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‘For nearly twenty years I was up to my neck in mud and bullets,’
writes subscriber David Lawrence-Young.
‘Not literally, but metaphorically. I had spent a few years
completing my MA dissertation which had analysed the poetry
of the First World War. I had concentrated on Wilfred Owen,
Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and Charles Sorley and knew
that I definitely had enough material to write a war novel or two.
‘But what was I going to write? A novel about a sensitive
young man writing poems as he survived the muddy, bloody
trenches of Flanders? A gung-ho story about a valiant junior
officer smashing his way across No-Man’s Land to bring glory
to his regiment and thus advance his own future promotion? A
battlefield love story? What?
‘And then it came to me. I would write a WW1 spy novel. It
would feature
a motor-cycle
dispatch rider
who, because of
his background
and education,
speaks French
and German.
On a mission
to deliver some
secret dispatches,
he is injured and
hospitalised. Following his recovery,
he returns to the Front but this time
as a spy in order to carry out several
undercover missions.
‘But where was this to happen?
After all, the Western Front
extended for hundreds of miles
from the English Channel to the
Swiss border. In the end I chose
the area around Ypres (“Wipers”
to the troops then serving there)
since I had studied this particular
battlefield and had toured the area
as part of my academic research.
‘Of the twenty historical novels that I have had published, Go
Spy Out the Land was to be one of the most exciting to write.
It included much of the background material I had studied and
actually seen as well as including my love of old British motorbikes.
What more could I want? The book was published a few months
ago by Ravenswood Publishing NC, USA and, as I was still on this
First World War “high” I followed it up almost immediately with
Entrenched. This second war novel which included a love story
concentrated more on the fighting in the trenches in north-east
France as well as on the Palestine and the Middle East battlefields
in 1917. It was published recently by Sharpe Books – a publisher I
had learned about through reading WM.’
Spies, mud and bullets