The story behind When The Germans Come

My latest tale may come as a bit of surprise to readers. It’s set not in Italy but a few miles from my home in England. In the town of Dover, a funny place that’s always sat at the edge of the country it seems to me, misunderstood, neglected in many ways, a place to pass through, rarely to stay.

This story is one that’s been hanging around my head for years. I’m a sucker for peering behind the scenes of history, past the accepted stories, looking for what really happened during times that are so often mythologised. My Venetian wartime story, The Garden of Angels, was very much based on the idea that occupied Venice must have been rather more complex than most appreciate. When I finished that I found myself trapped at home by the pandemic and lockdown, unable to do the very thing that fires most of my work: travel.

I still had so many memories of three years of research about war, about bravery, sacrifice and treachery, much of it quite disturbing, running round my head.

Unable to get to Italy, barely able to travel anywhere thanks to Covid for a while, I remembered an earlier idea I’d had. One that tried to imagine what Dover must have been like at the height of the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, when Churchill was only newly installed in No 10 and a good number of people thought the war lost, and invasion imminent. A blitzkrieg that would have been focussed on the area around Dover, the closest point of England to Hitler’s forces across the Channel. Just down the road from me.

Research, research, research

Where do you go to accurate contemporary accounts of times like this? In Venice, for The Garden of Angels I’d been lucky enough to find some books, and more importantly a treasure trove of accounts of the Nazi occupation from locals who lived and fought through it. A real eye opener. But Italy was a loser in the war, starting out as a supporter of Hitler through Mussolini, then agreeing with an armistice with the Allies and entering an awkward phase where the Nazis occupied the north and tried to force the locals onto their side.

This messy situation is little understood today. The position in England in 1940 was rather different. There are a few books about Dover in wartime, but, understandably, they’re written from the point of view of victory. Tales of sacrifice and heroism, all true without a doubt. But they’re not the whole story. In the summer of 1940 Churchill was a controversial figure, far from the almost universally acclaimed figure he would become.

A town like Dover was no classically peaceful English enclave either. That was easy to tell from my main source of material for this book, much of it the microfiche files of the local newspapers I pored over in the local library. They told a story of a town that was on the edge. Many institutions were closed or barely operating. Lots of children had been evacuated, but not all, and those who remained roamed free and sometimes wild.

The place was full of soldiers and sailors too, looking for entertainment in the evening. There were busy music halls, some quite risqué, black marketeers, roaring pubs, fights, the edgy atmosphere that always accompanies the threat of war. This was not the seaside England of Dad’s Army at all.

One thought above all others prompted this story: when it seems Hitler will land in the town at any moment, who is going to care much about law and order? And what happens after the Nazis are finally here?

The narrative

Louis Renard is a former Scotland Yard murder detective with a mysterious past, recovering from wounds he’s received during the Dunkirk evacuation, somewhere he should never have been, given a CID desk in Dover nick and precious little to do. When a showgirl is found murdered in the secret clifftop bunker prepared for guerrilla war after the expected invasion, the town's overstretched police station believes it has better things to worry about, such as Hitler on the doorstep.

Renard, a stubborn, curious man, feels otherwise and isn’t going to stop until he gets some answers.

So, not an Italian story for a change, though you will have another of those coming next year. But it does, in my head anyway, connect with The Garden of Angels and the two stories do travel down the same road. They ask the awkward question… what does war do to people? What makes some heroes, others traitors and villains? And a good few in the awkward grey limbo between the two.

Does Louis Renard's story end here? I'm not sure. In a way that depends on you. If the book works and is popular enough I can certainly imagine returning to wartime Kent and finding out what him and his rather likeable sidekick Kelly have got up to. Oh, and his aunt, the elderly widowed thespian Dame Veronica Sallis, who's quite a handful. And there's the question of the Canadian reporter Jessica Marshall too...

Hmmm... in your hands, dear reader.