There is a report by John Dugdale in the Guardian today (gu.com/p/3daqd/tf) on the author event I took part in last Monday with Barry Forshaw, Mark Billingham, Laura Wilson and pathologist Carla Connelly at the British Library. He correctly says we discussed violence in our books at length and considered any taboos in our writing. I forgot to mention that in Dead Man’s Land there was to be a scene of gang rape. I sat at the head of that chapter for days thinking: my wife and kids are going to read this. I really didn’t want to write it. Yet it was a pivotal inciting incident. Then the solution came to me: tell it in song. Not some cheery ditty, but a murder ballad (or rape ballad I suppose). In the end I re-worked the lyrics of Fairport Convention’s Matty Groves (a sort of Lady Chatterley’s Lover tale with added murder, marvellously sung by Sandy Denny) and had one of the characters sing that. I checked with Joe Boyd, who produced the album Liege and Lief,

that I wasn’t breaching any copyright by keeping one line of the original words in as a clue to its origins, but he assured me it was a traditional piece. I was subsequently asked (of which more later) to help with a piece for the forthcoming Benjamin Britten centenary at Snape Maltings near Aldeburgh. And I discovered that Britten, too, had used a version of the Matty Groves story in a piece called The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard (for male voices and piano). If you look up that piece, it will say, bizarrely, that the world premier was at Oflag V11b, a POW camp in Germany. Britten composed it in 1943 or Richard Wood, the husband of one of Britten’s singers who was a POW at the camp at Eichstätt, Bavaria. He organised a music festival for the prisoners between February and March 1944 and Britten’s work – sent out in a Red Cross parcel – was performed at seven of the concerts. The Imperial War Museum has the original score. As part of the Britten centenary celebrations Jon Boden, BBC Radio 2’s ‘Folksinger of the Year’ 2010, weaves a new work into The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard at Snape Maltings on August 11 (see www.brittenaldeburgh.co.uk). My efforts – with someone else supplying the music – will be at the same venue on June 12.

The new novel Dead Man’s Land (out today, January 3rd) is dedicated to Clive Powell, “a genuine Leigh pal”. Some of you may know that Clive Powell is the real name of one of Leigh’s most famous sons, Georgie Fame. I have met him several times over the past few years and his famed all-nighters at Soho’s Flamingo club in the early 60s were referenced in my book Signal Red, about the Great Train Robbery.

This time I wanted his help because the regiment in the new novel is a ‘Pals’ battalion, one of the units of Kitchener’s New Army that were raised to replace early losses, and consisted of men from the same village or profession. So there were Salford Pals, Liverpool Pals, Taxi Driver, Artist and Footballer Pals. There wasn’t, however, actually a Pals from the cotton town of Leigh, although I’ve invented one. Originally I used quite a lot of ‘Lanky’ dialect and local phrases for the soldier’s conversations, and Georgie was going to help out by checking their authenticity. Sadly, early readers said they found those sections impenetrable and I re-wrote them in more straightforward language, meaning I no longer needed Mr Fame’s help. Still, Georgie’s concerts have given me much pleasure of late and, coming up to 70, he shows no sign of stopping – his new record Lost in a Lover’s Dream is a laidback corker and he will be playing Ronnie Scott’s for the week starting April 8^th, where he’ll no doubt telling stories about the Zagreb club owner and vibes player who inspired the new album.

Tickets: www.ronniescotts.co.uk

Album: www.juno.co.uk/labels/Three+Line+Whip/

In my introduction to the Complete Sherlock Holmes e-book (available for free – http://tinyurl.com/c9hp4ww), I seem to have inadvertently upped the number of novels in the Conan Doyle canon from four to five. One of the joys of e-books is that, unlike with print versions, such glitches can be easily fixed. Yet I knew very well there were four novels – A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear – and I can only assume I was so taken in by reading Anthony Horowitz’s House of Silk, I added it to the tally. House of Silk, like Dead Man’s Land, has the blessing of the Conan Doyle Estate, although unlike DML it is written in the style of ACD. Most Holmes ‘continuation’ novels read like a pale imitation of the original, or are so reverential they end up wooden and stilted. Not House of Silk – Horowitz nails the classic characters and doesn’t forget to add a rip-roaring plot. Highly recommended and best read by gaslight.

The omni-talented Barry Forshaw, head honcho of Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk) and author of Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, British Crime Film and Guns for Hire: The Modern Adventure Thriller, among many others, asked me to get involved in this round-robin called The Next Big Thing.

The idea is that I answer the following questions about my writing then recommend other authors who also answer the questions and they in turn recommend other authors until the world begs for mercy. You can find Barry’s answers on the Crime Time website, and my “tag” authors at the end of the questionnaire, who should be posting within the week.

1) What is the working title of your next book?

Dead Man’s Land, out on January 3.

 2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

Dead Man’s Land is inspired by a line from Conan Doyle’s His Last Bow, set in 1914, in which Sherlock Holmes says that Watson intends to ‘rejoin his old service’ – by this time the Royal Army Medical Corps. So it is Dr. Watson’s adventures in WW1.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

Historical thriller.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

The central character is Dr John Watson – Holmes’s sidekick – but without the Great Detective. It roughly follows Conan Doyle’s (sometimes wayward) chronology of his heroes, so I need an actor in his 60s, someone like Tom Wilkinson, martin Shaw or Michael Kitchen. I’m thinking Kelly Riley (too young?) or Alex Kingston as his flame-haired nurse.

5) What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

With thousands dying every day on the Western Front, what better place to commit a murder..

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It is published by Simon & Schuster.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

About seven months.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Despite having Dr Watson in it, not Conan Doyle, more Len Deighton or early Robert Harris.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My editor at S&S, Maxine Hitchcock said they were looking for a novel based on ‘a detective in the trenches’. She set me on the road to recalling that Dr Watson had served in WW1.

10) What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Winston Churchill is a pivotal figure in the novel, because after Gallipoli he went into the army and served on the front line.

To see how other authors tackle this list, go along and visit:

Dean Crawford, a British Michael Crichton and author of science-thrillers Apocalypse, Covenant and Immortal at www.deancrawfordbooks.com.

Howard Linskey, who brings Get Carter and crew bang up to date in The Drop, The Damage and The Dead on http://howardlinskey.blogspot.co.uk/.

Frank Barnard, ace WW2 flying chronicler (Blue Man Falling, Band of Eagles, To Play The Fox) and, with A Time For Heroes, WW1 as well, at www.frankbarnard.com.

As a tie-in to the imminent release of the Dr Watson novel DEAD MAN’S LAND, Simon & Schuster has made available a free e-book of the Complete Sherlock Holmes. As part of the package they asked me to write an introduction, which I duly did. Then the artwork came. You do realise, I told them, that it wouldn’t say 221b above the door? That the ‘b’ signified Holmes’s and Watson’s lodgings, not the whole building? There would be a doorbell or door pull marked ‘b’. We’ll get letters, I said. My editors thought for a minute and said: We’ll get letters if we don’t put it there. Apparently Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss had similar discussions with their BBC Sherlock re-boot. In the end they decided the address was so iconic, the ‘b’ had to stay. And if it’s good enough for them….

* http://books.simonandschuster.com/Complete-Sherlock-Holmes/Arthur-Conan-Doyle/9781471127182

* http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Complete-Sherlock-Holmes-ebook/dp/B00AHEMYEY

Next year Bloomsbury Reader is to re-release one of Gavin Lyall’s titles from the sixties – The Most Dangerous Game. That’s good news, he deserves to be re-discovered. It’s just that it is the wrong book. It’s not that TMDG is a bad thriller. It has most of the tropes familiar from early Lyall: the ex-RAF pilot slowly going to seed until something re-kindles his spirit and his sense of self-worth, great flying sequences and an interesting setting – the Russo-Finnish border. But for me, Lyall’s best book will always be Midnight Plus One. This was his third novel and for once didn’t feature a pilot. Instead, the man going to seed etc is Lewis Cane, an ex-SOE agent who once worked with the French Resistance, now almost making a living as a freelance bodyguard in Paris. He is teamed with an American gunman, Harvey Lovell, to escort a businessman who has been framed on a rape charge to a meeting in Liechtenstein. Unknown assailants want to stop them.

It is really a kind of road movie book, describing a drive across France, mostly in a Citroen DS (which expires in one of the book’s most memorable scene – who knew a car could bleed to death?). Katherine Whitehorn, Lyall’s wife, once revealed that he drove every inch of the route. His research would shame us all:  “He spent many nights in the kitchen at Primrose Hill, north London, experimenting to see if one could, in fact, cast bullets from lead melted in a saucepan, or whether the muzzle flash of a revolver fired across a saucer of petrol really would ignite a fire”. No, apparently. Probably just as well for Primrose Hill.

There were and still are rumours that Steve McQueen had optioned the book, intending to play the alcoholic Harvey, but died before it could go any further. I once asked Alan Trustman who wrote Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair for McQueen about this. He said he hadn’t heard any talk of a screenplay, but it would have been a fitting end to a career – the man who rode shotgun for Yul Brynner doing the same for an ex-British spy (Michael Caine?), both more cynical and careworn than they’d care to admit. The sexual politics in the book might have dated, but Midnight Plus One holds up remarkably well as a thriller. It would still make a great, tight movie. Sadly, though, they don’t make Steve McQueens any more.

* The Most Dangerous Game is due in March 2013.

I was at the ceremony for the unveiling, by The Princess Royal, of the memorial to SOE agent Noor   Inayat Khan yesterday (November 8^th). I was an interested party because Noor’s is a fascinating and tragic story, one I almost used in my novel Early One Morning, but realized it would unbalance the book (the beautiful, shy, dreamy but tenacious half-Indian, half-American daughter of the founder of Sufi mysticism, descended from Indian royalty, talented musician and writer – it was all too much for a secondary story). The short ceremony brought home once again the bravery of the men and women of Special Operations Executive who parachuted or were landed into occupied territories. I recently interviewed Cressida Cowell, author of the How to Train Your Dragon children’s books and she mentioned her ‘grandfather Alan’ had been in SOE in Albania. So I looked him up. It turned out Alan Hare was a friend of the recently deceased Patrick Leigh-Fermor and, as his obituary in The Independent confirmed, cut from the same cloth:

“Betrayed by partisans and ambushed by the Germans, Hare only escaped after a grim chase across snow-bound mountains. Ravaged by frostbite, he was the sole survivor of [the mission] to the isolated valleys of the Balkans. He remained far longer than either reason or compassion would have dictated, tending to the wounds of a fellow British officer. He was later awarded a Military Cross.”

Noor Inayat Khan, operating as a wireless operator, was also betrayed, in October 1943.  Imprisoned and questioned by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD – the SS intelligence service) at its notorious Avenue Foch HQ, she escaped over the rooftops only to be re-captured during an air raid (the German routine was to head count all prisoners when the air raid alarm sounded, hence her absence was discovered). She gave nothing away during her interrogations. However, against all the security protocols of SOE (which, as MRD Foot has pointed out, were often ambiguously worded in the manuals), Noor had not destroyed her transmission notes or ciphers. The Germans were able to decode the messages and ‘turn’ her radio and, despite some suspicions at home, for several months the British believed Noor was still at large and transmitting. This led to agents beings sent to France with the SD waiting to receive them.

The fact her radio was turned should not detract from Noor’s bravery, either before and after capture – at one point she had been given the chance to pull out, but elected to stay on as the last Paris-London link. Sadly, it was an all too common an occurrence, especially in Holland. There the Germans played the devastating Englandspiel (the English Game) with captured transmitters through most of 1942-3, arresting the agents SOE sent in, the majority of whom perished.

After Avenue Foch, Noor endured months of solitary confinement in shackles in a German prison and was eventually murdered and her body burned at Dachau concentration camp in September 1944, along with fellow SOE recruits Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damerment (with a terrible irony, one of the agents lured to France by the SD using Noor’s radio). Noor was 30 years old. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre. Her memorial, a bust sculpted by Karen Newman, is located in Gordon Square Gardens, near the University of London.

Recommended books on SOE and the female agents include Sarah Helm’s A Life in Secrets (a fascinating biography of Vera Atkins, who was a lynchpin of SOE’s F – for France – Section), Flames in the Field by Rita Kramer, which traces the lives of the four girls murdered at Dachau and, the book that led directly to the memorial, The Spy Princess by Shrabani Basu.

Thanks to Martyn Cox who has created an invaluable archive of interviews with SOE, FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), escape line and ‘special duty’ RAF squadron veterans. See www.our-secret-war.org.

Dead Man’s Land is out on January 3^rd. It is a novel about Dr John Watson. It might look like that I am, unusually for me, surfing the zeitgeist, with Sherlock Holmes being more popular than ever, but I realized that the concept dates back almost two years to January 2011, when I had a meeting with Maxine Hitchcock, editorial director of Simon & Schuster. She mentioned that they were looking for a work of fiction featuring a ‘detective in the trenches of WW1’. I said it was an interesting idea – what better spot to commit murder than in a place where thousands are being slaughtered each day? But I also knew it had its problems, not least because the front line was very fluid (soldiers did not spend weeks in the trenches – they were rotated back on a regular basis) and also most Military Policemen were concerned with desertion and cowardice than crime. So I said: ‘Actually, it would be better if he wasn’t a copper, but a doctor, just behind the lines, a man who might recognize a murder when he sees one. And why not go one step further and make the central figure Dr Watson?’

Why Watson? Because at the end of His Last Bow, a story written by Conan Doyle in World War One and set in 1914, Holmes mentions that Watson will be rejoining ‘his old service’, which by that time was known as the Royal Army Medical Corps. Holmes, meanwhile, will go back to his beekeeping. And so, for once, Watson is a man very much alone when he finds that there has been at least one murder out on the Western Front.. and that he has been added to the killer’s list.