Hello everyone, thanks for having me aboard.
Here are morningpaper's q's,and my a's, to get started:
From Morning paper
Why did you write the book? I mean, I can understand thinking "Hmm this obituary is interesting" but that is a far cry from thinking "I know, I will spend the next few years rummaging around the basement of MI5 for his old notebooks and write 200,000 words about it". Have you always had an interest in spies?
I have always been fascinated by spies. Indeed, I was briefly recruited by the Funnies at University, and even went to a few interviews, before we decided by mutual consent that it wasn?t a great idea: not least because I am hopeless at keeping secrets (see above).
I saw the obituary in 1997, and then started gathering bits and pieces, but it was not until MI5 began releasing the official material that I really got going.
- How long did it take to research and write?
Actually, not that long. I researched it for six months, and then wrote it, while still researching, for another year. I was lucky that the vast majority of the material was in one place, the National Archives at Kew.
- Which part of the story surprised you the most?
I was staggered by Chapman?s offer to assassinate Hitler. I really did not know whether to believe it, but the psychological profiles in the files show that he was in deadly earnest. The other big surprise came with the discovery of Chapman?s Iron Cross. I had been convinced that this was just one of Chapman?s self-inflating lies. But then I contacted Ronald Reed?s son, Nicolas, who astonished me by saying that he had Chapman?s iron cross and the citation to go with it in German.
- What has been the most interesting Chapman-related incident or new information that happened to you since the book was published?
The call I got from the German ambassador to Britain explaining that his father, who is still alive, had been the pilot of the Luftwaffe plane that flew Chapman to Britain was quite a revelation. The extraordinary number of people who knew Chapmen still amazes me ? it is one of the great pleasures of writing a book that is on the edge of living memory - I still get telephone calls from people saying that they had been to his nightclub, or even, in two case, had done ?jobs? with him before the war.
You are SO prolific and you have THREE CHLIDREN. How do you juggle it all?
Kate (Muir), my wife, and I take it in turns to write books. I think if we were both doing them simultaneously, the entire family edifice would collapse. In truth, it was easier to write the books when we were abroad, as foreign correspondents for the Times, because one had a little more space to juggle in. The Times has always been very supportive of the book-writing, and gave me a lovely chunk of time off to write Agent Zigzag.