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David Roberts writes...

21st September 2008

No More Dying (to be published on 30th October) is the ninth in my Lord Edward Corinth/Verity Browne series.

England had not gone to war in 1938 owing to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain having signed a worthless piece of paper at Munich. Czechoslovakia was handed over to Hitler in the vain hope that this bleeding chunk of Europe would satisfy the ravening beast. Of course it didn’t and by February 1939, when No More Dying begins, even the most stubborn ostrich, head firmly buried in the sand, could not escape grasping the unpleasant fact that war was just a few weeks away. Squirm though England had over five shameful years, the reckoning had finally to be paid and the price was very much higher than it should have been.

Most people understood by 1939 that Chamberlain was not the right man to lead this country through total war. The alternatives were Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and Winston Churchill, the outcast who, like Cassandra of old, had forecast war and had not been believed.

There were several attempts on Churchill’s life and this is a fictionalised account of one of them. Churchill himself refused to cower between walls of police or secret service men. Grumpily, he allowed just one policeman to act as bodyguard but he would have been very easy to kill. He was always in public, meeting people and talking to friends and enemies careless of the danger that stalked him.

One of his bitterest enemies – and England’s – was Joseph Kennedy, the American Ambassador and the father of John F Kennedy. He was convinced that England could never stand against Nazi Germany and urged the Prime Minister to make some squalid deal with Hitler to save what she could of her Empire. Worse still, he advised Franklin D Roosevelt, the President of the United States to abandon Britain and not allow himself to be dragged into another European War.

Kennedy had friends in Britain – the so-called Cliveden Set – those who met at the home of the impossibly rich and powerful Astor family.

Edward goes to Cliveden in his efforts to find Churchill’s would-be assassin. He finds murder and betrayal which takes him from an English country house to Switzerland and, on the icy Cresta Run, he finds his nemesis.

This, the penultimate book in the series, is a little darker than its predecessors which reflects the gathering of the storm clouds but No More Dying is, I hope, still fun to read, recalling a dangerous but in some ways more innocent age. The evil was very real but could be recognised. The justification for taking up arms was indisputable. Heroism by ordinary folk was taken for granted.

As I take up my pen to begin the final book in the series, Sweet Sorrow, I feel sad to think I shall be saying goodbye to characters who have become more real to me than many flesh and blood acquaintances. From Sweet Poison to Sweet Sorrow I have been much encouraged by the many letters and emails I have received about the series and I very much hope No More Dying does not disappoint those who have travelled with me through time.

In our current world of financial chaos, greed and weasel words, I hope we can escape with Lord Edward and Verity – not to a better world – but to a year in which every Briton and the British Empire as a whole stood shoulder to shoulder, forgetting family quarrels, to deny a tyrant and a madman final victory.

- David Roberts