (a WW1 flight sim) over the
Internet". Actually flying? "Check us out on Oceanic Wing ,"
Steve suggested, so I did. These guys recreate
WW1 aircraft (and others) that are so realistic that they can fly
(and fight) them. Astonishing. Their website also has a books
page with some enthusiastic remarks about my stuff, so they're
obviously well-read too.
A quick whizz through
other mail. Christine in Southampton was stumped for something to give
her ex-RAF dad on his 89th birthday, and then found that he'd read my
Damned Good Show and was
"completely blown away by how authentic and
realistic your book is". So she bought him a copy of Cake and one
of Hullo Russia.
Problem solved. Leon in Woking also
bought Hullo Russia,
and added that Cake "remains
for me the
perfect novel in terms of content, pace, characters, dialogue, depth,
everything!" and urges me to keep writing. Well, I do my
best. John in Japan bought an armful of books and asked:
"Why on earth hasn't War Story
been either made into a movie or
televised?" Good question. The movie/TV business is a total
mystery to me too. Howard in Santa Cruz, California, had the
initiative to email my new publisher and tell him that printed editions
of some of my books "are available only in the range of $100" and
he urged him to issue all my stuff as eBooks - which,
in fact, my publisher is now in the middle of setting up.
(100 bucks is a crazy price, brought about simply by the fact that some
books are scarce. At one stage, specialist book dealers were asking
over £200 for a used copy of Hornet's
Sting - which is why
I decided to self-publish it for a fraction of that price.) And finally
Steven, I don't know where, tells me that years ago he bought A Good
Clean Fight, couldn't get into it, threw it down in disgust (too
to appreciate it, he thinks), picked it up later and loved
it - especially the relationship between
Schramm and Maria Grandinetti. As a result, he says: "I've always
promised myself, in the event of a lady deciding to 'love me for five
minutes', to take the bull by the horns." Go for it, Steve.
You never know. Five minutes could last a lifetime.
My thanks to all who wrote.
Return to
The roller-coaster of books,
Shock-horror at MGM,
and mobilising the mental juices.
Computers get a bit of
stick nowadays for what they do to
reading and writing - everyone is stuck to the
screen, so
it's said, and nobody writes a real letter any more. But there's
angle. The Internet has been good for books (if not for
bookshops). Peter
in Toronto tells me that, 19 years ago, "My father introduced me to Goshawk
Squadron when I was 13" (a round of applause for fathers like
"but I only just started reading your other novels, obtained secondhand
over the 'Net, as most seem to be out of print." Too true, but
leaning on my publisher to revive them. Peter ordered copies of Hornet's
Sting and Hullo
Meanwhile, a longtime fan, David in Malaysia, tipped me off to something my publisher had failed to tell me, which is that their reissue of Piece of Cake and Hullo Russia, Goodbye England has been postponed from this October to next February. There's a reason: the designer we had lined up to create the new covers dropped out and so we're starting from scratch. Book covers are what the Promotion Department needs in order to do their job. One bit of good news: you can now get (if that's your taste) my RFC trilogy (War Story, Hornet's Sting, Goshawk Squadron) as e-books on Amazon/Kindle. Swings and roundabouts. Or snakes and ladders. Maybe ham and eggs. Take your pick.
The moral of the story, I suppose, is to soldier on and hope the good and the bad luck even out. Take the case of the American Hugh Martin, a nice guy and a talented lyricist and composer. He died a few months ago, aged 96. During the Second World War he co-wrote several hits, including a number called The Trolley Song ('Clang, clang, clang went the trolley, Ding, ding, ding went the bell, Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings. From the moment I saw you, I fell...') which, if you're one of the younger fellahs, you may never have heard. But in 1944 Judy Garland belted it out in the movie Meet Me in St Louis, and it helped make her a star.
Hugh Martin kept
working and in 1957 he had another
hit. Bear in mind that by 1957 the world looked a grim and gloomy
The Korean War had ended in stalemate. Nuclear tests were exploding in
parts. The Soviet Union had the first satellites circling the globe,
Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
It may be your last,
Next year we may all be living in the past.
The studio turned it down flat. Bittersweet and nostalgic they might accept, they said, but not a dirge. Martin got to work and rewrote the last two lines:
Let your heart be light;
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.
And of course
Martin lived to see his song become as
immortal as anything can be in showbiz. Was he sorry to lose the
which he felt had expressed the world in 1957? Probably.
But he was
a professional. He was in the entertainment business. So am I.
First and
foremost, I write novels that entertain. If they also take the
somewhere he might never otherwise have gone, and make him think
little - what the film director Sidnet Lumet
"stimulating thought and setting the mental juices flowing
" - well, that's a bonus. Lumet managed it
such fine movies as Twelve Angry Men, Network and Dog Day
Afternoon. Whether I manage it is entirely up to the
reader, but I'm
encouraged when I hear from Peter in Portishead (the town, not the
band) who
first read Goshawk Squadron as a boy, "while hunkered
the bedclothes with a torch." Since then it's been with him in
first Gulf War,
Readers Write #21 October 2011
Literary lions stumble,
Confessions of an invisible man,
And explosions of brilliance in Dublin
Why do writers
write? I ask because Bud, in
And a different
author. I'm not the same scribbler I
was twenty, thirty years ago, and what may seem worth exploring
now was
unknown territory then. As someone once said: How do I know what
I think
until I see what I've said? Except that, in my case, I
often don't
know what I've said until you, the reader, points it out to me.
novel is a gamble, and even the best writers stumble, once in a while.
Louis Stevenson and P.G.Wodehouse - two names you rarely
see in the
same sentence - each wrote a stinker or two. They
must have
thought the yarns were a good idea at the time. (Nobody sits down
thinks: I'll waste a year or two on a real turkey.)
But the
end product was a big mistake. OK, if you insist, I'll tell you
titles: Stevenson's Catriona (poor sequel to Kidnapped; David
Balfour falls in love with the childish Catriona who, as Stevenson
admitted, is
"as virginal as billy-ho!") and
Back to the beginning. Why do writers write? Bill, somewhere in the US, came across Piece of Cake in the library of the US Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia, enjoyed it immensely, cruised through my RFC and RAF series and, he says, "to some modest degree, they shaped the man I am today." He's seen life: after the Navy he became a paramedic and a firefighter. He adds that "Frankly, after my father, you and Bernard Cornwell have been my biggest and most positive role models." I was startled. I take what you said as a compliment, Bill, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable being a role model. After all, I'm the invisible man in the room. I just tell the story and let the reader make what he likes of it. Two characters I've invented - Stanley Woolley in Goshawk Squadron and Moggy Cattermole in Cake - are not the sort of men you'd want your daughter to marry. Yet they score strongly with readers. I don't know where I found them. Sometimes I think the door was left open and they wandered in. That's how Skull arrived in Cake (and other books). They're all lucky accidents. But role models?
It's easy to say why writers don't write. Not for the money. Writing novels is a precarious business. The Inland Revenue taxes me by estimating what it reckons I'll earn next year, which is total guesswork based on what I made last year. Like most freelance writers, my income goes up and down like a roller-coaster, so the Revenue get it wrong as often as right. If you want steady money, I'd recommend a career as a chartered accountant.
What about
fame? It's not much of a reward. It
certainly won't pay for the groceries. A good review in the newspapers
is very
welcome, as long as you remember that it'll wrap tomorrow's fish and
Fame is fleeting, and so are novels. Nearly all the heavyweight
bestselling authors who dominated the fiction lists when I was a boy
are out of
print now and largely forgotten. Will my stuff be around fifty years
now? Do I care? Not much. I'm not writing for posterity (it
did me anything for me). And look at what happened to J.M.Synge, who
wrote The
Playboy of the Western World. The play's opening night, in
Synge's crime was
to write a play without Irish
Quick round-up of
my mail. Jim in
And Ben, now in his final year at school, having not only read my RFC trilogy but also got his mother and mother to read it - "an achievement of sorts" - is writing a 5,000-word project as an A-Level extension. His subject: Hitler's Operation Sealion and the truth about the role of Fighter Command in the non-invasion of 1940.....a topic I've looked at in my Invasion 1940. Meaty stuff.
My thanks to all who wrote.
Derek Robinson Return to HomepageReaders Write #22 January 2012
Ice cold
a Goshawk
with clipped wings,
and no
good deed goes
The Royal Flying Corps is almost a hundred
years old. A reader of my RFC trilogy today is in a comparable position
someone in 1912 who was reading about the
Somewhat north of
Perhaps. But if Sealion had sailed in a
flat calm, the Royal Navy was ready and waiting.
Europeans are often so fluent in English
that they put us Brits to shame, and Boris in Frankenburg,
Leap ten thousand miles to the south-east
(which of course is no barrier to the Internet) and Liz in
Now jump another few thousand miles to
One thing is definite. I shan't be doing any business in all of February 2012. The shop will be shut while the computer gets thoroughly overhauled, oiled and polished. So - please save your emails for March.
My thanks to
all who wrote.
Derek Robinson
A curtain-call for extras,
gunplay in the bathroom,
and laughing fit to bust
The folk-singer Fred Wedlock, now alas no longer with us, once told me the secret of how to create a statue of a horse. "Get a big block of stone," he said, "and hack off everything that doesn't look like horse." There are days when writing feels like making that statue, except that the chisel is blunt and the mallet has a handle made of rubber.
That's when I
reach for my omnibus edition of Raymond
Chandler's novels, partly for the pleasure of seeing a champion in
partly to remind myself that he had his bad days too, and partly to
that what matters (especially in a crime story) are the extras, the
characters whom Chandler crafted so beautifully. In The Lady
in the
Lake, he has a scene where his private eye Philip Marlowe visits
Graysons, a retired couple who can probably provide some
'Grayson was a long stooped yellow-faced man with high shoulders, bristly eyebrows and almost no chin. The upper part of his face meant business. The lower part was just saying goodbye. He wore bifocals and had been gnawing fretfully at the evening paper.'
There is another link.
It goes back to long ago, when Hamish
Hamilton was publishing The Eldorado Network. By good
fortune, Roger
Machell was my editor - and Roger had also been
Chandler's editor for his British editions. He told me that one day his
rang and it was Chandler, calling from his home in La Jolla,
California, and
obviously very drunk. "I'm going to shoot myself," he said.
Roger, thinking fast, said, "Don't do that, Raymond. Let's talk about
it..." He heard two loud bangs. Then silence. Roger phoned the La Jolla
police, they hurried over and found
End of anecdote. But
what interested me was that when
Thanks to the Internet,
I get echoes of what I write in
emails from readers all over the globe. Of course praise is
(There is no limit to the flattery an author can absorb.) Bill,
in the
John in
Then - surprise, surprise - a letter from Guy, a very old pal (we were at college together, back in the Middle Ages). Recovering from a rather nasty illness, he had time to re-read my flying stories - 'Once again I was totally engrossed among the vivid characters. Their persuasive arguments and caustic banter make them so alive and such good company.' Enter his wife, to give him a copy of my non-fiction book, Invasion. 1940, and he says 'to my astonishment I was so hooked by the reasoning that I finished the whole of it before returning to the interrupted novel.' Well, I worked hard to make that slice of history as readable as any work of fiction, and I'm glad it paid off. Guy spent his National Service on a Motor Torpedo Boat, dashing up and down the Channel, so he has personal knowledge of those hazardous waters.
I'm delighted to hear that Guy's gremlins have been zapped. On the other hand, maybe the Luis Cabrillo quartet should have a health warning on the cover. L.L in New York 'picked up Red Rag Blues, ran across Cabrillo, the Fantonis and Chick Scatola (Mafiosi of varying competence) and began laughing so hard' that he ended up in hospital - although it's only fair to add that he was already suffering from a deep chest cold, so maybe Luis Cabrillo's con-artist doings simply hastened the doctor's decision. Anyway, I sent L.L. a copy of the sequel, Operation Bamboozle and he replied with thanks, saying: 'I look forward to reading BAMBOOZLE with a pacemaker handy.' Both books were fun to write, and I'm glad they're fun to read.
My thanks to all who wrote, and to the many who sent me birthday greetings on Facebook - too many for me to answer.Derek Robinson Previous Readers Write
Black Eyes,
And Other Occupational Hazards
are readers, too. At least, some are. I've known book
reviewers who, pressed for time, just read the publisher's blurb on the
back cover. Othere, with a little more time, glanced at every
third page of the book, which they reckoned was enough to give
them a feeling of whether or not it was any good. They have my
sympathy. I've done their job myself, and it's a daunting
prospect when you get given four or five thick books, all to be
reviewed by next Tuesday.
why I value the advice of the best literary agent I ever had, the late
George Greenfield. "Don't read your reviews," George said. "Measure
them." Size equals impact.
I did read them, if only to spot the mistakes. I remember a
rather sniffy (but quite large) review of A Good Clean Fight
by a man whom I knew to be an academic. He ended his piece by
saying that I was shaky on jargon in the Desert Air Force, and
that "the knowing reader" (meaning himself) "waits in vain for the
squadron's Kittyhawks to be identified as 'Tommy Dodds'." Well, I
research my books pretty thoroughly. I wrote and told him I'd
never come across this nickname, so what was his source?
apologised. He'd got it wrong. He had looked in The Concise Dictionary
of Slang and Unconventional Usage and he'd misread the entry. It
happens. I chalked it up to experience.
who get steamed-up by bad reviews are like actors who storm about bad
notices - too sensitive. After all, it's only one
man's or woman's opinion, and (as I've often said) no book is for
everybody. My first novel, Goshawk Squadron, got
some good reviews and some very bad ones. A respected writer in an
eminent magazine read Goshawk and his review advised me to
quit now and find a better job, such as digging ditches. My local radio
station asked Alan Gibson to review the book. He'd won a Double
First at
away Woolley and the book vanishes. If Woolley had been simply a
four-letter word, he would be shallow and tedious, and the book
wouldn't be worth reading, then or now. Yet, in
the years since Alan's review, there have been at least six
editions of Goshawk Squadron and several
translations. MacLehose Press will bring out a new edition later this
on from Goshawk Squadron to Piece of Cake. It was
widely reviewed in
characters are not much more than his historical revelations," he
wrote. "The cast consists of cliches." And he spelled out what he
most disliked: the pilots are "virtual subversives and
delinquents, sarcastic wits skilled at insubordination, drunken,
sadistic, nutty, scared to death, welcoming as an inestimable
benefaction every day clouded over and unfit for flying." Not the
book I remembered writing. And his account was odd, because
later Fussell found fault with the way I 'romanticized' the squadron:
"No group of pilots could be so charmingly intelligent and verbal, so
gifted at Noel Coward repartee..."
puzzled me that Fussell could wish to have it both ways, finding the
pilots so repellent yet so charming.And my guess is that one reason why
Piece of Cake has been reprinted so often, and is now
reissued by MacLehose Press, is that Fussell totally misunderstood the
book. Readers like the characters he hated; they even like
dodgy types like Moggy Cattermole. They enjoy the humour. Former
RAF aircrew tell me that the dialogue is convincing, that
aircrew banter was very like mine (and still is). As a
history of the first year of WW2 in the air, the book is accurate and
authentic, but what brings readers to return to it again and again is
their recognition of the characters, of their enjoyment of life and the
abrupt fact of their death.
Fussell's review was a long time ago, and now he too has died, on 23
May 2012, aged 88, an acclaimed literary scholar. In 1944 he fought
with the
coincidence, as I was writing this column, an email arrived from
an old fan, Martin in the
Thanks also to Robert in Texas, Max in East
Sussex, John in Edinburgh, Chris in West Australia, Jonathan in Surrey,
and Sam in Devon - and to everyone who wrote.
Stooging down The Mall,
Strafing the literary festivals,
and Moggy on the analyst's couch.
Readers Write #26 September 2012
No Bananas,
radiant seagulls,
and stoked in the USA.
In my last RW, I took a poke at literary festivals and how they distract writers from the business of writing, so this time I'll have a go at mega-hyper-super-bestsellers. Friends - intrigued by the soaring runaway sales of the Grey trilogy - have asked me how I feel about it. Depressed? (Why not my book?) Elated? (Bookshops full of punters.) Astonished? (Nobody saw it coming.) None of the above.
Freaks happen. Back in the 1930s, someone wrote a song called Yes, We Have No Bananas. It swept the country. People were singing it everywhere Music publishers must have looked at each other and said 'No Bananas is a hit? World's gone crazy.' Well, every now and then it does go crazy, and publishing is no exception, especially when word-of-mouth gets into the act. Many years ago, a New York publisher put out a novel called Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. Without enthusiasm, and with no hopes of making a dollar from it, because the story was about a bored seagull who seeks perfection in flight and finds wisdom, together with two other radiant and loving seagulls. Well, somebody liked it, told his friends, and the rest is history. Also economics, because Seagull not only topped the New York Times Best Seller List, for two years it was the best-selling book in the USA. It became a movie. (Neil Diamond sang the songs.) Critics panned the book - one said that, by comparison, The Little Engine That Could was 'a work of some depth and ambition' - but who cared? It was everywhere. It was a freak. These things happen.
In fact they've been happening ever since the 1890s, when publishing stopped grinding out three-volume sagas to amuse the rich and idle and began offering cheap fiction to the masses. The sales of Mrs James's Grey trilogy aren't particularly huge, compared with the scores racked up by the literary giants of Edwardian times and the years between the wars. When Edgar Wallace was going strong, it was reckoned that, apart from the Bible, one in four books bought in England was an Edgar Wallace thriller. Ethel M.Dell, the Mills & Boon of her day, almost matched him. But for really big money and colossal ego, nobody got near Marie Corelli. In the 1900s, her novels earned her (in modern money) a million pounds a year, and she had the longest entry in Who's Who. She lived at Stratford-on-Avon in a style that makes our own dear Barbara Cartland seem like a shrinking violet. Marie had a coach pulled by two Shetland Ponies, in which she progressed around Stratford every day, with the coachman perched above and behind . Her Venetian gondola took her on the Avon, with a genuine Italian steering it. Why not? The eggheads said her books were sentimental junk, but she claimed to be the most widely read writer, in English and in translation, in the world. And she probably was.
But not forever. In 1908, Hall Caine's novel was (he said) the first to sell a million copies in Britain; and then came Nat Gould's prodigious output - 130 novels, all about horse-racing. By 1927 he'd sold 24 million copies and was still going strong. Corelli had fame, but Nat had more readers. So where does the Grey trilogy slot into this pantheon? Modestly, when you look at (for example) Terry Pratchett's 45 million sales - and he's just one of many in the record books. Thomas the Tank Engine has sold 200 million copies. So has Enid Blyton's Noddy. Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books have reached 300 million. J.K.Rowling's Harry Potter series tips the scale at 450 million. Vast forests have been felled to make the paper for these blockbusters. So why don't I feel jealous? Two reasons.
One reason is that those authors did things their way, and I do mine my way. I can't crank out a book a year. It takes me two or three, sometimes four or five years to write a book. The other reason is that I have different expectations. I don't aim for the bestseller market (although I'd be happy if it happened). I aim to put all that blood, sweat and ink into writing a book that will stick around for ten or twenty years. The readers who are willing to pay good money for my stuff are probably a minority - a discerning and demanding minority, but too few to generate sales in the millions. Part of my reward is knowing that Goshawk Squadron, for example, is still in print, forty years on. (MacLehose Press's reissue will appear in January 2013.) I hold nothing against Mrs James and the ballistic sales of her Grey books. Good luck to her, especially as a big chunk of the income will go to H.M. Treasury. Meanwhile, I take pleasure in the kind of email that money can't buy, from a fan in Fairfax, Virginia.
Fred, who is one of the discerning and demanding minority, "drifted
back" to my website "after a long absence" and, he says, "I'm glad I
did. I am stoked, stoked about A Splendid Little War. I
am assuming that some of our friends from the RFC trilogy will
appear." Not many, Fred. The year is 1919, and very few of
my RFC characters survived what was known as the Great War. But 'the
whiff of battiness and brimstone' (in the words of one reviewer)
is still there.
Fred being in the U.S., I regret to say that the American edition of Splendid will not appear when the book is published here and in the rest of the English-speaking world, in January 2013. MacLehose Press/Quercus are still sorting out their relationship with North America. You'll know the outcome when I do. Incidentally, Fred's refreshingly new adjective, stoked, is surely one to note. My guess is that it means 'over the moon'. I look forward to its appearance on this side of the Atlantic.
From the opposite side of the globe, Liam in Darwin, Australia sends a short but bracing note. He teaches history. One of his 10th grade students was reluctant to read books of any kind, so Liam gave him War Story, my yarn of the RFC in 1916. "He is powering through it and enjoying it immensely," Liam says. Liam and other teachers "plan to use some historical fiction as sources when we teach WW2." And already, Piece of Cake is going down well at the school. Brilliant idea.
My thanks to all who wrote.
Readers Write #27 October 2012
Peregrine Delancey gets his comeuppance,
boos and cheers for HRGE,
and barnstorming over Winsconsin.
I live close by a large university, and if I'm driving past it when the lectures end and the streets are suddenly flooded with students, I have learned to avoid the deaf and the blind. These are students wandering across the road, with an i-pod in an ear, a bottle of water in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. They are texting the entire world, oblivious to traffic and obsessed with junk. That's just my opinion, of course; but I wonder whether any text message is worth the risk of getting turned into strawberry jam. Especially when you consider the damage already being done to the English language by the galloping impatience of text talk. If enough people go on texting 'u', will the day come when they don't know whether it's spelt 'you' or 'yew'? Good English matters. It can make a big difference to anyone writing to impress as well as to inform. If you don't know the difference between 'discreet' and 'discrete', or between 'affect' and 'effect', or between 'exercise' and 'exorcise', you run the danger of looking like a total moppet instead of the hot stuff you're trying to be.
I mention this because I've just had a letter from a firm of private bankers. I'll call them Peregrine Delancey because that's not their real name - which sounds as if they're waiting to be knighted, and so does Peregrine Delancey. (If there really is a Peregrine Delancey out there, I apologise in advance.)
P.D. made me an interesting offer. They would manage my wealth and take a minimum fee of only £1,250 a year. Now, the writing game is precarious (today, steak and chips; tomorrow, bread and cheese), and by sheer bad luck I not only have no loose wealth but also no spare £1,250. Still, it was nice of P.D. to offer. Then I reached para 3 of their letter, where they talk about 'principle partners', and suddenly their letter turned to ashes in my hands.
'Principle partners' is gibberish. All partners in any bank have principles; it's what keeps them out of jail. What Peregrine Delancey meant was 'principal partners'. Simple mistake - but a bank that plays fast and loose with the English language is never going to gets its hands on my wealth, if I ever have any. That letter was worse than a waste; it was a reason not to trust them. It was an unbusiness letter. Good English matters.
OK. End of pontification. On to readers write. Bad English is about the only thing that Paul (somewhere in UK) didn't find wrong with Hullo Russia, Goodbye England. He felt that I skimmed the surface of the Cold War, produced characters who are two-dimensional and glib, and treated the real issues in a way that was almost meaningless. Also, I made a poor job of explaining the workings of the Vulcan bomber, the book is too short, and in general it descended to the level of juvenile fiction such a Biggles. He's an 'avid lover' of my other stuff, but he rates HRGE as a dud, and hopes I'll do better next time.
This was a comprehensive demolition, and it proves a point I've often made, which is that no book is for everybody. That (and a lot more) is what I said in my reply to him. I mentioned that some readers, including ex-Vulcan aircrew, enjoyed HRGE very much; but I can't, and don't, hope to please everyone. I talked about an old friend who told me that Goshawk Squadron would be a much better story if only I would get rid of that bloody awful Major Woolley. And Paul replied to say that Woolley is 'probably my favourite character', and maybe if he (Paul) had read the prequel to HRGE, Damned Good Show - which introduces Silko - then he might have felt differently about the book. Turns out that Paul is a playwright. (We wordsmiths have strong feelings about stuff.) We parted company amiably. He looks forward to A Splendid Little War, out soon. Will he like it or loathe it? Every book is a gamble.
Then I got a 'quick note of appreciation for HRGE' from Gareth, here in the UK, who 'just finished the ebook and enjoyed it immensely'. He declares an interest: his father, a Vulcan pilot, was actually sitting in one of the QRA Vulcans, ready for action, during the Cuban missile crisis. His dad - who, at 85, plays three rounds of golf a week - has no doubt that he would have 'actually pressed the button over Moscow', because he would have known that all his family, in married quarters near the runway, would be dead from a Soviet first strike. Makes you think.
The madness of Mutual Assured Destruction is at the heart of HRGE, and yet there is comedy too. Gareth writes: 'I am pleased that you managed to reflect some of the humour of the pilots. My recollection (as a small boy) was that they were always laughing.' The novel mentions the black eye patches issued to pilots, to protect one eye if the other was blinded by a nuclear flash. 'Very glad you got the eye patches into the narrative,' Gareth adds. 'I can recall finding one of these and my father telling me that it was for a Captain Hook fancy dress costume he was going to wear to the mess!'
Martin in London has already pre-booked a copy of A Splendid Little War - and 'pre-booked a day off in early January to read it from cover to cover'. And says 'I love the front cover', which is on view on the Quercus website. And an old pal, John in New York State, tells me that he was in Iowa recently, flying a 1934 Aeronca C-3. 'Cows disturbed, probably made butter, and horses none too happy with the thought of a plane that's about 80 years old buzzing just overhead at 500 ft.' Here's what the Aeronca looks like on the ground. Sporty little model.
John can fly almost anything. In the summer he joined 'a barnstorming tour of the MidWest along with 14 other guys in planes from 1928-1933 (I got to fly a 1932 Fairchild 22)' which they flew 'in our own little dawn patrol over the trenches of Wisconsin'. When he's not flying, John is expert at carving propellers for RFC replicas; right now he's working on four props (birch) for Sopwith Snipes and two (mahogany) for Sopwith Pups. During the barnstorming, someone stole his copy of Piece of Cake (I don't think he travels anywhere without it). 'So please tell the powers that be to get off their asses (or fingers out) and make it available in the U.S. sooner rather than later.' I keep poking Quercus in the ribs, John.
Cue Garth in Manhattan, who keeps re-reading Cake and A Good Clean Fight, and has a couple of questions. (1) 'How did Baggy Bletchley survive being strafed on the bog (while trapped by his knackers) in Piece of Cake? Re-reading the sequence I can see it's just barely possible, but the mobile lavatory is described as being bowled over and over by German fire. (2) There's a scene in AGCF where Pip Patterson breaks down while remembering an old pal, a guy who saved his life and was such a good pilot Pip was certain the Germans would never get him. Then, of course, they did. Fanny Barton listens quietly, he's seen this again and again.....Once, the narrative tells us, it had even happened to him. So what I'm wondering is, is Fanny thinking about the ultimate fate of CH3?'
My answer to question one is simple. Baggy Bletchley's predicament is based on a true story, involving the master of a freighter, caught with his pants down in a rolling sea; and Baggy survives the attack because, after a quick strafe, any lowflying Me109 would seek out more rewarding targets on an airfield. And air commodores are tougher than they look. Question two sent me to page 264 of AGCF, where Pip's sad memories and Fanny Barton's thought occur. Bear in mind that all this takes place in the spring of 1942. Who knows what has happened to Fanny in the 18 months since the Battle of Britain? Almost certainly, he has known good pilots who got the chop. Maybe he was thinking of CH3. Seven American pilots flew in the Battle and six were killed in action afterwards. The final lines of Cake describe Barton and CH3 emptying their guns on German bombers. After that, anything was possible.
To close, a word about stoked, which cropped up in my last RW when an American reader used it to express his large enthusiasm for the coming publication of ASLW. I wondered at the strangeness of this adjective. Now, a kind and anonymous pal tells me that 'stoked' began life in Southern California, where surfers and skateboarders use it as shorthand for saying they're completely and intensely enthusiastic, exhilarated or excited about something. For example: "I'm stoked about going to California!" The word has reached the East Coast, so it should appear in the UK soon. Tell me if you hear it.
My thanks to all who wrote.
Halley's Comet strikes again,
The high price of Norwegian literacy,
and 'stoked' spans the globe.
A Splendid Little War is out, and the Daily Express gives it 5 stars (for full
review, click here). The launch took me to a gathering of booksellers the other
night. (What is the collective noun? A volume of booksellers? A sequence? A
binding?) I made a very brief speech, just four minutes - there was food and
drink waiting - about how and why I wrote ASLW. The novel tells the story of an
R.A.F. squadron during the Intervention in
It seems I was slightly wrong. This happens as rarely as a visit by Halley's Comet, but when it does I'm willing to admit it.
Mike, having been 'thoroughly entertained by ASLW, writes that it reminded him that 'I studied the conflict between the White and the Red Russians when at school'. (Sounds like a better school than mine, where the history syllabus said nothing much happened after the Boer War.) Mike goes on: 'I found it fascinating then, but was not old enough to understand the wider implications which come to life so well in ASLW.'
Steve also enjoyed ASLW, in his case all the more so because back in the 1980s he'd read a John Harris novel, aimed at teenagers, all about the Intervention. It was called The Interceptors, and its cover showed a Camel flying low over a line of cavalry. (The book must be pretty rare today - a used copy costs £45 on the Internet.) Steve especially enjoyed ASLW for 'the way you've blended real and imagined events', and he got 'a real sense of what life was like for those men (and one woman!)'. Which is what a novel should do: take the reader somewhere he would otherwise never go.
Speaking of money, my eyebrows jumped an
inch when Jon Gunnar in
Just across the Baltic, Erwin in the
Down in
Graham in the
Something that several people mention is their pleasure at coming across familar faces in ASLW, meaning Lacey (the former Orderly Room corporal) and Brazier (the adjutant). They first appeared in War Story and then played a larger part in Hornet's Sting. Lacey, the least warlike man in the books, believes that war may be hell but that's no reason why the squadron shouldn't live in black-market luxury. Brazier is the opposite: a warhorse who breathes fire and reads King's Regulations for pleasure. I've enjoyed their contribution to three novels. Who knows? They may live again in a fourth.
A last word about 'stoking'. We traced the
origin of this cheerful adjective to the beach boys of
My thanks to all who wrote. Derek Robinson Return to Homepage
Readers Write #29 March 2013My thanks to all who wrote. Derek Robinson
Lucky, lucky
Charles Dash,
Rolling a Tiger,
and the truth about
Deflection Shooting.
April was a good month. Maybe newspaper editors have a soft spot for authors who hit eighty with the pen still in their hands. Anyway. The Times book section gave Goshawk Squadron (plus all my flying novels) a half-page review, with a photograph that also shows, hanging on the wall, a soft-focus picture of one of the Spitfires used in filming Piece of Cake. (To read the review, click on the link in the panel above.)
Meanwhile, a message arrived by cleft stick from Matthew, who lives not a thousand miles from me. Having read Goshawk Squadron years ago, he took the plunge and read War Story and Hornet's Sting. (All my RFC/RAF books are now available as MacLehose Press paperbacks.) 'Great stuff,' Matthew writes. 'Best novels I've read for years. I gave a copy of Hornet's Sting
to a chum who used to command 2/2 squadron of the SAS and he called me to say he'd finished it quicker than he had a book for years, and praised in particular the pre/post fighting atmosphere.'
Then Matthew raised a question that gets to the very heart of Hornet's Sting. 'Who shagged Dash?' he asked. Most queries from readers are about the horsepower of the Sopwith Pup, or the whereabouts of St Oscar's, an alleged public school where Woolley claimed to have been educated. (He lied. Saint Oscar never existed.) Now Matthew went straight to the nub of chapter 3. Charles Dash was a young RFC pilot who, on horseback, got lost in a snowstorm as night fell. He found himself at a nunnery, empty of nuns but occuped by six stunningly beautiful members of F.A.N.Y., the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. They gave him a hot bath and a delicious supper and a bed for the night, during which some kind lady entered his room and relieved him of his virginity. Perhaps two kind ladies, hard to tell when everything was totally black. All he knew for certain was that she was, or they were, either Chloe Legge-Barrington, Edith Reynolds, Laura da Silva, Nancy Hicks-Potter, Jane Brackenden, or Lucy Knight. Later, he returned to the nunnery and was similarly rewarded; but by whom? And when he planned a third visit, they'd all gone. Moved on. War is hell.
Now you know as much as I do. Chloe, Edith, Laura, Nancy, Jane, or Lucy? You decide. I just tell the story. Nobody said the author had to know everything.
one of your RFC or RAF novels would learn as much (if not
more!) about the experience of the past than from reading just a dry history
textbook' - a point that some teenagers (and even their
teachers) have made in the past. Paraag is working on an RFC novel,
avoiding my style and seeking his own: a wise choice. I wish him
well. Another longtime fan, Jan in
I'd heard that the Tiger is a delight to fly but somewhat lethal if you try to roll it, and Jan confirmed this. He gave step-by-step instructions for attempting to roll the aircraft, including the possible disastrous conclusion, but added: 'Having said that, I have been in a Tiger with a guy that did everything. Slow rolls, barrel rolls, loops, Immelmann's and even a slight tail slide and stall turn. But then there are pilots and weekend warriors. You need to know which tribe you belong to and stick with it.' Good advice.
Finally: I came across an old letter from Ernest (I
know not where) who said good things about my books and urged me to keep
going, which was rewarding since it came from a man who had flown
Hurricanes, Spitfires and even the Me-109 ('an uncomfortable gadget, designed
for nasty midgets,' he said, 'which changed its response from agile to
impossible to handle, depending on the flight envelope. I loathed it.') He
wrote that he didn't understand 'why people describe deflection shooting as
aiming in front. If you do that, you miss behind; you have to swing the
gun/aircraft/tennis racket/golfclub through from behind, fire when you
pass the target and keep swinging, on pheasant, grouse, ME's and golfballs. You
brush the target out of the air. Aiming with the gunsight means you lose the
enemy.' There you have it, from one who has been at the sharp end.
My thanks to all who wrote.
Derek Robinson Previous Readers Write
Call me Lance, dear, you can trust me,
News from Nowhere: a Blast from the Past,
and a poke in the chops in total silence.
Moggy Cattermole continues to intrigue readers. A squadron leader
who actually did lead a squadron in the Battle of Britain summed him up very
well: "Bad for discipline but good for morale. Every squadron
should have one - but only one." Now Hugh, who
says he's enjoyed all my books and was happy to find A Splendid Little War
in e-book form (he was in
David, an old pal (
A word about readers' emails. Writing novels is an odd job.
For two years, maybe more, nobody sees the story but me. Then it's
published and vanishes. Who's reading it? Where? Is anybody reading it? What do
they think? Often, the Internet answers. The other day I got this
brief email from Rob, a Scottish librarian: 'I am delighted you have finally a
deal which enabled your novels to be restocked by our libraries. At the moment
I have 5 out on loan which makes me happy as a pig in shit'
- news that I found both encouraging and refreshing: three
cheers for Scottish librarians! Phil in
That same week came an e-mail from Joseph in
(Pity about the cigarette. I'm a non-smoker, and so is everyone in my novels.) Today, Joe is re-reading the trilogy, discovering things he'd forgotten or never realised. What struck him was that Mackenzie and Woolley first appear in Hornet's Sting; Mackenzie is killed.and Woolley mentions his loss at the start of Goshawk Squadron - which I wrote umpteen years before Hornet's Sting. And that leads Joe to suggest that 'you must have had the entire RFC Trilogy sketched out in your mind before you wrote the first line of Goshawk Squadron.' It's a nice thought, Joe, but the truth is I wrote Goshawk with no idea of sequels or prequels. All that came much later, out of the blue. A quick note from Chris: having just read Goshawk and Sting, 'I am trying not to start reading War Story immediately. I suspect I won't succeed.' Go ahead, Chris. Give in.
Then came an e-mail from Jim and his wife in
I know the wiped feeling, because Gerry has sent me this
uppercut of an e-mail: 'Hullo, Mr Robinson. I have just read your
excellent book, Invasion 1940. One error in it. You stated that
Bomber Command wireless operators tested their equipment before take-off.
Not true. Radio silence was strictly maintained. How do I know? I was
one.' Wham!
Gerry and I exchanged notes, and I found that he served on 75NZ Squadron, largely manned by Kiwis (although Gerry is English), and highly respected for its 'press on regardless' attitude. Not surprisingly, it was also known as 'the chop squadron' - in all of Bomber Command, it suffered the second-highest casualties. Bomber Command was a huge organisation and the question of radio silence is equally big. R.V.Jones, one of the most brilliant boffins in WW2, wrote that, in his experience, Bomber Command (and indeed USAAF) was 'appallingly indiscreet in its use of radio transmissions'. A lot of bombers, he says, flew with their I.F.F. (Identification Friend or Foe) transmitting, and German fighters detected this signal. And Max Hastings, in his book Bomber Command, wrote about the Luftwaffe's 'Tame Boar' operations in 1943, and said: 'The British discovered that the Germans could often predict a raid by monitoring wireless operators' signals from all over eastern England during the morning air test, and 100 Group began to broadcast fake test signals on days when Bomber Command was not operating, to confuse the issue.'
In the end, Gerry and I agreed that we were both right: on 75NZ Squadron, radio silence was total, but on other squadrons it was a different story. War is never a simple business. And finally some good news: hardbacks of my latest yarn, A Splendid Little War - published in January - have all sold out. To celebrate this success, publication of the paperback edition has been brought forward from January 2014 to November 2013. Whoopee!
My thanks to all who wrote.
Derek Robinson Previous Readers Write
Readers Write #32 November 2013Never quit: portrait of a wartime pilot,
Flying in a Lancaster (earplugs needed),
And Baggy Bletchley versus the mobile loo.
The makers of the film A Bridge Too Far, based on Cornelius Ryan's book about the paratroop assault on Arnhem, held a preview before general release. As they left, the audience were asked to write their opinions. Many said it was a good film but the story was farfetched. They simply didn't believe that the force sent to relieve the paras would have to cross so many bridges. Yet the story was true. Arnhem was a bridge too far for the Allied relief columns, and so the operation ended in failure.
Things happen in war that any
writer would hesitate to invent. Take the career of Lewis Hodges. He was
21 in 1940 when his Hampden bomber raided Stettin, was damaged, and he made a
forced-landing in Brittany.
He and his gunner then walked across France
to Marseilles,
got arrested and jailed. Hodges escaped, stowed away on a cargo boat to Oran in
West Africa, got arrested and was returned to Marseilles, where he escaped yet
again, having used a potato to create official-looking stamps on a pass. He
travelled by train and taxi to the Pyrenees and into Spain. This time customs
officers arrested him. He spent five weeks in a prison camp before the
British Embassy secured his release and he went via Gibraltar to Britain
and rejoined his squadron. He'd been on the run for eight months. Asked
what he'd missed most, he said: 'My pyjamas.' Thereafter, when flying on
ops he always wore them under his uniform. He flew many ops.
A long spell of
night raids on Germany earned him a place in a squadron supporting SOE
operations in Europe flying Halifax bombers that dropped supplies and
agents to resistance groups. It was a lonely and dangerous task,
for a calm temperament and superb navigational skills. By 1943 (when
was 24) he commanded the squadron, now flying Lysanders and
Hudsons, small enough to land in fields. He flew SOE ops until 1944
and then
went to the Far East, where he commanded a special duties squadron,
Lysanders, Dakotas and long-range Liberators to support resistance
groups inBurma, Thailand
and Malaya. These sorties lasted up to
20 hours, often in monsoon conditions. He ended the war with a double DSO and a
double DFC .
That's a brief account of the
extraordinary wartime career of the man who eventually became Air Chief Marshal
Sir LewisHodges, CBE, CB, KCB. His portrait hangs in the RAF Club, in
Piccadilly, and next to it is a picture of the first bombers he
flew, Hampdens, in a low-level raid over the North Sea.
It's the original that Tony Cowland painted for the new cover of the MacLehose
Press edition of Damned Good Show. Those three words are a
fitting description of both Lewis Hodges and the painting.
More transatlantic info comes
from another good guy, Tibor, who is currently mentoring students of English at
the University of Tampa in Florida.
One of his class wrote a thoughtful critique on my output.
"Robinson," he says, "calmly narrates the Goshawk attack on the
Zeppelin and subsequent firefight without getting too popcorn and
relentless. It all goes back to straight reportage", which he
believes I do as well as Hemingway and maybe even slightly better. Well, I just
tell the story and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, Garth in NYC,
who is also in the military fiction business, has achieved the ultimate in
research by actually flying in a
Click on a thumbnail to see a larger version.
Very impressive. You can
see what a beautiful beast the Lanc was (and is). Garth reports that
he could move around reasonably freely, "although clambering over the main
spar that holds the wings on is a bit of a sod, so what it would have been like
in full flying gear doesn't bear thinking about" -
especially in pitch darkness. "The airframe creaks and groans and
screams and shudders, and the noise produced by the four engines is simply
unbearable", so passengers wore ear-protectors. In WW2,
aircrew endured the deafening noise, breathed oxygen, flew at 20,000 feet in
temperatures down to minus 60, and faced flak and nightfighters. Garth
concludes: "My respect for the men of Bomber Command, already high, has
now doubled."
Jumping from the Lanc to the
electronic age, Bob ("a devoted reader since Piece of Cake
in 1991") writes from somewhere in
Lastly, a couple of messages
from the UK.
Rob has read and re-read all my stuff again, "thanks to your latest
publisher who has seen the light in the quality and stark depth in your
writing. Like so many, I read and read again, and each time reveals another
layer in your characters. Some live, many die, but the reader truly cares
about each." Which leads him to wonder: what happened next to
CH3 after Cake and to Barton after A Good Clean Fight?
Fanny Barton's future is spelled out very briefly in the novel
- he goes to Rhodesia
and commands a pilot training base (which, personally, I don't think would
satisfy him for long). I can only guess at CH3's future, but
the hard fact is that six American pilots flew in the Battle of Britain and
five were killed later in the war; so CH3's chances of survival were not
And Phil joins the club of
those who re-read Cake every two or three years, and says:
"Liking Skull and Kellaway more with each reading.... I receive a sort of
holistic notice as I approach Baggy Bletchley's testicular battle on the
portable toilet. I know what's happening, more or less what he's going
through, and I still laugh out loud at each reading." I have a
soft spot for old Baggy. He survived tha
My thanks to all who wrote.
Derek Robinson
Readers Write #33 January 2014
13 boots on the ceiling
Love conquers all,
and pooch scoffs predator.
It's been said (probably by me) that fighter pilots take
nothing seriously except flying. An email from Richard gives an example
of this truth which made even my old eyebrows twitch. Back in 1985, when
he was a schoolboy, Richard got invited to visit RAF Binbrook. 5 and 11
Squadrons flew Lightnings from Binbrook, and the Lightning was the supreme
British postwar fighter. Its twin
My thanks to all who wrote.
Derek Robinson
Readers Write #34 March 2014
Knuckle-duster knife,
Throttling a Camel,
And bouncing-bomb Mosquitoes.
a remarkable coincidence. Just when Mark ("always been a
fan of your WW1 and WW2 books") learned about my latest, A Splendid Little War,
he was clearing out the family house, his mother having passed away. He
knew that his great-uncle and godfather John had flown with the RFC/RAF
in WW1 because he'd bequeathed Mark his medals
- the DFC, the Western Front and Great War campaign awards,
plus "a curious thing: the Order of St. Stanislav with Swords".
Mark had been told that John had flown a Bristol Fighter "in the
another regular fan, Steve, emailed me to say that in the early 1980s,
"as an impressionable teenager", he'd read John Harris's story The Interceptors, also based on the Intervention of 1919. Fast-forward thirty years and he saw a copy in an
Next, to Oz. Peter in
More from Oz. I heard from Shannon, now in
My thanks to all who wrote. Derek Robinson
Readers Write #35 June 2014
The low-flying
Hairy bridges,
Forget soccer.
The Vulcan attack
on the airfield at
How far and how fast Splendid sailed on that day didn't alter the
Vulcan achievement, but it made a difference to me. An author needs to
make only one big factual mistake and he's lost the reader's confidence. I
research my stuff very thoroughly, and it's good to hear from Steve in
The locals called it
Derek Robinson
Readers Write #36 September 2014
Not all over by Christmas,
and a hop in a Camel
Here's a thought. Suppose MI6 had killed Adolf in the middle of World War Two. Would that have improved the Allies' chances? Probably not. It would have made him a German martyr and removed the war's worst decision-maker, the man who invaded Russia and, seven months later, declared war on America. Two colossal mistakes. There were other blunders. The best way to defeat Germany was by leaving Hitler in charge. The same might be said of Kaiser Wilhelm II, supreme commander of all German forces in WW1. Kaiser Bill was tenpence in the shilling (if you don't understand that, ask your dad). He believed he was appointed by God and therefore saying something made it happen. In August 1914, just after war was declared, he told his troops: 'You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.' When the leaves fell, his troops already knew that they faced a long, hard fight. Confidence in the Kaiser took a knock.
Readers Write #37 November 2014
Missed opportunities,
death in the desert,
and the Tsar rides again.
Here's a surprise. Product placement has infiltrated the writing game. It's been part of the Hollywood economy for many years - if your hero drinks beer, make sure he always has a bottle of Old Frothenslosh and the brewery will write you a fat cheque. Even fatter, if you you can get him to say he likes it because it's old, stale, and has the head at the bottom, that being their slogan. Absurd? Look at what Popeye did for the sale of spinach. And now Land Rover has handed six figures to someone so that he'll write a new Bond yarn about which I know nothing except it's a safe bet that a Land Rover has a supporting role, and you can be sure it starts when Bond turns turns the key.Readers Write #39 May 2015
The crashes that never were,
the Fortress that tried to fly backwards,
Readers Write #39 May 2015
The crashes that never were,
the Fortress that tried to fly backwards,
Readers Write #40 July 2015
A shabby Cardigan,
Why Moggy buzzed Protheroe,
We Brits are notorious for celebrating our defeats. Boadicea, famous for losing to the Romans. Harold, second-best to William the Conqueror.
Moving on. An interesting email from Jeff, somewhere in the
Drove my Chevy to the levee
but the levee was dry,
Them good ole boys were drinking
and rye.
Now, I have seen a levee. Big American rivers have them. A levee is an embankment, built to keep the water out. The word is French; levee means 'raised'. That's why it's dry. Go to a wet levee and the river will wash you away. The reason Don Maclean (who wrote the song) went to the levee was it rhymed with Chevy. If he meant it was dry in the non-alcoholic sense, how could them good ole boys be drinking whisky and rye? Nice melody, but the lyrics go nowhere. American Pie sold three million copies in a single year. When Maclean was asked its meaning, he said: 'It means I never have to work again.'
Readers Write #41 November 2015
The galloping submarine,
Skull's desert wear,
As the lawyers like to say, the devil is in the detail. My advice to any new author is to read your contract very carefully and with a blue pencil in your hand. Publishers like to insert a clause that gives them a fat share of any sales of screen rights, meaning film or TV money. I always cross out that clause. Publishers are in the book business, not the movie business, and who knows? Screen rights could earn the author more than royalties. Writing is a job, and it's up to the author to stay in business.
the devil-in-the-detail warning applies to writing the book in the
first place. Get one small detail wrong, and the reader is liable
to shout 'Idiot!' and fling your book in the fire. For instance,
in a crime novel by a well-known author, a character walks through an
English wood at night and is startled by the sudden noise of an owl's
wings. Not true. Owls' wings are virtually silent; that's
what helps them catch their prey. It was just a detail, but my
belief in the whole story took a nasty knock. Another
example: a book about the Falklands Campaign made such a cock-up
of a British submarine's journey that I calculated the sub must have
been doing 125 m.p.h. That sort of thing shakes your faith.
Well, I'm human too, and errors can creep in, so if
possible I ask a former pilot to read my new aviation story while
it's still in typescript. Avoids a lot of blunders. Even
so, I sometimes stumbled. Many years ago, a veteran pilot
pointed out that a book of mine referred to an R.F.C. pilot returning
from a patrol at low level and hedge-hopping over the trenches.
'Wrong,' he said. 'There weren't any hedges left to hop over.' I
hadn't thought of that.
One thing I never had to worry about was what my aircrews wore on duty, since it had to be uniform. Now Steve in
'His blazer was a size
too large for Skull, and its stripes of dove grey, pillar-box red and
royal blue, with gold piping, had faded to soft pastel shades, but its
cool looseness was just the thing for the desert. Skull wore it with a
pair of corduroy bags bought in
I never thought my ripping yarns would be linked with Philip Larkin. Oliver in Tamworth discovered AGCF ('utterly brilliant'), moved on to Goshawk Squadron and
wondered if Woolley's remembering of the whole Aston Villa team in 1913
(when the club won the Football Association's Cup) might have
prompted Larkin to mention Aston Villa in his poem MCMXIV. Well,
stranger things have happened, although personally I can't imagine
Larkin enjoying my stuff. Even his friends said he was glum (he
turned down the offer of becoming Poet Laureate) and his output
revealed a dour pessimism. Not much room for humour in Larkin's
spectrum of talent. Anyway, Oliver now has a chance to compare and
contrast my style with Larkin's - he has Piece of Cakeand Damned Good Show to occupy him in the long winter nights.
Readers Write #42 Jamuary 2016
Trust nobody, that's my motto,
with a gong for Gunnar
and rocket-firing long before the Typhoons.
sometimes ask me why I don't write plays or movie scripts, seeing as I have
something of a gift for dialogue. (It wasn't a total gift. I worked on it
for many years, writing everything from radio commercials to magazine
articles. I churned out two disastrous and unpublishable novels, which at
least showed me how not to write. Goshawk Squadron was one of those overnight
successes that had twenty years' apprenticeship behind it.)
artwork on the side is taken from an Italian painting entitled 'The Sleeping
Venus'. (The Russians liked to show off their artistic skills.) Those
rockets are an authentic detail. Nieuport 16s had them as early as 1916,
and when Zeppelins began raiding
news from Oliver in
Finally, a literary ricochet. Mike, who is in the
Readers Write #43 May 2016
The hazards of fiction,
'Why 1914?' rides again,
ago I was the defendant in a case of breach of
copyright - what's usually called
plagiarism - after I published my novel, Piece of Cake.
It's an occupational hazard. As someone said to me during the
filming, 'After the hit, comes the writ.' In my case, it came
after a national paper announced that Cake would
be adapted for television and the budget was £6 million. Some
people thought that I would get it all. If only. One person
decided I didn't deserve any of it because, he claimed, I'd copied his
book. (Later I discovered that he had written two screenplays about an
RAF fighter squadron in WW2 and he'd failed to sell them, which may
explain his resentment.) Thanks to the support of my
publishers and some top lawyers, I won the case, but
it took seven years.
thing I remember is that in the seventh year, the plaintiff
commissioned a barrister to write a Counsel's Opinion.
Mysteriously, I got to see it. Their barrister advised them
not to take the case to court, and wrote: 'Mr Robinson
appears to be a tenacious opponent.' Too right I
was. One of the accusations made against me was that I pinched
the use of the pilots' nicknames, in particular Moggy Cattermole,
from the plaintiff's book. In fact I knew the original Moggy when
I was at school. That, of course, was 40 years ago, but I tracked him
down. He lived in
So what? It was a long time ago, and Cake is
still in print. (In fact, Quercus will reprint all my RFC/RAF
novels next month.) But tenacity is, I think, an underrated quality in
writers. Talent is not enough. The
Today there are Jane Austen Festivals. TV and the cinema can't get enough of her; the latest
regularly remind me that I should be grateful for the English language,
which is both marvellously flexible and gratifyingly universal,
and not just in the English-speaking world. In a recent RW,
I celebrated Gunnar, a retired log-truck driver in Sweden who has read
everything I've written; and now I've heard from Lars in Denmark
who, when serving with UN forces in Cyprus, 'stumbled upon Piece of Cake and
have been a huge fan of yours ever since. Your books (of which I
have every one) give me great joy and laughs and thrills.
Besides, the books keep me in touch with the English language. I
have just re-read the two books with pilot Silk for the third
time, and will certainly read them again. You are the
best.' And Lars ends with a request: 'Please tell me that
more books are under way!'
As it happens, I've just finished another novel. Not a flying story; more like The Eldorado Network.
Every novel is a gamble, and I'm too close to this one to know
whether it's any good. Watch this space.
Lars bought a copy of Why 1914?
Other requests for copies keep arriving, which suggests to me
that the tsunami of books, TV programmes, articles and memoirs has
prompted people to wonder what caused the whole catastrophe.
That's the question my book tries to answer, and I packed it with
things that most people (including me) never learned at school.
Here's an example. Nearly everyone has heard about the
assassination on 28 June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at
'Franz Ferdinand went to
Rhys, in
Now to
Dave Morris, curator of the museum, says of the rockets: 'They would be launched just like fireworks. There was a button in the cockpit that would fire them all at once and they would hope that at least one would hit the balloon.' Le Prieur rockets were cardboard tubes filled with 200g of black powder, with a wooden conical head and a tail. Pilots got as close as possible to the target to make up for the rockets' extreme inaccuracy. Eric tells me the rockets were set off by a 2-volt battery - 'presumably that was the norm in those days'. He's trying to work out how he can fire his Nieuport 16's rockets without upsetting the Civil Aviation people at the next Classic Fighters Airshow at Easter 1917. 'If it comes off, I'll let you know; if it doesn't then I won't...'
A last word about names. American authors go in for three names - think of Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe I've been shortchanging myself. Is it too late to adopt a longer name? I'm thinking of Miles Farragut Ravensworth. The legal process is surprisingly simple. The UK Deed Poll Service will rename you, in only four working days, for a mere £33. One man changed his name to Bacon Double Cheeseburger. A father and son took the name of their favourite football club, Queens Park Rangers. Someone decided to be called Happy Birthday. Another went for Sarge Metal-fatigue. No. On reflection, I'll stick to what I've got. It's easier for autographs.Readers Write #44 June 2016
Play dead and don't smile,
Operation Jostle was no picnic,
and the work ethic of Dylan Thomas.
Cops-and-robbers dramas on television often claim to reflect real life. Sometimes the phrase 'police procedurals' suggests serious authenticity. Yet the programme makers can be surprisingly squeamish. When murder is committed, the corpse is not dead, of course. It is an actor trying not to breathe. What is odd is that the actor's mouth is always shut. On television, everyone dies with the lips firmly sealed.This
is such an unbreakable rule that I asked a friendly medic about it, a man
who has seen plenty of sudden death. 'Not true,' he told me. 'Most
people die with their mouths open.' Murder on TV or in the cinema is
lavish with blood spatter but the victim always dies with a presentable
expression. This is one of the many curiosities of cop shows.
Mobile phones are useful in keeping the plot moving, but they rarely ring when
anyone's talking. Come to that, nobody enters a room in the middle of
dialogue; they always arrive when someone's finished speaking. Cops
never fail to kick down doors with ease; building codes on film sets are
pathetic. How often have I seen a cop go into a men's room and express
his frustration by ripping down a hand-dryer? I hope one day
to see him dislocate his wrist because the device is securely bolted to the
wall. And one day a police car will race to the scene of the crime and find
nowhere to park. It happens to the rest of us. Why not them?
answer, of course, is entertainment. In the world of televised drama
there is always a parking space; otherwise the show would never end. I
too am in the entertainment business. Readers spend good money to buy a
novel because they expect it to entertain them; if it's not readable it's
unreadable. But it has to be believable too, and that can be
tricky. I understand why murder victims in TV dramas keep their mouths
shut; the director doesn't want them to look unacceptably dead. But
whenever I see the alleged body, mouth firmly shut, my reaction is to say:
'It's an actor!' And realism goes out of the window.
it's a balancing act. Film and TV directors want to be convincing but not
so convincing that the viewer turns pale and heads for the exit. Years
ago, I had a letter from a very senior RAF officer, written more in
sadness than in anger, who deplored the savagery with which pilots are killed
in Piece of Cake. He accepted that aircrew died, but why did I
have to spell out the brutal horror of their deaths? (Perhaps he feared
the novel would harm recruiting.) Well, I wrote Cake because I
felt that a lot of fiction about air combat had pulled its punches. It
made too much of the chivalry of the skies (which I doubted) and not enough of
the reality of death. A pilot who is cut in half by a burst of cannon
shells at twenty thousand feet is no more romantic than an infantryman
shot through the head. Courage in air warfare is a matter of recognising
the price of failure. Pilots know this, and many of them have told
me that Cake (and my other RFC/RAF novels) rings true.
sometimes my stuff prompts a reader to write a book. Margaret, somewhere in the
arrives from all over. In
Since my
last RW, a few literary oddities have cropped up. For instance:
Dylan Thomas was not a no-good boyo who wrote best when tanked-up. His
village GP from 1949 to 1953, Dr Hughes, wrote a memoir of this much-loved
British poet, and in it several myths go up in flames. Thomas wrote
best, his doctor says, in conditions of 'quiet, routine and relative
sobriety'. The routine never varied: he worked in a shed,
undisturbed, from 2.30 pm until 6.30 pm. His wife, Caitlin, was 'a nymphomaniac
and first-class bitch'. Their rows were vicious: 'She would
physically attack Thomas, sometimes knocking him unconscious by banging his
head on the floor.' He died, not from drinking 18 straight whiskeys in a
a comfortable chair always helps, and someone recently paid $394,000 for
the chair that J.K.Rowling sat in while writing Harry Potter. Whether
the bestselling skills go with the furniture is open to question.
Saul Bellow's desk failed to get a bidder when it came up for auction.
Nobody wanted to own the woodwork on which he won a Nobel. I'd have
offered a fiver. Saul was a Booker Prize judge in 1971. He wanted Goshawk
Squadron to win but he got voted down by the others, one of
whom later admitted he was drunk. Life is full of oddities.
something to revel in: a Spitfire in flight, so close and so clear you
feel you can reach out and touch it.
Dibbs is an aviation photographer. Working with ex-RAF pilot Tim Ellison,
he got within 15 feet of a Spitfire in flight. By shooting through an
open canopy with a hand-held camera, he captured these remarkable images.
Usually, close-ups of the fighter in the air meant using zoom lenses, followed
by much cropping and magnification. John Dibbs got closer than any
photographer I've ever known.
Readers Write #45 September 2016
Luck, good and bad,Eye-opener in Fiji,
And another blunder for the hit list.
sometimes thought of writing a book about the influence of luck on
war. Paddy Ashdown (who was in the SAS) once said: "The
first casualty of war is not the truth. It's the plan."
Given the violence of combat and the way it can make nonsense of
detailed plans, it's likely that some of these unforeseen casualties
will be labelled as good luck by one side and bad luck by their
enemy. Sometimes what looks like luck turns out to change the
course of war.
Hitler invaded
Then there was the
Lastly, a little-known fact about the 9/11 terrorist attack on the
There's a lot of luck in publishing too, and Shannon (now living in
One of the surprises of writing is the discovery that a book has travelled far and influenced lives. Another reader in America, J.P.M. in Connecticut ("Have been a fan for decades") ordered copies of A Good Clean Fight, Operation Bamboozle and Why 1914? "Keep on writing," he urged. And Kieran in Buckinghamshire emailed me: "I have just read Goshawk Squadron after more than 20 years and enjoyed it even more this time around... your books recreate the merciless, raw and terrifying experience those young men went through better than anyone else, in my opinion. And they are hugely entertaining!" And he too ordered a copy of Why 1914?. Which made me wonder why there is ongoing interest in this short (200 pages) book. Maybe it's because the torrent of thick volumes on the Great War have stimulated a question that they failed to answer. Why did the catastrophe happen?
At the start of Why 1914? I quoted what Liddell Hart, a respected military historian, wrote in 1930. His History of the World War said: "Fifty years were spent in the process of making
more on my hit list of blunders by TV and movie directors. In the
last RW, I condemned the practice of filming corpses with
their mouths firmly shut, and of cops who get into a house with a
single painless kick. (In one of Raymond Chandler's books,
his private eye Philip Marlowe tries to kick a locked door in, and
fails. "I should have known better," Marlowe said. "The
front door is about the only part of a
Last word: I've finished another novel. It's called Holy Smoke and it's a heartwarming comedy of deceit, deception, power-seeking and revenge set in the liberated
Readers Write #46 November 2016
Bats in the bomb bay,crashed in the bush,
and Garbo in jail (maybe).
may be stranger than fiction, but writers like me learn to handle it
carefully. Something can be totally true and yet unbelievable to
the punter. Bizarre things happened in WW2, for instance. One
night in
I came across them when I was researching my new novel, Holy Smoke (out next year). It involves the wartime American intelligence service, the
discovered that you could freeze a bat and then thaw it again with no
evident harm to the bat. Leaping from this to the fact that many
Japanese buildings were made of paper, some scientist came up with a
foolproof idea. Freeze a bunch of bats, wire tiny incendiary
devices to their feet, and drop them from a high-altitude plane. "Bats
away!" As they fell through the warming atmosphere they would
revive and, with the gimcrack buildings of
This loony project was put to the test at an
It seems there is no limit to what some people will believe. In WW1,
large numbers of sober, intelligent English folk believed that a
Russian army had been rushed across England by train, the proof being
that someone had identified them by 'the snow on their boots'.
People today still believe in 'the Angel of Mons', a supposedly divine
apparition that allegedly saved the British army during its retreat in
1914. If you want the truth about these (and other) myths, read my narrative history, Why 1914? Only £8 post-paid in the
So did Liam in
Soon afterward, Flight Sergeant Colin Duncan arrived from
Liam has read my Desert Air Force story A Good Clean Fight, and he writes: "Your description of the heat, the isolation and the stench of the pilots in
From Oz to
Not all my stuff is about aircraft, and Steve in
Last word: I urge movie directors to stop making an actor take his hat off at a moment of high drama. If it's meant to indicate how surprised the guy is, it fails. I saw a film about Krakatoa. Local fisherman were on the island when the volcano exploded, and one immediately took his hat off. Not a wise move when lumps of hot lava were falling all around him.