Previously in Readers Write...

 #1  March 09  

 News from the author, now and then.

Derek Robinson          Return to Homepage

#2  May 09

Robbery in the Library, Gender Confusion, and a Dog Named 'Moggy'.    

   Listen, I just write the books.  Who knows where they end up? I've had mail from Norwegians on oil platforms,  and from a pilot who flies jumbos for a South Pacific airline,  and from Jim in Alberta where it's often 30 or 40 below.  I'm told the U.S. Marines in Iraq enjoy my WW2 desert story,  A Good Clean Fight.   Nothing surprises me, not even the email from Tim in Australia that began:  "The first book I stole was Piece of Cake."  He nicked it from the school library when he was 16.  "I probably read it another six or seven times before it fell apart."  By then he was old enough to pay for books, so he bought another copy.  Should have bought two, and given the other to the library. 

   These thoughts are prompted by the steady stream of letters (and cheques or PayPal requests) that followed Nicholas  Lezard's corker of a review of Hullo Russia, Goodbye England in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago. David in Maryland ordered a copy and wrote that he came across Goshawk Squadron over 35 years ago and still re-reads it, along with other yarns of mine.  Helen in Dublin said she 'enjoyed' my writing, then thought that 'appreciated' was a better word, and finally upgraded that to 'enthralled'. W.B.T. in Southampton has read and re-read all my books, and (he says) so has his wife, which is pleasing.  Paul in Dublin ranks me as "one of 3 or 4 authors all of whose work I own";  and Matt in London "recently read Goshawk Squadron on my honeymoon and absolutely loved it."  (Let's hope that marks the start of a long relationship.)   And many more letters, saying more of the same, including the nice lady in Wales who addressed me as 'Dear Sir or Madam'. 

Derek Robinson          Return to Homepage

#3  June 09

Vulcan feedback,

   the deaded P tube, 

              and the Snow White trick.   

Thomas Keneally is a very good researcher, By chance, he met the owner of a Californian leather-goods shop who was one of the Polish Jews rescued from the German death camps by Oskar Schindler. After that, Keneally worked hard to find the facts that became Schindler's Ark, which became the film Schindler's List. He could have written another Holocaust history. Instead, he wrote his book as fiction - not because he wasn't sure of the truth, but because he didn't want it to end up on the packed shelves of Holocaust volumes. Keneally wanted his story to be read by people who never look at World War Two histories. And he succeeded.

I think I know how he feels. I parted company with one publisher because my fiction always ended up in the Military History section of the shop. That wasn't why I wrote it. I wrote it for the Keneally reason, so that people might get an idea of what war is like at the sharp end. Not the daily scores in, say, air combat in the desert war (which is how military historians tend to see the battle) but how a fighter squadron lives, kills and dies in the sand, flies and blood of the Western Desert. A Good Clean Fight is good history; I researched it thoroughly. But it takes you where the military histories never go. I hope that's true of all my flying stuff.

Including the latest, Hullo Russia, Goodbye England. I've had some feedback from former Vulcan pilots and groundcrew. Chris in London flew Vulcans and said: "It was a good read, and took me back." Brad in Lincoln said, "Have just finished it. Grand read!" Having been front-line ground crew for 15 years, he noticed a couple of places where I slightly bent the truth - for instance, each Vulcan airbase was either a Blue Steel or a bomb station, but not both. My mistake.

And here's another detail I might have included: "There is no mention of the dreaded P Tube, a rubber bladder with a fitted chrome receptacle into which you could pee, if you really had to. After a sortie, each crew member emptied their own, normally at the side of the Crew Chief's hut on the pan." I suspect that's the kind of info my readers like to know. Some people thought Baggy Bletchley bought it in a portable loo at the end of Piece of Cake, and were pleasantly surprised to meet him again in Hullo Russia. He survived Cake, and A Good Clean Fight; he may surface again.

I was happy that Brad confirmed the problems of arming a Vulcan with the Blue Steel missile. The fuel (HTP) was so toxic that any groundcrew splashed with it had to dive into a nearby plunge bath instantly, or his clothing caught fire. And loading the missile meant 230 gold studs (the Butt Connector) made perfect contact; if not, download and start again. An exercise involving Blue Steel began hours before take-off. A far cry from the famous 'four-minute warning' of an attack.

 Peter, a former Vulcan captain now in France, got the book and wrote: "I sat in a deckchair at the week-end and I pretty much read it straight through. I think that says a great deal, and I found it a good read. The story perhaps stretched the imagination a little in some areas. Certainly our hero Silk could not have been disposed of quite so quickly." Well, endings are often the most difficult part. Peter adds that he joined the Vulcan OCU eight years after Silk. By then, the aircraft was a truly low-level machine, Blue Steel had long gone, and so had the WW2 veterans in the aircrew. (Maybe some of the mindset of those who had bombed German cities went with them.) But Peter also read Piece of Cake. "I think you have caught the repartee and banter of aircrew magnificently," he says. "My first Vulcan squadron used the Snow White party trick." (That's the one with everyone in line astern, marching on their knees, arms folded, singing 'Hey Ho!' - it's in Cake, page 75.) "With 55 aircrew on the squadron, there were sometimes more than seven dwarfs!"

Thanks to all who wrote.  And welcome to several public libraries who have bought copies, including Enfield (in London), Hartlepool, North Yorkshire, Dorset and Wrexham.  Glad to have you on board.    

Derek Robinson      Return to Homepage

   Someone remarked that there are no heroes in my books.  Plenty of courage, no lack of sacrifice, a lot of death.  But heroes?  The word itself has been done to death.  I was in New York when US soldiers, marines and airmen returned from the First Gulf  War, nearly twenty years ago, and they got a tickertape reception.  New Yorkers called them all 'heroes', and many servicemen looked uncomfortable with the label.  In any army, for every frontline fighting man there are six or seven or even ten men behind  him, providing support.  Cooks, medics, dentists, truck drivers, guys organising supplies, keeping records, sending signals.  All doing essential jobs, but are they all heroes?  When everyone is heroic, the word has lost all meaning.  Let's save it for those who truly deserve it.  

   Moving on:  I've always believed that a good writer can write convincingly in any style that's needed  -  tabloid journalism, song lyrics,  boring bureaucratic jargon, whatever.  I'm sometimes disappointed by crime novelists who include chunks of newspaper  reporting for the sake of  plot.  They've obviously never worked on a paper. When I wrote 'The Eldorado Network'   -   which is  about a double agent reporting allegedly secret info   -    his style often had to be boring in order to be convincing.  The facts seemed more exciting because the writing was so dull.  I worked hard on that,  just as I did in 'A Good Clean Fight' where I wanted to quote the lyrics of a certain popular song.  (Good contrast with the bleak Libyan desert.)  Surprise, surprise:  UK copyright  lasts for 70 years after the death of the creator,  and those lyrics were still in copyright.  Rather than pay a fee (hey, writing is a business, remember), I wrote my own lyrics, of which I'm quietly proud.  You can sing them in the bath, if you wish:  

                              When you don't care... 

                              I'm bound in iron bands. 

                              When you don't care... 

                              I'm lost in desert sands. 

                              In this wilderness, with none but you to guide me, 

                              I'm in heaven with your tenderness beside me...  

And if you think any fool could have written that,  just try writing the next verse.  But don't steal my words.  They're my copyright now.   

   Fresh insights from readers' messages.  Anthony in London bought 'Hullo Russia...' and mentions what a pleasure it is "to find a novelist who is able to produce books that you can't put down  -  I finished 'Piece of Cake' in a few days and felt totally wrung out  by the sense of tension and fatigue you managed to sustain..."  By contrast, a different reaction from John,  somewhere in UK,  who  "read it again and again over a period of three years...I never, ever laughed out loud so many times. My wife thinks I'm mad, The humour is fantastic, and the deaths of the characters very emotional..."  Matthew in Ontario discovered 'Cake' when he was   14:  "I have read it dozens of times since then and still enjoy it immensely."  Indeed,  it has inspired him to write a Bomber Command novel.  And why not?  Kim, now a librarian, confesses to having borrowed a copy of 'Hornet's Sting' from a public library, told them it was lost (not true) but paid for it, and says: "I always enjoy recommending your work to fans of Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O'Brian, C.S. Forester,  etc. Absolute fantastic reads on all levels."  

   And Richard in North Yorkshire  -  another big fan  -  reckons that " 'Goshawk Squadron' should have won the Booker Prize." (I'll settle for the fact that it's still in print nearly 40 years later.)  Also from far-flung readers:  Neal in Houston, Texas says of 'Hullo Russia...':  "Well done, sir! You still have the gift for character and banter."  Mark in Adelaide, while ordering an armful of books, says:  "Thanks for years of entertainment!"   While Jarmo in Oulo, on the strength of reading the first 80 pages of War Story', wants a similar armful of what he calls my "delightful prose".   And Oulo, in case you're wondering, is in delightful Finland.  

My thanks to you all.  

Derek Robinson                   Return to Homepage

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Readers Write #7 November 09

 Viewers are smart,

          readers are far-flung,

                     translations are rare

   The television adaptation of  Piece of Cake still attracts questions.  (It was first shown in 1988,  so if you're under 25, ask your parents.)  All five hour-long episodes are now available on DVD, at what strikes me (and I can be impartial because I sold the rights and so I don't make a penny from the DVD) as a very low price. If you can't find it locally, try Ian Allan Publishing  -  that's where I bought mine.  For a drama, the TV showing pulled in a big audience. I think the final episode attracted 13 million viewers in the UK,  and LWT sold the series around the world.  In the US it went out on Mobil Masterpiece Theatre, a much respected viewing slot.  And don't tell me they spell it 'Theater' over there.  Mobil called it 'Theatre', and I have the poster to prove it.  

Tim in Victoria, Australia was 12 at the time, watched Cake with his Mum, bet her that Moggy would survive, "which of course ultimately resulted in my having to make both our beds for a week."  This throws an interesting light on the novel and one reason why I think it keeps on getting re-read (and re-shown): it's the unpredictable nature of events.  A good story should surprise. I set out to tell the events of the Phoney War, the Battle for France and the Battle of Britain, just as they might have happened to one RAF fighter squadron.  All the research I did (and that was a lot) confirmed one thing: many pilots got killed, some in battle, some not, some by inexperience, some by sheer bad luck.  Flying was risky in those days.  On a typical fighter squadron, of those pilots who had begun the war, most would not be flying a year later. Sometimes none.  

This is the unpredictable element that keeps Piece of Cake on edge.  When the television series was being cast, I was pleased to see that I recognised hardly any names.  Viewers are smart.  They know that the star they meet in episode one is not going to be killed in episode two or three, and probably not at all  -  television has paid that actor a ton of money and it's not going to be wasted.  Nearly all the pilots in Piece of Cake were played by young unknown actors.  Some became better known later (Jeremy Northam, Nathaniel Parker) and Tom Burlinson had already made a name in Australia but not in Britain.  So viewers could never guess who would live and who would die.  Tim, aged 12, guessed wrongly,  and that both reflected the truth of the war and upheld the dramatic tension of the story.  Incidentally, I thought Neil Dudgeon, who played Moggy Cattermole, was excellent.  An RAF fighter pilot who actually led a squadron in the Battle of Britain read the book, saw the series, and wrote to me.  He had known men like Moggy,  and he summed him up very neatly:  "Bad for discipline, good for morale  -  every squadron should have one.  Just one." 

Other questions I get asked: (1) Did I write the screenplay? No, I didn't.  I'd put four hard years into the novel, and I was very happy when Leon Griffiths (who created Minder) wrote the screenplay. (2) The novel says Hurricanes, so why use Spitfires?  Very few Hurricanes survived, and none were aerobatic, so it was Spits or nothing.  (3) Did I like the TV version?  Well, naturally I pefer the book,  but it's a long story and if they'd shot the whole of the printed word, the series would never have ended. It's pretty good. The music is haunting.  I wish it were on CD. 

Back to readers write.  Among the more exotic  messages have been those from Bernice, who runs Crooked Timber Books in what sounds like a very rugged corner of Nova Scotia; Jarmo in Finland (ordering the RFC trilogy);  Anette in Sweden (ditto); plus Karen in Switzerland (Hornet's Sting), Jules in Holland, Charles in Prague and Werner in Vienna  (all for Hullo Russia, Goodbye England).  

Which prompts two thoughts.  First:  that I'm lucky to write in English, a global language. When an Egyptian airliner talks to Bulgarian air traffic control, they talk in English.   I'm sure Finland is a delightful country, but if I'd been born there, writing in Finnish would not have made my career any easier.  And my second thought is that there are translations of my work sitting on my shelves that might make an unusual gift if you have a friend in another country.   I have copies of Goshawk Squadron in French (Les Abattoirs du Ciel), in Spanish (Escadrilla Azur), and in Dutch (Het Havik Squadron).  There's The Eldorado Network in Spanish (El Spia Dorado) and in Dutch (Het Eldorado Netwerk);  and Kramer's War in Finnish (Luutnantti Kramerin Sota) and in what may be Belgian but is probably Dutch (Kramer's Oorlog).   I've even got  Polish versions of A Good Clean Fight (Pustynny Ogien), and of The Eldorado Network (Siatka Eldorado) and of Artillery of Lies (Artyleria Klamstw).  If you're interested, email me and we'll take it from there.

 My thanks to all who have written.  

Derek Robinson                   Return to Homepage

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Readers Write #8 December 09

Rumblings in Cornwall,

                        the Forgotten War,

                                     and three helpings of 'Cake'

I sense a smouldering impatience in Cornwall.  K.M.D. of St Ives writes to say how much he's enjoyed my previous books, especially the RFC/RAF trilogies.  'Damned Good Show' meant much to him because his father-in-law was in Bomber Command in WW2, got shot down in a Wellington, spent four years in Stalag Luft III, and then in the 1950s  instructed at RAF Finningley, a V-Bomber base.  Which is why K.M.D. particularly wanted to read 'Hullo Russia, Goodbye England'  -  it echoes much of his father-in-law's experience.   

But then he adds:  "I've been disappointed that there aren't more of your RAF books. After all, there's still a lot of WW2 left for Hornet Squadron after 'A Good Clean Fight', and there's also Korea, Suez etc."  

Well, I wish I could oblige. The money would be nice. I see other writers who, year after year, produce a succession of novels that play variations on the same tune, and a small voice inside me says: Why don't you do that?  Dick Francis writes a horse-racing novel a year. His fans love him.  Write an RAF novel a year and your fans will love you.  Why not? And a loud voice inside me says: Because you'll be bored rigid. Even the great Conan Doyle grew to loath Sherlock Holmes and tried to kill him off.  His fans wouldn't wear it and Doyle went back to grinding out more variations on a tune that must have made him want to throttle someone. If not Holmes, then Watson.  Or Inspector Lestrade. Or Mrs Hudson..  Or, ideally, the whole gang.  

I'm not in the grinding-out business. I write novels because I find an idea that strikes me as different, even surprising. I try to write a story that I enjoy  -  something fresh and unusual, maybe something that upsets what most people think they already know. Every novel is a gamble. I like risk.  So I can't do what K.M.D. of St Ives suggests,  which is to put Hornet Squadron into Suez or Korea simply because those wars happened.  I need an idea as well, a hook to hang the story on.  

One of the hooks I found, and used in 'Damned Good Show', is the forgotten war waged by Bomber Command from  the outbreak of war to 1941/2.  Say 'Bomber Command' to most people and they think of Lancasters flattening German cities.  But the Lancs weren't much seen on ops until mid-1942,  and not in large numbers until 1943.  Take the Thousand-Bomber Raid on Cologne on 30th May 1942;  only 73 Lancs took part in that, as compared with 79 Hampdens,  131 Halifaxes and 602 Wellingtons  (plus others). In fact, Bomber Command's first operation was on the very day that war was declared, 3rd September 1939.  During the next couple of years, the Command learned how (and how not) to take the battle to the enemy homeland. 

So I was very pleased to hear from someone who was there at the start. Lawrence Wheatley in Bude, Cornwall. He qualified as an Air Observer (soon to be renamed Navigator) in summer 1939,  and joined 'B' Flight of 144 Squadron. The squadron  flew Hampdens, a compact twin-engine bomber that plays a big part in 'Damned Good Show'.  Lawrence suffered from chronic air-sickness and was grounded by the medics, which almost certainly saved his life, because on 29 September 1939 'B' Flight was searching for targets north of Heligoland and ran into German fighters. All five Hampdens were shot down. Soon people were calling it the 'Phoney War'.  It was real enough for the RAF.  Throughout WW2, Bomber Command losses were heavy. Of the 48 men who completed Lawrence's Air Observer course, 28 died in action or in flying accidents.

Lawrence said he's enjoying D.G.S., "though slightly disappointed" that it's centred on the officers "and little is said about the Sergeants' Mess where the majority of the crew would live."  It's a fair point.  My problem was numbers.  I told the story through the pilots, who were usually officers.  That involved a dozen (or more) characters. If I had included the Sergeants' Mess too, it would have doubled the cast. That would be more than I, or most readers, could handle.

Meanwhile, my other flying stories have been prompting some mail. Bob in Ottery St. Mary flew Canberras and Buccaneers (both types were capable of carrying nuclear weapons) and he writes: "I don't know how you do it, but the atmosphere and the characters on the squadrons I've served on are often reflected in your books."  Steve in Nottingham, having just read 'Hullo Russia, Goodbye England', says: "The flying descriptions  -  absolutely brilliant. I presume you leaned on some former pilots to get that right."  Well, I certainly had my stuff doublechecked for accuracy, but in essence it all came out of what's left of my mind.  Chris in the Borders "liked HRGE immensely. You have a way with character dialogue that, in my opinion, is second to none....Also the story had me from the start; these are characters that I may not necessarily care about, but I revel in their ups and downs, and ultimately they mostly win me over by the end;  including Luis Cabrillo from 'The Eldorado Network' trilogy..."  (It's actually a quartet, with the new book 'Operation Bamboozle', which Chris bought.) Jonathan in Basingstoke is now on his third copy of 'Piece of Cake', having worn out the other two: "Still an old favourite that I revisit every few years....and it has the rare gift of giving something different every time." While Susan of Colchester bought HRGE and 'Hornet's Sting' as a Christmas gift for her husband, "a devotee of your writing"; and when Richard in Kent got his copy of 'Operation Bamboozle', he was "really chuffed to have a shelf full of your produce."   And I'm chuffed too. 

Derek Robinson                   Return to Homepage

Readers Write #9 February 2010

Barrel-rolling a Boeing, our forgetful MPs,  and a nice line in scams.

For the filming of  Piece of Cake, the Spitfires were flown by professionals, and they took it seriously,  which is understandable when (a) the aeroplane was worth half a million pounds (more now), and (b) it was irreplaceable, and (c) your life depended on it. 

Nevertheless, I remember a day when the weather was too gloomy for filming, and one pilot got very bored with hanging around.  When the cloud-level lifted the light was still poor, but he was itching to fly, and so he took off and threw his Spit around for ten minutes. Just for fun. No charge on the producers. But the pilot got a big charge out of it.  

I mention this because I imagine that inside every commercial pilot is the ghost of a fighter pilot who sometimes looks at his Airbus or his Boeing and wonders what it would be be like to perform a sweet barrel roll, or play leapfrog with the clouds.  Just for fun.  Then the fighter pilot gets firmly put back in his box and the pro pilot returns to another day in the cockpit.  Or, as many call it, the office.  

Maybe that explains why quite a few working pilots like to read my stuff.  Rowland in New South Wales spent eight years flying in police helicopters, and he read his paperback Piece of Cake so often that it fell apart. He says: "Many of my vintage aircrew read it in our many and lengthy downtimes. We read parts of it to each other across the crewroom, office and hangar floor...Good memories."  (He's now bought a hardback copy from me.) "A sincere thank you for the many hours of enjoyment Piece of Cake brought to very bored aircrew waiting for the telephone to ring."  Robert in Cologne is another pilot (he's with Lufthansa) who keeps returning to Cake (now on his sixth reading).  "For me, it is maybe the best book about flying fighters I have ever read," he writes, "apart from being a very good book."  And he adds something it's always good to hear from a pro pilot: "You got the flying scenes right -  and I'm very sensitive when it comes to that."  But it's the humour and the characters that keep drawing him back: "I just read the part where Squadron Leader Rex elaborates on fighter tactics in October '39  -  with Reilly (his dog) yawning and wandering away. That is so good."  Dogs often make useful contributions in my books. My wife reckons that Othello, the elderly basset hound in Operation Bamboozle, has the best lines. Nobody hears him, of course, but he knows what he thinks.

Moving on:  Gordon in Suffolk worked for Rolls-Royce engines until recently.  He enjoyed Hullo Russia, Goodbye England, and he's not the first to tell me he's "absolutely appalled that you could not find a publisher. If you can't get this type of book published, who can?"  It's a mystery to me too, but commercial publishers go their own sweet way, which is why I self-publish my stuff.  Gordon, having found my website, says: "It was like discovering a treasure trove of undiscovered goodies."  (He meant the books, not my author's photograph, which a friend said looks like a benevolent Balkans dictator.  That's what friends are for.) Gordon passes on a story he was told by a veteran aerospace journalist who went to a reception given by a defence manufacturer. Many youngish MPs were there. The journo remarked to them that it was marvellous to see the Vulcan, greatest of all V-bombers, flying again. Blank looks. 'V-bombers....Vulcan, Victor, Valiant...Cold War... nuclear deterrent in the 1960s...' More blank looks. Gordon quotes Alan Bennett: "There is nowhere more distant than the recent past."  Too true. It's one reason why I wrote HRGE. People forget. Even things like the motto of the nuclear powers  -  Mutual Assured Destruction  -  can slip their mind.  

Readers continue to intrigue me by their sheer stamina. David in Barnes SW13 reckons he's read "just about every one of your books at least 5 times (beginning with Goshawk Squadron) and I have now recruited my present wife, my ex-wife, my two brothers, my daughter, her husband and soon, I hope, their two boys."  To which, with the Cake DVD, he's just hooked his son-in-law.  Truly amazing. John, somewhere in Oz, is reading Damned Good Show for the fourth time, and  -  because his dad flew in them  -  would like me to write about the dangerous, low-level work of four-engine Halifaxes dropping supplies to partisans in Italy, Jugoslavia, even Poland. Very hairy ops.  And Peter in Ontario got a kick out of reading A Good Clean Fight, since his dad flew Kittyhawks with the Desert Air Force, went on to fly Spits in Johnson's Canadian wing at D-Day, and survived the war.  Peter ("I'm a big fan") bought Hornet's Sting, Op Bam and Hullo Russia. Then Karen in Switzerland, having just read War Story and Hornet's Sting, says: "I loved both and 'missed' reading them when finished." She's always been interested in vintage aeroplanes and in photography (she sent me some fine airborne** shots taken at Old Warden, especially one of the Bristol Fighter), and her partner is a retired pilot.  Add her interest in the history of both World Wars and (she says) "You managed to tick all the boxes that make the perfect book for me. I adored all the characters and found myself completely absorbed by the pilot psyche of the day."  Lastly, Stephen in Nottingham "enjoyed Bamboozle, which managed to combine a page-turning plot with some lovely period detail (as ever), and a nice line in scams." He then raises an unusual point.  In Cake, he says, I supply the background to every main character  -  except Moggy Cattermole. Stephen wants to know more about him.  I'll give it some serious thought. 

Thanks to everyone who wrote.

** If you would like to see Karen's pictures, Click Here

Readers Write #10 March 2010

 Humour can be more dangerous than gunpowder. With gunpowder,  you get a choice of two:  either it explodes or it fails. With humour, the choice may be three.  Ideally, people laugh.  But some people may not see the point.  When that happens, the silence is deafening.  And yet others may find the alleged humour so unfunny that, for them, it backfires.  It offends them.  This is the risk you take, because there is no such thing as a joke that cannot upset somebody, somewhere.  So humour is a gamble.  Ask any stand-up comic.  He'll tell you of nights when he had to fight the audience to make them laugh.  Other nights, they would laugh no matter what he said, even if it was "Corrugated iron".   Humour is a battlefield. 

    Maybe that's why it's such a big ingredient in my books. I write about battlefields (some of them in the sky) and humour keeps cropping up, even in the most desperate situations. It might be gallows humour.  In my first novel, Goshawk Squadron, a very young fighter pilot is so twitchy about going on patrol that he can't face his porridge at breakfast.  Woolley, the CO, comes in. "Are you going to eat that, Dudley?" Woolley asks.  "Or have you already?"   Nobody in the Mess laughs.  But I hoped the reader would at least smile, partly because the joke helps to tell the story and partly because it helps me  make a living. Richard Briers says much the same thing, and he should know.  

   Richard Briers ('The Good Life')  is one of the best comic actors in Britain. He's been called an icon.  (Live long enough and, as Alan Bennett put it, if you can still eat a boiled egg, you're an icon. I'm the third biggest icon in Bristol. The other two are Wallace and Gromit.) Briers says his talent for comedy has kept his family in comfort for more than 50 years.  Here's his advice to young actors:  "If you want to starve, go for Shakespeare.  But if you can be funny, lucky bugger, look at the bank balance..." Briers is no ham:  he's played King Lear on tour to 30 countries.  But being funny is what he's good at, and he's grateful for the talent.  I'm grateful for mine. Subtract the humour from my books and I don't think Darren (in Western Australia) would have read and re-read all my RFC and RAF stories. 

    "My fave is A Good Clean Fight," he writes. "Such vivid imagery!" He's a Flight Lieutenant, RAAF,  an Air Traffic Controller and amateur pilot, and his Aussie grandfather fought tank battles in the Desert War (where AGCF takes place),  so it's no surprise that the book rang bells for him.  But what strikes him especially is the humour.  "Your wicked satire style is contagious, and I must control myself when dealing with difficult people for weeks after reading one of your books, lest I drop slightly too barbed comments in response to their 'unhelpfulness'." 

    Cut to Luxembourg.  Captain Jean-Marie, a retired pilot, tells me he reads and enjoys all my stuff.  Nowadays, the aircrew in all airlines must have a grasp of English,  which is good for me.  Martin in London SW6 (not a pilot) rates himself as "simply one of your greatest fans" and to prove it he's read Hornet's Sting five times, Goshawk Squadron even more, and he's just finished Damned Good Show for the third time.  Now he's delving into Red Rag Blues and Operation Bamboozle, plus Hullo Russia, Goodbye England. ("Did Silk make it to the church with Zoe?" he asks.)

    Last month I promised Stephen in Nottingham that I would reveal Moggy Cattermole's background, since nothing is said about it in Piece of Cake. I've given it some thought, and young Moggy  -  always too tall for his age, and never a pretty boy  -  turned out to be the only son of a minor Anglican bishop.  He had three elder sisters who spoiled him something rotten.  He soon rebelled against discipline and good manners (this often happened to sons of ultra-respectable families).  He found that he had a talent for getting his own way, sometimes by flattery, sometimes by bribery, sometimes by blackmail.  He was morally neutral but fairly brave. Liked flying  because civilians, especially women, treated him like a god.  Otherwise  -  no ambitions and no principles except having a good time at others' expense. If it hadn't been for the war he would probably have ended up in jail.

Thanks to everyone who wrote.

Readers Write #11 May 2010

Risky Hits,
                    Inedible Cakes,
                                            and the shock of Woolley's Twin Brother 

         When he was being interviewed on television, Stephen Sondheim remarked that, at the opening of  West Side Story on Broadway, many of the audience walked out. The show wasn't what they expected. Their idea of a good musical was lots of easy laughs, gorgeous girls, and songs you could whistle on the way home. West Side Story, by contrast, was about love and hate between street gangs, and it changed for ever the way musicals were written. Sondheim (lyrics) and Leonard Bernstein (music)  -  with some help from Shakespeare  -  wanted to stretch their talents and challenge the audience's expectations.  They wanted to move on, to create something fresh and new and surprising. 

 This is satisfying but dangerous.  Bizet's Carmen was fresh and new and it got panned by the critics. When Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was first performed in Paris, the audience rioted.  TIME magazine gave Bonnie and Clyde zero stars. When Dave Brubeck wrote his jazz hit, Take Five, his record company turned it down because, they said, people can't dance to five-in-a-bar music. Van Gogh was broke for most of his short life, Catch-22 was rejected by 17 publishers, and my novel Piece of Cake was such a spectacular flop when first published that the hardback edition got remaindered within six months. Cake is not in the same creative league as Stravinsky or Van Gogh (although some have said it's up there with Heller's Catch-22), but I was trying to make something fresh and original when I wrote it:  a novel about the Battle of Britain which showed that RAF fighter pilots were not all heroic, handsome and always victorious.  They were human. The strain on them was huge. Some behaved admirably. Some did not. Inevitably, the book was condemned by those who preferred to believe the myth. They said that Cake was wrong, bad, disgraceful.  I wasn't surprised, or even disappointed.  If you stick your neck out, chances are that someone will try to chop it off. One good friend urged me to rewrite Goshawk Squadron without Woolley who, he felt, was totally unacceptable. Another friend abandoned  The Eldorado Network after two chapters.  "What on earth is it all about?" he asked.  That's life. Fiction, like fruit, is a matter of personal taste. No book is for everybody, which is why I never say to anyone, "You must read this novel  -  you'll love it."  They may hate it, and despise my terrible taste

This knowledge only goes to boost my respect for those big-hearted readers who strongly recommend my stuff to their children, wives, ex-wives, working colleagues, neighbours, librarians, and someone they met in a bar. Peter, in Wellington, New Zealand, falls into a slightly different category  -  his (adult) daughter takes his books and fails to return them, which explains why he ordered another Cake from me. "This will be the fifth copy I will have (temporarily) owned," he says, and he also owns "three copies each of Goshawk Squadron and  Hornet's Sting, bought at various times against depredations by my daughter."  

Some of the emails I get rank me so highly amongst the Great Writers of the World that I haven't the nerve to repeat them here. But Alan of W5 simply says, "Big fan  -  keep doing it!" while D.E.W.  in Luton says, "I enjoy your books immensely." Another great fan, Jim in Frome, ordered Hornet's Sting and looks forward to "reading the one book I've so far been unable to find."   And Ronald, now living in Normandy and "an avid reader since Kramer's War in 1978", wanted Hullo Russia, Goodbye England and Operation Bamboozle, and tells why  -  "thoroughly entertaining, amusing, informative and thought-provoking." Finally, Nathaniel, here in Bristol, has read everything of mine he could find, then bought Hullo Russia and finished it "at a sitting".   He also uncovered a rarity  -  a figure who was famous enough to get a big obituary which (surprise, surprise) likened him to Major Woolley.

The obit ran in The Guardian on 22 March 1995 and it was written by Christopher MacLehose  (by far the best editor I ever had). It was for Edmund Fisher, a brilliant figure in the publishing world, described as "fabulously intolerant of dead wood" and "militantly unpompous" and "a severe trial to his corporate masters".  MacLehose also detected "an inadvertent likeness in him to Major Woolley, the RFC commander in Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson whom Edmund later published (and what a terrifying airman he would have made):  a brave, passionate, rebarbative officer, always seeking out the best in his men, a tireless inspiration to them, always minding about winning, having a huge appetite for combat, insufferable to his superiors, a rattler of cages, a hater of pretentiousness and snobbery, cutter of swathes, not going to be forgotten."  

Certainly not by me. Although he published Goshawk Squadron when he was at Sphere, I never met Edmund. My loss.

Derek Robinson                          Return to Homepage

  Readers Write #12 June 2010

 Readers Write #14 September  2010

Readers Write #15 October 2010      

Snoopy dies again, 

         A quartet of Hurricanes,

                 And never enough Cake.   

 

   My thanks to all who wrote.    Derek Robinson     Return to Homepage 

Readers Write #16 December 2010      

Caesar's slave rides again,

         Exploring the Canadian military,

           and a double whammy from the US.

            HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED TAKING UP MORE SUITABLE EMPLOYMENT?  

       LIKE BEING A BROTHEL DOORMAN.  

       TROUBLE IS, YOU MIGHT HAVE DIFFICULTY IN FINDING SOMEONE TO  GIVE YOU A REFERENCE.  

       HANG ABOUT, THOUGH  -  HOW ABOUT A TELEVISION PRODUCER!!! 

 Not too subtle, perhaps, but I couldn't fault the writer for spelling or grammar, although a good editor might have queried the triple exclamation marks.  I keep it on the wall for much the same reason that Roman emperors who were making a triumphal procession used to keep a slave standing behind them whose job was to whisper: 'Remember, Caesar, you are mortal.' In my case, the warning is:  'Remember, Robinson, some of the punters out there think your stuff is crap.'

 And that's their privilege. In the long run it's readers, not authors, who decide whether or not a book makes the grade. I mention this because I get some very generous emails which may not be statistically representative.  Kieran in Buckinghamshire reckons that the RFC trilogy is 'without doubt the best aerial combat books I have ever read'. From Chris in Scotland: 'Thanks for a cracking read.' Dave in Northumberland writes: 'Friends and I have spent years enjoying your books'  -  he bought some as gifts, always a clincher  -  'and I re-read them on occasions.'  Richard in Manchester has no doubts:  'They really are wonderful.'  And Marc in Essex says, 'Your books are brilliant,' especially the RFC and RAF series 'which I have re-read many times (as has my father, an ex-national serviceman who served in Malaya).  There's not many novelists, apart from George McDonald Fraser, that get it as right as you do  -  the laughter, the excitement, the selfishness and naivety of young men, the incredible physical and mental demands, the terror and the tragedy.' And Stafford in South Africa simply says, 'I devour your books,' and he bought three of the latest titles to feed his appetite. 

 All that is on the plus side.  I don't hear from readers who throw my book at the cat, say it's unreadable, and go down the pub instead.  I don't hear from them because they're not going to waste a stamp on me, but I'm sure they exist. They probably won't read this, which is a pity because Chris Buckham, who is a major in the Canadian Armed Forces, found depths in the novels that surprised even me. He recommends that Junior Air Force Officers under his command should read them, and  his analysis of Piece of Cake tells why: 

                   'Dark humour underscores a theme throughout that speaks to the individual character's means of dealing with the   realities of war. The strength of the book lies in its development of its characters and its insights into the human psyche.  The Commanding Officers and Flight Commanders struggle with the changes that war brings in their relationships within the Squadron between themselves and the young line pilots. Conversely, the line pilots struggle themselves as they grapple with the deadliness of their chosen profession.  Leadership strengths and weaknesses make themselves felt more keenly and shortfalls are quickly tolerated  less or are forgiven. This novel captures the essence of the effects of combat on unit cohesion and command.  It is stark and uncomfortable but it highlights lessons that are best learned and understood before the guns start firing.' 

 Which - as Chris points out - unfortunately doesn't always happen. 

 Finally, a double whammy of praise in another unsuspected place.  John Sandford is an American novelist, much read on both sides of the Atlantic.  He wrote a story called Dead Watch. The whammy is double because the central character is also an author.  Here he's in a college town, with some time to kill: 

 'The day was a nice one, the beginning of warmer weather, and the college girls were coming out of their winter cocoons, walking along with their form-fitting jeans and soft breast-clinging tops. 

 Excellent. 

 Maybe get a novel, Jake thought: he'd just read the first of a series of novels about British fliers during World War 1, by Derek Robinson, and was anxious to get another. And, of course, university bookstores were the most likely place to find his own books; like most authors, he always checked.' 

 (True.  Jake finds a couple of his own books 'in what he thought was an obscure location', so he quietly reshelves them in a better spot.  He also buys a copy of  Goshawk Squadron.) 

 'With a sense of satisfaction, he walked across the street, got a bagel with cream cheese and sat on a bench in the sun and started reading about the Goshawks.' 

 Thanks, John.  Always nice to get an unsolicited testimonial from someone in the same line of work.  

   My thanks to all who wrote.    Derek Robinson     Return to Homepage

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Readers Write #17 January 2011  

Bristle with pride,

        The wide blue yonder in deepest Texas,

                and hilarity from Surrey to Florida.             

Back in the days when I was fairly broke,  I came up with a spoof glossary of the dialect in my home town, Bristol,  and I called this language 'Bristle'.   The title on the cover was Krek Waiter's Peak Bristle.  It had three things going for it.  My pal Vic, a professional cartoonist, illustrated it brilliantly. It was small and cheap (a lot of people sent it instead of Christmas cards). And many of the Bristle entries were about areas of Bristol.  People laugh more readily at jokes set in places they know.  (New Yorkers laugh at Yonkers, unless they live there, in which case they laugh at Staten Island.) 

Krek Waiter's spawned half a dozen sequels.  Today, forty years on, it's still in print; and if I'm known for anything in Bristol, it's as the creator of Bristle.  When Mick in Wiltshire bought a copy of Hullo Russia, Goodbye England,  it was for his father, Ted, who was the Chief Systems Engineer on Concorde at Filton (which is in Bristol).  That was a very big job indeed,  and I hope he is enjoying  reading about Vulcans with Bristol Olympus jet turbines that gave it a kick like an earthquake,  because the Olympus went on to power Concorde.  Mick added this note about his dad:  "Over the years, whenever he entertained overseas visitors, he always dropped a copy of Krek Waiter's in their laps before taking them around the old place." 

Which reminded me of what happened ten years ago, when the British Society of Paediatric Gastroenterologists, Hepatologists and Nutritionists met in Bristol.  (I'm not making this up.)  The chairman, Dr Martin Brueton, waved  Krek Waiter's  at them and urged them to get a copy if they hoped to understand what the natives were saying.  

Life is full of surprises. I had heard that copies of  A Good Clean Fight, my SAS and RAF novel set in North Africa, found their way to US Marines serving in Iraq.  Now I got a message from Charles Howard in Kansas City.  As an infantry officer,  he was in the thick of some heavy fighting both in Afganistan and Iraq, including the Battle of Fallujah,  where he had Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom with him. In Iraq he also read Larteguy's Centurions and his Praetorians.  (These novels written by Jean Larteguy in 1960 centred on France's Algerian War. Huge bestsellers in France.  The English translations were much read, and quoted,  by US officers in Vietnam and Iraq. Centurions  was adapted for a film called Lost Command, with Anthony Quinn.  English copies of the book  are very scarce; I don't know why.)  Charles Howard writes:  "I have always believed that literature tells us a fictional, but more true, version of what happened before.  A lot of us, when we're doing difficult things, like to see how others handled similar situations. As you say, sand looks the same in any country!" His last job was at the US embassy in Cairo,  and now he's bought a copy of  A Good Clean Fight. "Maybe they and I marched over some of the same ground." 

A different  kind of surprise came from Joe in Austin, Texas, who  -  having read most of my books  -  was "excited to find your website" and decided to download  Hullo Russia from Audible,  who supply Books On Tape. ("West Texas is quite desolate, so listening to audio tape on a long drive is nice.") Audio tapes of my novels have been made by Soundings in the UK, so I checked with Soundings and they have a deal with the Amazon company Audible.com, with the result that some of my books will be appearing on Amazon sites in the UK, the US and Australia and New Zealand, and probably in other areas. You will find the audiobooks listed in both CD and Cassette formats, and also as downloads under the name Audible. Which is good news. Here are pictures of the audio covers.  I like them.   

Candidates for my Mile High Club keep appearing. Steve in Surrey, buying Red Rag Blues, says: "I've never read a book that even comes close to captivating me like yours do... I make a point of reading Piece of Cake at least once a year."   And to prove it, he did something calculated to turn heads:  "I laughed out loud on the train to work when I got to the point where Sticky reads out the cricket scores from the French radio truck."  And there is similar laugh-aloud evidence from Edgewater, Florida, where Loraine writes that I'm her husband's favourite author, and she says, "I can always tell by the way he laughs that it is one of your books he's reading." (She bought Operation Bamboozle for him.) Alan in Wellington, New Zealand, bought Hullo Russia, having "recently done a mammoth re-read of all the RFC/RAF books and I loved them all over again."  Penny,in Hertfordshire, a "big fan", wanted Hornet's Sting to complete her collection.  And John in Portland, Oregon ("enjoyed many of your books very much") did the same. 

 My thanks to all who wrote.    Derek Robinson                                Return to Homepage

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Readers Write #18 March 2011  

Hornets in Yonkers,

        Hilarity and brutality in New Zealand,

                and Robinson-mania in the Netherlands.             

You may remember the report from a fan, deep in the American West, who bought a springer spaniel pup, or it might have been a fox terrier, and christened it 'Moggy', as a way of preserving the memory of that other maverick creature, Flying Officer Moggy Cattermole in Piece of Cake. (His girlfriend renamed the pooch to something she could shout in the park without  feeling embarrassed.  Trapper, I think. Or maybe Fang. 
 
Now I hear from Jane,  on America's East Coast.  She may qualify for my Double-Digit Club, having read Goshawk Squadron many times, and she adapts Woolley's line:  "Ah, bloody (insert name). I hate the bastard"  when she encounters bad drivers in up-State New York  -  and she immediately feels better. Which just goes to show that fiction can be powerful therapy.  
 
More evidence of this from an old friend, John Walsh (who actually lives in up-State New York). He's teaching inner-city kids the basics of aviation by helping them build model airplanes. As a way of developing a group allegiance, he suggested they adopt a name, and so a dozen kids in Yonkers "call themselves (very loud and very proud, by the way) Hornet Squadron!".  John is currently deep into my yarn of Hornet Squadron, A Good Clean Fight, for the third time. The book went with him all through the second Iraq war and back, so it's no surprise that the cover has fallen off.
 
Meanwhile, Tony in Nuneaton put another of mine through its paces. He writes: "My copy of Kentucky Blues has now been read by the whole family, including my 84-year-old mother-in-law, who loved it as much as I did!"  He bought copies of Damned Good Show and Hullo Russia, Goodbye England. He builds and flies radio-controlled models and  -  perhaps inspired by Goshawk Squadron  -  decided to build an SE5a. Hendon air museum let him take a close look at their RFC replicas.  His reaction:  "Apart from the craftsmanship of it and all the other aircraft,  my overriding impression was of their frailty. Little wonder the numbers shot down were far outweighed by accidents, equipment failure and training." Too true. An excellent book on the RFC, The First of the Few by Denis Winter (Allen Lane 1982) quotes the official total of casualties at the end of the war: of 14,166 dead pilots, 8,000 had died while training in the UK.  No dual control in those days.  You were on your own, the first time you took off.  All too often it was your last.

They were young (18 or 19 was not uncommon) and the young laugh easily.  So there was humour to be found in every squadron  -  or, as Alan in New Zealand sums up my war novels, "hilarious and brutal". Alan writes for the Journal of the Wellington Science Fiction Society, but he casts his net widely and it takes in non-sci-fi books as well. He's read everything I've published and his review in the Journal of Hullo Russia, Goodbye England  -  too long to print here in full  -  is on http://tyke.net.nz (go to 'wot i red' and then go to February 2011).  It's the first novel of mine to be set in a time that he remembers. He was only a boy, but "I was nevertheless strongly affected by the almost palpable sense of fear engendered by the Cuban Missile Crisis. It seemed likely that the world I knew would not be there when I woke up in the morning. If I woke up in the morning."
 
And adds: "The thing that makes a Derek Robinson novel stand out from all the others that surround it is his impeccable understanding of history, his extraordinary ability to re-live it in context through the eyes and minds of the people to whom it is a contemporary happening, and the sharp, crackling and sometimes breathtakingly cynical wit of his dialogue and of his observations; a wit that is often laugh-out-loud funny but which makes you weep inside even while you are laughing so very hard at the piercing truth of it.  Hullo Russia, Goodbye England is a genuine tour de force."
 
Mail arrives from elsewhere. Martin in SW6 has gone through all my books. He read Hornet's Sting in the office, "surreptitiously, almost under the table"  -  even the most tolerant of offices might have raised an eyebrow if he'd read it while completely under the table.  The image of the two Russian flyers in France, "playing both the piano and poker fast and loose, demanding duels,  has remained with me for 10+ years."  Now he's suffering what another reader called 'withdrawal pains' and he asks urgently for "more needed for the summer please!!"  Well, I'm working on it, and I hope something will appear in the summer, but   -  just as Woolley predicted the war would be over by Christmas but which Christmas he didn't know  -  I don't know which summer the new book will be ready.  I had a financial adviser called Lewis, very good at his job, who used to ask me what I would earn next year.  I always said I hadn't the faintest idea, which caused his brow to furrow.  There are writerly types who crank out a novel a year, fair weather or foul. If only.  Goshawk Squadron took me about nine months to write. (I was young and didn't know any better.) Piece of Cake took four years,  and got derailed twice on the way. Kentucky Blues was an idea that refused to go away, but it took 25 years to germinate.  How long will the new yarn take?  As long as it likes.
 
Paul in Deal discovered Piece of Cake "when the children were young and to read half a chapter a night was an achievement".  Now they're off to University and he ordered Hornet's Sting. Erwin in Holland is one of my repeat offenders, having read Cake for the 6th time. He found a secondhand copy in the UK with his girlfriend  -  now his wife  -  20 years ago.  He's read all the rest  ("wonderful books") and now asked for Hullo Russia.   
 
So did Joe, three thousand miles to the west in Ramsey, New Jersey.  He sends thanks for my writing: "It puts me directly in a place in history I never knew (I'm 30 years old), and is so rich and alive that I can practically smell aircraft exhaust and fresh cut grass." Go back nearly four thousand miles to the east, where Stian in Rogoland, Norway. wrote his master's thesis on WW1  aviation and got "much enjoyment" from Goshawk Squadron, so he asked for the prequels, War Story and Hornet's Sting. He served with the Norwegian Army, and says: "You describe service culture quite well."  Well, the military is the military wherever you go.  Streaking south by ten thousand miles takes me to Steve in Te Anau, New Zealand. He found the same satisfaction as Stian: "I'm ex-RAAF, so I could relate to the military BS between squadron and upper echelon  -  it still goes on." Of Goshawk Squadron he says: "I couldn't put it down, really enjoyed the banter between pilots and the black humour, interlaced with vivid dogfight scenes."  Zooming up to the USA and Michael in central Indiana ("currently reading  A Good Clean Fight  for the 10th time") works in community theatre and would like to adapt my RFC trilogy for the stage.  I'm happy to give the project my blessing. 
 
Finally, how about this...   

                                                             
 
I'm the guy in the glasses and the slightly worried smile on the right. The guy with the cheery grin is Bill Hitchings, confident that his camera is doing its stuff. Bill flew from Melbourne (reading Damned Good Show on the flight  -  "just as enthralling"  as my other books)    and he dropped in for a cup of tea. Good to meet him. 

 My thanks to all who wrote.    Derek Robinson           Return to Homepage

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Readers Write #19 May 2011  

Going where no university dared,

        Matching Woolley Guinness for Guinness,

                and the Agony Aunt Flies Again.             

What sort of book is Goshawk Squadron?  One family read it and the husband thought it was a great adventure, his wife found it a moving love story, and their teenage son laughed his socks off. I think each was right  -  it's a story of young men who fall in love when they're not fighting for their lives, and make the blackest of jokes if they survive.  
 
As it was my first novel, people sometimes ask me why I wrote it.  Was it for the combat, or the romance, or the humour? The answer is all of those and more. I wrote it for the history. Nobody had written a brutally honest book about the Royal Flying Corps and I wanted to fill the vacuum.  I wrote it for me,  and if anyone else liked it, well, that would be a bonus.  Luckily for me, the bonus happened and Goshawk still gets readers all over the world.  
 
I realised the wider truth about that vacuum when I saw a review by David Aaronovitch of a book called 'Civilisation' by Niall Ferguson.   One cause of the recent economic disaster, so Ferguson claimed, was that few bankers knew anything about the 1929 Crash, and he blamed that failure on the last 30 years of education.  Aaronovitch shot that  notion down in flames. When he studied modern history at Oxford 35 years ago, he said, nothing after 1914 was taught. He got Gladstone but not the Depression. Same happened to me when I was studying history at Cambridge in the Fifties. The biggest events of the century, the two World Wars, were out of bounds.  But they had influenced everyone's lives, including mine, and they were exactly what I wanted to understand. Later, when I could, I researched them. And wrote some books. My fiction is based solidly on fact. The stories may be ripping yarns, but they're also reliable history.

And if a reader prefers the yarn to history,  that's fine by me. Darren in New Zealand writes that he gets unusual satisfaction from Goshawk. He "acquired a copy 25-odd years ago in a pub in South Wales after a bollox-freezing game against some feral team from the valleys. I've carted that book around ever since. To add a bit of realism to the story, every time Woolley reaches for a Guinness, I do the same."   The first chapter is a bit of a challenge  -  Woolley sinks a few  -  but "after that it's downhill all the way."  Amazing.  
 
Equally impressive are the model-makers.  Keith in Leeds bought a copy of A Good Clean Fight.  This is a sequel to Cake,  and it follows Fanny Barton and his Hornet Squadron in the Desert War, where they fly the P40 Tomahawk.  Keith plans to build scale models, and asked my permission to use my initials as squadron recognition letters on the planes.  I'm flattered.  And Peter in Nottingham bought Cake and Hullo Russia, Goodbye England (he describes himself as "a complete Vulcan nerd  -  I've been in the cockpits of six of the survivors").  He's a semi-pro in the model business  -  he's sold a few of his WW2 tanks to film companies  -  and, inspired by A Good Clean Fight, he's not only built models of the Tomahawk but also photographed them flying low over the desert.  Look closely and you might see the shark's teeth on the nose.  Very convincing. 
 
                                     
 
What next?  I'm Stone Age Man when it comes to the more exotic workings of the Internet,  so the doings of Steve in Victoria, Oz, leave me gasping.  He bought Hornet's Sting (thus completing his trilogy)  and told me that he and a group of like-minded enthusiasts are "flying Rise of Flight (a WW1 flight sim) over the Internet".  Actually flying?  "Check us out on Oceanic Wing ," Steve suggested, so I did. These guys recreate WW1 aircraft (and others) that are so realistic that they can fly  (and fight) them.  Astonishing. Their website also has a books page with some enthusiastic remarks about my stuff, so they're obviously well-read too.  

A quick whizz through other mail. Christine in Southampton was stumped for something to give her ex-RAF dad on his 89th birthday, and then found that he'd read my Damned Good Show and was "completely blown away by how authentic and realistic your book is".  So she bought him a copy of Cake and one of Hullo Russia.  Problem solved.  Leon in Woking also bought  Hullo Russia, and added that Cake "remains for me the perfect novel in terms of content, pace, characters, dialogue, depth, everything!" and urges me to keep writing.  Well, I do my best.  John in Japan bought an armful of books and asked:  "Why on earth hasn't War Story been either made into a movie or televised?"  Good question.  The movie/TV business is a total mystery to me too.  Howard in Santa Cruz, California, had the initiative to email my new publisher and tell him that printed editions of some of my books "are available only in the range of $100"  and he urged him to issue all my stuff as eBooks  -   which, in fact, my publisher  is now in the middle of setting up.  (100 bucks is a crazy price, brought about simply by the fact that some books are scarce. At one stage, specialist book dealers were asking over £200 for a used copy of Hornet's Sting  -  which is why I decided to self-publish it for a fraction of that price.) And finally Steven, I don't know where, tells me that years ago he bought A Good Clean Fight, couldn't get into it, threw it down in disgust (too young to appreciate it, he thinks), picked it up later and loved it   -   especially the relationship between Schramm and Maria Grandinetti.  As a result, he says: "I've always promised myself, in the event of a lady deciding to 'love me for five minutes', to take the bull by the horns."  Go for it, Steve.  You never know.  Five minutes could last a lifetime. 
 
My thanks to all who wrote. 
 
Derek Robinson                                        Return to Homepage

Readers Write #20 August 2011  

The roller-coaster of books,

        Shock-horror at MGM,

                and mobilising the mental juices.             

Computers get a bit of stick nowadays for what they do to reading and writing   -  everyone is stuck to the screen, so it's said, and nobody writes a real letter any more. But there's another angle.  The Internet has been good for books (if not for bookshops). Peter in Toronto tells me that, 19 years ago, "My father introduced me to Goshawk Squadron when I was 13" (a round of applause for fathers like that) "but I only just started reading your other novels, obtained secondhand or over the 'Net, as most seem to be out of print."  Too true, but I'm leaning on my publisher to revive them. Peter ordered copies of Hornet's Sting and Hullo Russia, Goodbye England. (Another round of applause for the man who invented websites.)  

Meanwhile, a longtime fan, David in Malaysia, tipped me off to something my publisher had failed to tell me, which is that their reissue of Piece of Cake and  Hullo Russia, Goodbye England has been postponed from this October to next February.  There's a reason:  the designer we had lined up to create the new covers dropped out and so we're starting from scratch. Book covers are what the Promotion Department needs in order to do their job. One bit of good news: you can now get (if that's your taste) my RFC trilogy (War Story, Hornet's Sting, Goshawk Squadron) as e-books on Amazon/Kindle. Swings and roundabouts. Or snakes and ladders. Maybe ham and eggs. Take your pick.  

The moral of the story, I suppose, is to soldier on and hope the good and the bad luck even out.  Take the case of the American Hugh Martin, a nice guy and a talented lyricist and composer. He died a few months ago, aged 96. During the Second World War he co-wrote several hits, including a number called The Trolley Song ('Clang, clang, clang went the trolley, Ding, ding, ding went the bell, Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings.  From the moment I saw you,  I fell...')  which, if you're one of the younger fellahs, you may never have heard.  But in 1944 Judy Garland belted it out in the movie Meet Me in St Louis, and it helped make her a star.  

Hugh Martin kept working and in 1957 he had another hit.  Bear in mind that by 1957 the world looked a grim and gloomy place. The Korean War had ended in stalemate. Nuclear tests were exploding in all parts. The Soviet Union had the first satellites circling the globe, including the USA.  So, no great surprise when Martin wrote these lyrics for MGM: 

                               Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
                               It may be your last,
                               Next year we may all be living in the past.   

 The studio turned it down flat. Bittersweet and nostalgic they might accept, they said, but not a dirge.  Martin got to work and rewrote the last two lines:  

                               Let your heart be light; 
                               Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.  

 And of course Martin lived to see his song become as immortal as anything can be in showbiz.  Was he sorry to lose the lines which he felt had expressed the world in 1957?  Probably.  But he was a professional. He was in the entertainment business.  So am I. First and foremost, I write novels that entertain.  If they also take the reader somewhere he might never otherwise have gone,  and make him think a little   -   what the film director Sidnet Lumet called "stimulating thought and setting the mental juices flowing  "   -  well, that's a bonus. Lumet managed it in such fine movies as Twelve Angry Men, Network and Dog Day Afternoon.  Whether I manage it is entirely up to the reader, but I'm encouraged when I hear from Peter in Portishead (the town, not the band) who first read  Goshawk Squadron as a boy, "while hunkered under the bedclothes with a torch."  Since then it's been with him in the first Gulf War, Northern Ireland twice, Kenya and the United States. No wonder his copy is looking rather fragile.  "I thoroughly enjoyed Hullo Russia, Goodbye England," he says. "What a fantastic slice of Cold War madness, articulated through perfect characters. I've read your books since I was a schoolboy and they never fail to entertain me."  (He also bought copies of Operation Bamboozle and my Summer Special.)    

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Readers Write #21 October 2011  

Literary lions stumble,

       Confessions of an invisible man,

                And explosions of brilliance in Dublin

Why do writers write?  I ask because Bud, in California, rounds off his request for a copy of Hornet's Sting ("A friend said it was the best book he had ever read, and I have to concur") with a simple plea.  More of the same, he says.  The good news, Bud, is that I've finished a new novel.  Maybe the less-than-good news is that, although it's a flying yarn, it's not like any of the others.  Some authors can please their readers by performing the same trick again and again - sequel after sequel.  I can't.  I write because I want to go somewhere fresh, find different characters and report something surprising.  Often this involves aeroplanes; but there's a big leap from A Good Clean Fight (Libyan desert, 1942) to Hullo Russia, Goodbye England (Vulcan nuclear squadron. 1962). Different tasks, different mentalities, different outcomes.

And a different author.  I'm not the same scribbler I was twenty, thirty years ago, and what may seem worth exploring now was unknown territory then.  As someone once said: How do I know what I think until I see what I've said?   Except that, in my case, I often don't know what I've said until you, the reader, points it out to me.  Every novel is a gamble, and even the best writers stumble, once in a while. Robert Louis Stevenson and P.G.Wodehouse  -  two names you rarely see in the same sentence  -  each wrote a stinker or two.  They must have thought the yarns were a good idea at the time.  (Nobody sits down and thinks: I'll waste a year or two on a real turkey.)  But the end product was a big mistake.  OK, if you insist, I'll tell you the titles: Stevenson's Catriona (poor sequel to Kidnapped; David Balfour falls in love with the childish Catriona who, as Stevenson admitted, is "as virginal as billy-ho!") and Plum's Psmith, Journalist  (English toff flattens the New York Mafia with a straight left). Both books, for me, never got off the ground. 

 Back to the beginning.  Why do writers write? Bill, somewhere in the US, came across Piece of Cake in the library of the US Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia, enjoyed it immensely, cruised through my RFC and RAF series and, he says, "to some modest degree, they shaped the man I am today."  He's seen life:  after the Navy he became a paramedic and a firefighter. He adds that "Frankly, after my father, you and Bernard Cornwell have been my biggest and most positive role models."  I was startled.  I take what you said as a compliment, Bill, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable being a role model.  After all, I'm the invisible man in the room.  I just tell the story and let the reader make what he likes of it.  Two characters I've invented   -   Stanley Woolley in Goshawk Squadron and Moggy Cattermole in Cake -  are not the sort of men you'd want your daughter to marry.  Yet they score strongly with readers.  I don't know where I found them.  Sometimes I think the door was left open and they wandered in.  That's how Skull arrived in Cake (and other books). They're all lucky accidents.  But role models?

It's easy to say why writers don't write.  Not for the money. Writing novels is a precarious business.  The Inland Revenue taxes me by estimating what it reckons I'll earn next year,  which is total guesswork based on what I made last year.  Like most freelance writers, my income goes up and down like a roller-coaster, so the Revenue get it wrong as often as right.  If you want steady money, I'd recommend a career as a chartered accountant.

 What about fame?  It's not much of a reward. It certainly won't pay for the groceries. A good review in the newspapers is very welcome, as long as you remember that it'll wrap tomorrow's fish and chips.  Fame is fleeting, and so are novels.  Nearly all the heavyweight bestselling authors who dominated the fiction lists when I was a boy are out of print now and largely forgotten. Will my stuff be around fifty years from now?  Do I care?  Not much. I'm not writing for posterity (it never did me anything for me). And look at what happened to J.M.Synge, who wrote The Playboy of the Western World. The play's opening night, in Dublin in 1907, caused a riot.  The audience stormed the stage, and not to congratulate the actors.

 Synge's crime was to write a play without Irish heroes.  Ireland in 1907 was still, in effect, a British colony, and nationalism, independence, freedom were in the air.  Dubliners wanted a play they could cheer about.  Instead, Synge's Playboy gave them a man built like Woody Allen who killed his dad with a spade and was idolised by the feckless peasantry. The country was outraged.  Two years later, Synge was dead.  Quite soon after that, Playboy was acclaimed as a masterpiece, performed worldwide. It's still being revived, currently by the London Old Vic   -   a century too late to do Synge any good.  So why did he write it?  Why stick his neck out?  All we can say, with any confidence, is that he couldn't resist it.  The story was too good to miss.  He'd left the door open and it had walked in.  He was a writer.  Writers write.

 Quick round-up of my mail.  Jim in Dunfermline bought Hornet's Sting  "as I thought Goshawk Squadron was right up there with Winged Victory by V.M.Yeates."  David in Barnes, having accidentally drowned his copy of Sting, now reports that his new copy is "banned from the bathroom".   Sam in Brisbane "first read  Piece of Cake at 15 years of age, been reading it yearly since. A huge fan of Moggy" and now ordered the RFC trilogy and my last copy of Hullo Russia.  (Sold out -  fresh edition is planned for February 2012 by my publishers, MacLehosePress/Quercus Books.)   Jimmy on Facebook sent more details of the amazing Rise of Flight, which creates Internet flight sims of WW1 combat over the Western Front, and he said, "I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoy reading your books."(You can see a selection of clips of the program at:  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rise+of+Flight+Youtube&aq=f  )

  And Ben, now in his final year at school, having not only read my RFC trilogy but also got his mother and mother to read it   -    "an achievement of sorts"   -   is writing a 5,000-word project as an A-Level extension.  His subject: Hitler's Operation Sealion and the truth about the role of Fighter Command in the non-invasion of 1940.....a topic I've looked at in my Invasion 1940.  Meaty stuff.

 My thanks to all who wrote. 

Readers Write #22 January 2012  

Ice cold in Kandahar,

       a Goshawk with clipped wings,

                and no good deed goes unpunished

The Royal Flying Corps is almost a hundred years old. A reader of my RFC trilogy today is in a comparable position to someone in 1912 who was reading about the Battle of Waterloo. And yet today's reader seems able to put himself in the cockpit of an FE2b or an SE5a with a great understanding of of the excitement and horror of flying over the Western Front. That understanding is sharpened when the reader has himself tasted a similar excitement or horror in combat. That's my theory, anyway. Patrick, an old friend and a U.S. infantry veteran of Iraq, is now on his second tour of duty in Aghanistan, where, he says, "Your books were a welcome diversion from the day-to-day work" - which is with an Airborne Division. Recently he bought A Good Clean Fight, a novel set in North Africa in 1942. It follows Hornet Squadron and, separately, an S.A.S. patrol which raids behind enemy lines. The patrol is led by Captain Lampard with a reckless determination that some might call foolhardy. "I served with Lampard in 2005," Patrick writes. "He is an ass, and currently works at a base in the U.S. Some of my current teammates show up in your books as well, but without the Wodehouseian banter of their WW2 British counterparts. I am looking forward to seeing whom I'll meet in the RFC series." He meant Hornet's Sting, which may take his mind off the cold "as I start to read, shivering in my billets near Kandahar."

Somewhat north of Afghanistan, in Bavaria, reading Goshawk Squadron caused Erben to start thinking hard about another war. His father, a WW2 veteran, told him: "In peacetime, all is well rehearsed, and when war begins, chaos rules" - or, in its English version, "The first casualty of war is the plan." (Not, as many think, the truth.) Erben has just read my Invasion,1940, which coincides with his own ideas. Hitler, he says, "decided to fight a strategic war without having strategic weapons. I cannot understand how he or his generals intended to do long-range airstrikes with a Me109" - whose limited range (no drop-tanks) meant it could fly no further than London. "That was not cunning planning," Erben says, and he singles out Operation Sealion (the planned seaborne invasion, largely in towed river barges) as an example of the improvisation that dogged the German war effort. "You wouldn't have needed the Royal Navy to 'boldly wipe out' the invasion," he says. "Perhaps bad weather would have done damage enough."

Perhaps. But if Sealion had sailed in a flat calm, the Royal Navy was ready and waiting.

Europeans are often so fluent in English that they put us Brits to shame, and Boris in Frankenburg, Germany is a good example. He's read (and "enjoyed enormously") almost all my RFC and RAF series and he has no trouble with the pilots' dialogue, which (like pilots themselves) cannnot always be taken seriously. Now he's bought enough books to fill the gaps, and he seeks The Eldorado Network too - which, unfortunately, I can't supply. Maybe my publisher will reissue it. Rob, near Rotterdam, a "great fan" of Piece of Cake, bought my other WW2 books. And Cees, not far away in Amsterdam ("In 1983 I bought The Eldorado Network and I read it at least once a year") discovered that there is a sequel. In fact there are three. I have no spare copies of the first, Artillery of Lies, but I was able to supply Cees with Red Rag Blues and Operation Bamboozle.

Leap ten thousand miles to the south-east (which of course is no barrier to the Internet) and Liz in Melbourne, having searched in vain for my titles in Australia, then found my website and ordered the RAF/WW2 trilogy as a birthday gift for her husband, an "avid reader" of my novels. Still in Australia, George in Goolwa Beach writes that he "particularly enjoyed the RFC series. I have great respect for those airmen. I used the Vickers MMG when a member of my school Cadet Unit (late 1950s). Clearing a stoppage on those guns was hard enough on the ground!" He bought more copies of War Story and Damned Good Show.

Now jump another few thousand miles to Canada and to Peter in Nova Scotia. His father read Goshawk Squadron to him when he was a kid, "strategically omitting some parts, as I later discovered when reading it for myself as a teenager." (I can't imagine what those parts were, unless his dad took exception to the solitary section where Woolley forces a new fighter pilot to utter a string of profanity, in an effort to shatter the schoolboy decency that obstructs his hunger for the kill. In later years I was able to compare that section with translations of the book and learn how to swear in French, Spanish and Dutch.) Peter went on to read more of my stuff, ordered Hullo Russia and Hornet's Sting, enjoyed the first "immensely" and saved the second "for the Christmas holidays" - and then bought extra copies of both for his father, a late thank-you for starting the ball rolling all those years ago.

From Canada to England and Portsmouth, where Didier ("a huge fan") ordered Hornet's Sting and A Good Clean Fight. Robert in Tyne and Wear bought Invasion,1940 and Operation Bamboozle, and emailed me later to say, "I am sorry that I have read them because I have not got them to look forward to. Invasion,1940 should be put forward as to how history should be written. And as funny as your other war books. Is 'funny' the right word? 'Entertaining'? Bamboozle equally as good." Meanwhile, Nick in Norfolk tells of an experience familiar to many of us. "Over the years I've bought all of your WW1 and WW2 books and been so enthralled and impressed that I couldn't wait to lend them to like-minded mates." We all know what's coming, Nick. The books "became public property so I never saw most of them again..." Now he has refreshed his shelves with copies of Hornet's Sting and A Good Clean Fight, and he waits patiently for MacLehose Press to reissue Cake and Hullo Russia (scheduled for March 2012). Elsewhere, David in Rochester, Kent, having enjoyed Operation Bamboozle, adds: "I hope you write many more." At least one more - called A Splendid Little War - will appear from MacLehose Press, probably in autumn 2012. After that, who knows?

One thing is definite. I shan't be doing any business in all of February 2012. The shop will be shut while the computer gets thoroughly overhauled, oiled and polished. So - please save your emails for March.

 My thanks to all who wrote.