Page 74 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - Winter 20
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wives, what about writing a novel about back to the Western Front, he takes part in
another one of them?” Allenby’s honour-guard when he enters the
Holy City in December 1917.
This made sense and so I wrote a second
Henrician novel about Wife #5, the My third WWI novel, ‘Go Spy Out the Land’,
unfortunate Catherine Howard. Both of these is about espionage on the Western Front near
Tudor novels became my best-selling works Ypres, Belgium. It describes how our hero
and while they didn’t pay for a new Rolls from West Sussex (I wonder why there?)
Royce, I was very happy with the proceeds. becomes involved with a young lady or two.
At the same time, he exposes what the
Germans are up to while stealing one of their
proto-type tanks.
A side effect of all of the above is that, apart
from dealing with some nefarious publishers,
I have met some very interesting people.
These include the Chancellor of Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge who I met in his
office, while I was researching ex-student,
Christopher Marlowe; having a fascinating
guided tour around Sarajevo exactly one
hundred years after the fateful assassination,
Using my love of history, and writing what I as well as becoming friends with a
knew about, I wrote three novels based on the descendant of one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
First World War, which I had studied for my Today she lives in a small village in North
BA and MA. The first one, Two Bullets in Yorkshire and was once a ‘dinner-lady’ at a
Sarajevo was about the assassination of the Jewish school in Gateshead!
Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand and his
wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo in June 1914. This “What – with your Habonim background,
famous incident probably led to the outbreak haven’t you written anything about Israel?”
Yes. The first book I wrote about this neck of
of the 1914-1918 War. For this novel, I the woods was, ‘Of Guns and Mules’ – a
concentrated on the assassination and on the WWI novel about Trumpeldor and the Zion
miserable lives of the assassins, while Mule Corps. I enjoyed writing and
contrasting them to the lives and secret love
affair between the archduke and his beautiful researching this one so much that I made the
wife. I followed this up with Entrenched, a hero, David Levi, the father of the hero,
love story which took place among the Benny Levi, in my second ‘Israeli’ novel –
muck’n bullets of the trenches on the Western ‘Of Guns, Revenge and Hope’. This WWII
novel was about the Jewish Brigade, who
Front. Of course, with my Zionist fought the Nazis in Italy, smuggled
background, after recovering from being concentration camp survivors to Mandatory
wounded in France, the hero is sent to the Palestine and who, via the illegal ‘Nokmim’
Middle East with Allenby. Before being sent
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