As the author of eight non-fiction books, I am most often asked why did I chose to write a particular title. The answer is that my books are usually written out of obsession: to slake my personal thirst for knowledge on the subject in question – almost irrespective of whether the topic would interest anyone else. Fortunately, most have.
I started early, writing my first title, The War Walk: A Journey Along the Western Front, when I was in my twenties. This, my most personal book, was a homage to my late father, Frank Jones, a very elderly dad who had been in his sixties when I was born. As such, he was a veteran of the first world war, but, like me, a myopic spectacle-wearer, he spent the conflict behind the lines in the châteaux where generals like Douglas Haig planned their bloody offensives. Dad’s task was to take down their battle orders in shorthand and then type them out. The nearest he came to danger was when a shell exploded on high, killing a pheasant which fell at his feet. He took it into the Mess for lunch.
My books are usually written out of obsession: to slake my personal thirst for knowledge on the subject in question
By a hideous irony, his younger brother Ernest, who had perfect eyesight, enlisted in the Rifle Brigade in 1914 aged 18 and was killed the following year near Ypres – possibly as the result of an order typed by his brother. My father brought me up on stories of the war and took me to visit the old battlefields and Uncle Ernest’s grave. I became obsessed with the subject, but only when I read other books on the subject did the obsession crystallise into the idea of writing my own.
The first book I read on the Great War was Verdun: The Price of Glory by the late Alistair Horne, for my money the most moving and brilliant of all the myriad books written about the war. Verdun is an ancient citadel in north-east France that was the scene of the longest and bloodiest battle of the war. A French friend inherited an old family house there, which I used as a base to explore the haunted glades of the battlefield. (After the war, despairing of ever returning the poisoned ground to the plough, the French planted a huge forest to cover it and the nine villages obliterated by the battle.)
The second book that inspired me to write was A Walk Along the Wall by the journalist Hunter Davies, a travelogue about his tramp from one end to the other of Hadrian’s Wall. Why not, I thought, apply this idea to the whole western front, and walk the 400-mile active section of the old trench lines, from the Belgian coast to St Mihiel in Lorraine, combining my travels, my family story, a potted history of the war, and my interviews with some 30 surviving veterans in a single book. Obtaining Mr Davies’s permission to nick and adapt his idea, I began my work.
My first problem as a complete unknown in the literary world was to find a publisher, but this was solved more easily than I had feared. At a book launch party, I met Norman Longmate, a social historian, who recommended Robert Hale, a small publisher with offices on Clerkenwell Green. After a single letter outlining my plan, I was summoned there for an interview and left clutching a contract for the book.
My second book sprang directly from the first: one of the veterans I had interviewed was the famous German writer and philosopher Ernst Jünger, the much-wounded and decorated author of the classic great war memoir Storm of Steel. I found him so interesting that my interview stretched to a three-week stay in his village, during which the 90-year-old sage mentored my first (and only) LSD trip: Jünger was a friend of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who had first synthesised the drug, and had been writing about it since the 1930s – long before Aldous Huxley or Timothy Leary followed him down the psychedelic trail. Incidentally, both Jünger and Hofmann lived to be over 100, so not all drug fiends die young.
Earlier in his varied career, Jünger had been the bard of the Freikorps, the mercenary force of ex-soldiers and young right-wing students who had crushed communist uprisings in Germany immediately after the Great War, and been so brutally effective that they had even tried to overthrow the young Weimar Republic with a military putsch. There was only a single history of the Freikorps in English at that time, and so I put myself forward to fill the gap, making Jünger the dedicatee of my book. This time my publisher was the venerable John Murray, a gentlemanly house who brought out my book Hitler’s Heralds in 1987, coincidentally in the same week that Rudolf Hess, like Jünger a Freikorps veteran, hanged himself in Spandau jail.
Lucky happenstance played a part in my third book, when for the first time I dipped my toe into the tricky waters of biography. At school, I had played a role in a production of a play by Patrick Hamilton, the alcoholic playwright and novelist now celebrated as the coiner of the concept ‘gaslighting’ from the title of his eponymous stage thriller.
I moved to Brighton in the late 1980s and discovered that Hamilton’s only surviving relative, his sister-in-law Aileen, was a near neighbour. Despite the fact that she detested him, Aileen was the guardian of Patrick’s papers and literary manuscripts, and delighted me by pulling out a huge suitcase stuffed with these relics from beneath her bed, giving me the freedom to use them as I wished. Within a week I had obtained a contract to write Hamilton’s biography.
I then found that I had a rival in the field. The publisher Faber had written Aileen a slightly snotty letter announcing that they had anointed the writer Sean French to pen a biography, and demanding her cooperation with the project. Aileen had taken umbrage at their presumption and not even bothered to reply, and, thanks to her, I had Patrick’s literary legacy and a decisive head start over my competitor. Nevertheless, once I had completed my book, I invited Sean to visit and consult my papers. I got the drop, and my biography Through a Glass Darkly duly appeared first.
By a hideous irony, his younger brother Ernest, who had perfect eyesight, was killed near Ypres – possibly as the result of an order typed by his brother
Sean had the last laugh though: together with his wife Nicci Gerrard, he formed the best-selling crime writing duo ‘Nicci French’ and a whole shelf full of books now testifies to their success. Aileen bequeathed me Patrick’s papers in her will, but having already used them, I sold them via Sotheby’s, and today they rest in that graveyard of British literary legacies, the University of Texas at Austin.
Another projected biography brought me more grief than poor Patrick had ever done. Richard Cohen, a distinguished books editor, decided to set up as a publisher with his own imprint and commissioned me to write the life of the artist Lucian Freud as one of his first titles. I was living in Austria at the time and was desperate to return home, so I accepted the brief without knowing too much about Freud or his private life. It turned out that Freud strongly objected to anyone prying, which was fair enough. I had not appreciated the lengths he would go to to stop the biography appearing, despite being warned by a former friend of the painter that he was a nasty piece of work with close contacts in London’s criminal underworld.
Anonymous phone calls warning me off soon escalated to actual threats, and I became paranoid enough to leave my home and sleep out in the office of a small literary magazine in Hove. Richard Cohen decided that publicity was my best protection, and arranged for the story of my disappearance, together with a gnomic comment from Freud, to appear in the Observer and the Independent on Sunday. The date was 31 August 1997, and although both papers had put the story on their front pages, it was immediately swallowed up and forgotten by what happened in Paris on that day: the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Deciding that no book was worth the trouble that Freud’s life had brought me, I proposed to Richard that I should abandon the project, and instead write the biography of the safely long-dead poet Rupert Brooke, a figure from the Great War era who had long fascinated me. Brooke’s official biographer, Christopher Hassall, had been discreet to the point of deception about the poet’s busy hidden life, and as Brooke had died without heirs, I assumed I would be safe from any Freudian persecution. I was wrong.
A beak at Eton College had acquired the unpublished letters that Brooke had written to Bryn Olivier, one of several women he had wooed simultaneously. The beak lent me copies of the letters without imposing any restrictions on their use, but strangely objected when I published them in the Hove literary magazine as a taster for my biography. A legal letter from his solicitor demanded £25,000 from me, which I declined to pay, and used the letters in my biography regardless. Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth duly appeared and was serialised in the Sunday Times without more ado, and when the beak died soon afterwards, I saw it as a kind of divine retribution.
And so, somehow, the books kept coming: a history of the Tower of London; a brief biography of Britain’s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, written with the cooperation of Mosley’s eldest son Nicholas; an account of the attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944, written with the help of Count Berthold von Stauffenberg, eldest son of the heroic would-be assassin; a history of the Edwardian era on the eve of the first world war; the story of a Berlin brothel used by the Nazis to spy on the clients. I am not sure what such varied interests say about their author, but it has been a very exhilarating ride.
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