SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: My next book, THE PRIME MINISTER'S SECRET AGENT (Maggie Hope #4) is coming out this July. I'm finally, finally, finally done with corrections and it's in ARC form now, with my last edits in. (Whew!)
And so I'm now working on Maggie Hope #5, MRS. ROOSEVELT'S CONFIDANTE. Some of you may remember my post about visiting Washington, D.C. and Alexandria, VA, tracing Winston Churchill's steps as he visited President Roosevelt and the First Lady in December 1941, after Pearl Harbor.
But how to get from there to actually plotting a World War II mystery?
Research, research, research.
What's fascinating to me is that the UK's "Official Secrets Act" — which cloaked much of what went on behind-the-scenes in World War II has been lifted — giving us access to people and stories we've never heard before.
One of those stories is told by Helen Fry, in her 2012 book, THE M ROOM: Secret Listeners Who Bugged the Nazis During World War II. Here's a brief description:
As seen on pbs and Channel 4 documentary "Spying on Hitler's Army"... This is the story of the German émigrés who fled Hitler’s regime and became secret listeners for British Intelligence during the Second World War. Behind the walls of the M Room (M for 'miked') they bugged the conversations of over 10,000 German PoWs, including 59 German Generals at Trent Park in North London. Providing a detailed, oft humorous, insight into life of the Generals in captivity, the book shows the farcical ‘stage-set’ in which they found themselves. But against this backdrop, the secret listeners eavesdropped on admission of war crimes and terrible atrocities against Russians, Poles and Jews; as well as details of an SS mutiny in a concentration camp in 1936, and Hitler’s human ‘stud farms’. This story places firmly on record just how much British and American Intelligence knew about Hitler's annihilation programme and how early. Why at the end of the war were these files not released for the war crimes trials to bring the perpetrators to justice? Was this one of the darkest secrets of the war? These transcripts, and thousands of others, of some of the most important Nazi secrets remained classified until 1999. During their clandestine work the secret listeners did not set eyes on a single German PoW, yet their work and the intelligence they gained was as significant for winning the war as Bletchley Park and cracking the Enigma Code. For over sixty years the listeners never spoke about their work, not even to their families. Many went to their grave bearing the secrets of the nation which had saved them from certain death.
The story of the M Room was also a documentary, called BUGGING HITLER'S GENERALS, which was first broadcast on PBS in the U.S, in May 2013.
Now, this is where it gets fun, like those children's "follow the dots" games...
The book and documentary talk about how Nazi officers let slip information about the V2 rocket program. That led me to:
SPIES IN THE SKY,
OPERATION CROSSBOW,
and the NOVA documentary on PBS: 3D SPIES OF WORLD WAR II.
Hmmmm....
So, we have a secret Nazi rocket-building facility.
We have RAF Spitfires flying over and taking photos, not really understanding what they're seeing.
We have a round-up of high level Nazis in British held prisoner in a British manor house, with every conversation being secretly recorded.
We have some of the Brits looking at the photos who believe that what they're seeing is the next Nazi mega-weopon.
On the other hand, we have people like Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his advisors not convinced and not willing to pledge manpower to bomb the site....
What they need is a something called a Wild (pronounced "vilt") A5 machine to turn the photographs in to 3D and give them more information....
Britain doesn't have one, so they'll need to — somehow — smuggle one out of Germany....
And we now have a ticking clock — can the Brits (and now the Americans) find the Wild A5 and bring it back to England and convince Churchill and the others to bomb the site before the Nazi V2 program is fully operational?
(Thank you for playing along at home.)
Reds, how do you get from research to a plot line?
Readers who are also writers, what do you do?
