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First, Blue Man Falling was likened to Derek Robinson’s Piece Of Cake, then To Play The Fox to Biggles Sweeps The Desert (see previous blog Admirable Chaps). Ingorious Bastards. Now, although no-one has pointed it out so far, Quentin Tarantino’s World War 2 fantasy Inglorious Bastards, featuring a unit of Jewish fighters operating behind the lines in Europe with the objective of assassinating Hitler, has a distinct similarity to ‘my’ group of Palestinian volunteers in To Play The Fox, except that in Fox the action takes place in North Africa at the time of the Battle of El Alamein and is much closer to the truth.

Researching the novel I learned of the Special Interrogation Group, the brainchild of Captain Herbert ‘Bertie’ Buck MC, who assembled a band of Palestinian Jews, all fluent in German, who dressed and trained as German soldiers and carried out clandestine missions in enemy territory, harrying the Afrika Korps in many ways, including attacks on airfields, and bringing back vital intelligence. The men of the SIG, correctly uniformed, even entered German camps to queue for food and, on one occasion, to demand pay. It ended tragically when an ambitious operation was betrayed by an ex-Wehrmacht member of the group who, having turned once, turned again.

However, in To Play The Fox, the Holly Force unit is not after Hitler but Rommel. In this they are unsuccessful because, when the Allies launched their assault at El Alamein, the so-called Desert Fox was in Berlin receiving promotion and medical attention. But his successor, the ill-fated General Georg Stumme, is targetted instead. He dies, but as he died in real life, victim of a heart attack, although my American wild-card Ossie Wolf, seconded to fly with Holly Force, comes close to putting a bullet in him. So, fiction woven more closely with fact.

I look forward to seeing Inglorious Bastards however, as a curious throwback to films like The Dirty Dozen, Guns Of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. Meanwhile, though, I await the inevitable suggestion that, somehow, I got the idea for To Play The Fox from the mercurial Mr Tarantino. It’s a pity, actually, that it’s worked out this way. Given a year or two, he might have read Fox and thought: ‘ This would make a great movie!’

To those of you interested in the ‘mechanics’ of embarking on a novel, I’m trying something new with Book Four. Previously the stories have evolved as I went along. Obviously my research into times, places and military hardware had been completed and I knew broadly where the plot would take me. But only broadly, and I was led almost as a reader would be led by characters and events down unexpected paths to often surprising happenings. Because of this process of discovery, faltering sometimes, re-tracing my steps, progress could be agonisingly slow; occasionally as few as three hundred words in a day.

With Book Four, for various reasons I won’t go into now, I decided on a different approach. This time I have completed a detailed synopsis, chapter by chapter, exceeding 15,000-words (can it be called a synopsis?) that has set out the entire plot and detailed in great depth each character; his or her background, motivations and actions. The beginning, middle and end is known and, to some extent, fixed. The hope is that, when I start writing ‘for real’ on Monday 19 October, I will be able to deal with the novel as if it were a journey, the route already identified, the points along the way confirmed, the destination established. Of course it may come to nothing, and I will find myself veering away from the map and exploring those ‘unexpected paths’ of previous titles. Whatever the outcome one thing never changes: that sense of rising anxiety that will overcome me as I sit down in front of a blank screen, in this case at about 10.00 a.m on Monday 19 October, and wonder ‘Can I do it again?’