I find stories hidden in history books. These often describe events that are so remarkable that they jump right out at you. You immediately feel that these stories are begging to be told in more detail. You want to know more about the characters and ...

I have started my final rewrite of “An Absolute Secret” which will go to the publisher at the end of August. During the writing I noticed that I was making a mistake about civilian flights to neutral countries from England. During the war it was impo...

It is believed that Sir Victor Mallet of the British Legation in Stockholm was involved in investing funds belonging to the British royal family in German assets. The funds came from the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland, a secretive b...

Stockholm was a centre of intelligence trading during the war years. The Finns and Estonians were selling Soviet intelligence to the Allies and to the Germans (their allies). The Japanese represented by General Onodera were buying and selling intelli...

The Finnish struggle against the Soviet Union figures large in my new novel. It all started during the ‘Winter War” with the Soviet invasion of Finland on November 30, 1939. On December 14, the League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled...

This week we are talking about my new novel An Absolute Secret which is in editing and due out in April 2017. This is a spy thriller set in wartime Sweden that tells the story of British SIS officer Peter Faye who is sent to the British Legation in S...

We believe that the imposter Rudolf Hess was interrogated by the very best people at MI5. Somebody like Lt-Colonel Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens. Stephens wore a Gurkha uniform and monocle and was an expert interrogator born in Egypt and educated at a Lyc...

Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy and best friend for some twenty years. After hearing Hitler speak in a small Munich beer hall, he joined the Nazi Party on July 1, 1920, becoming the sixteenth member of the party. When Hitler was jailed in the 1920s i...

As soon as we accept the reality of a Hess imposter or double, the story takes a very unique turn. We now have a man trying to hide his identity from Britain’s secret services. We have a man trying to dupe the British government with a peace plan. We...

What did MI6 or MI5 think about Hess? MI5 had a special branch in 1941 known as B Branch whose job was to handle suspected German agents. They had some very competent people, although many were rank amateurs in intelligence gathering. Men like J...

There are dozens of theories concerning the Hess story, a lot of them unsubstantiated and many that are impossible to believe. We think Dr. W. Hugh Thomas’ theory is the most convincing. Here is a medical professional, a specialist in bullet wounds w...

Playing Rudolf Hess is a fascinating story about one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War and is based on the true story of Hess’ incarceration in Britain, his faked amnesia and his bombshell revelation at Nuremberg. Solid historical res...

Don’t we love stories about doppelgangers and body-doubles!Political assassination is always a risk for a public figure. Hitler had several doubles who replaced him at public events where there might be some danger to his person. The use of a “politi...

I believe my first experience reading historical fiction was Robert Graves’ I Claudius which I read as a schoolboy in England. This was followed by several Ernest Hemingway novels about the Spanish civil war (For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Ar...

Like a lot of you, I recently read an article that said that a lot of what we think we know about World War II is terribly wrong. For instance, I always thought that German engineering was the best in the world, well it appears that a lot of weapons ...