Creative writing: Blending fact and fiction

There’s a key moment the making of every novel, and it happened again in my novel Dead Ground. I’d set out to explore the events of the book against the background of what the Nazis called Operation Felix, the bid to kick the Brits off the rock of Gibraltar. The move south was time-tabled for the early days of 1941. With the rest of Europe under the Wehrmacht boot, this would have seen a substantial German presence in Spain.

Then I read and re-read books about the background and involvement of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. At the time of Felix, he headed the Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the German army, but Canaris was unusual. He’d signed up with the Nazi movement in the chaotic aftermath of the Great War but the more he saw of the regime in action, the less he liked it.

 A German of the old school – urbane, reserved, multi-lingual, well-travelled – he watched what happened in Poland, especially to the Jews, and quietly made it his business to frustrate some of his Fuhrer’s wilder foreign adventures. One of these might have been Operation Felix. Can I prove it? No. But it suddenly put him in unlikely company, and that was enough to spark a novel.

The unlikely company was a long-running fictional character of mine, Tam Moncrieff, an ex-Royal Marine poached by MI5. He’s tasked to throttle Felix at birth, and senses that Canaris might be induced to become an ally in this bid. One of the agents Moncrieff recruits is a young Anglo-English art student, translator, and nurse.  

Annie Wrenne has been living on her wits during the Spanish Civil War. Fluent in the language, a woman both determined and physically courageous, she agrees to team up with Carlos Ortega, a mercenary sniper hideously disfigured in a bomb explosion but still available to the highest bidder.

Together, Wrenne and Ortega become involved in an attempt to murder a leading member of the Nazi establishment, Heinrich Himmler, during his brief visit to Spain. The seeming involvement of Canaris will be enough to secure his quiet opposition to Felix.

Canaris and Himmler, plus the English Ambassador to Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare.  All real.  Moncrieff, Annie Wrenne, Carlos Ortega. All invented. This marriage of fiction and non-fiction has been one of the recurring features of The Spoils of War, the series to which Dead Ground (Book Nine) belongs. Just how does an author manage this conjuring trick?

In the first place, with a great deal of trepidation. My own characters are my own business, literally, but real historical figures had lives of their own to manage. Who am I to kidnap them for my own fictional purposes?  

And so you have to get to know these people: how they think, how they talk, how they interact, what newsreel footage and black and white still tell us about them, and what they left us on paper. The latter, to take two examples, is very telling. Both Churchill and Josef Goebbels feature heavily in the series, the former florid and rather pleased with himself, the latter punchy, manipulative, and yet curiously vulnerable.  

You have to enlist these folk on their own terms, not yours. You have to make them both historically credible and fictionally compelling. They have, in short, to serve both your purposes and theirs, and when they get to met your fictional characters those scenes have to carry the reader over what might otherwise be a bump in the narrative road. An easy sleight of hand? Far from it.  

Home-grown characters, by contrast, are wholly mine in the making, and yet they too  must quickly acquire lives of their own. The series – now re-branded ‘The Collection’ – was designed to carry a repertoire company of recurring characters. In all they number around a dozen. They’re English, German, French, American, and they appear and re-appear as successive stories demand. In this way, I’ve been able to avoid the corset of a single main character.

This is, dare I say it, oddly addictive. Every next novel demands a towering pile of books – diaries, biographies, third person accounts – to be read and absorbed to get past the crude sterotypes that history thrusts on people we think we know. In reality, these individuals were as complex and nuanced as people in our own lives, and it’s my duty to catch those telling inflections.

That same duty, oddly enough, applies to my own little troupe of characters. They must be people in their own right, carefully drawn, have lives of their own, and above all they must grow as novel follows novel, and as they meet or manoeuvre themselves around real figures in the then-real world.

Worthwhile? Definitely. A good read? Only you can be the judge…

Dead Ground by Graham Hurley is published by Head of Zeus (£20)

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