THE OCCUPATION SERIES

Living under the shadow cast by his experiences in World War One, Eddie Giral is a Paris police detective forced to come to terms with the Nazi Occupation of the city, while still maintaining some sense of justice – and of himself.

The trouble is that the notion of justice itself becomes as dangerous, blurred and confused as the times. And while there may be the occasional gun and explosion in my stories, what really interests me is the social aspect of the Occupation and trying to understand the nuances of resistance and collaboration. I’m fascinated by what day-to-day life was like under Nazi rule: queuing for food, the sensation of the blackout, the sights and sounds and smells of a Paris with its soul ripped out of it, the fear and distrust in the simplest of actions and beliefs. I want to explore how and why ordinary people made choices between resisting and collaborating, so my books look at the awful decisions people had to face every day, the impossible dilemmas and blurred morality between resistance and collaboration.

So why a police detective? Well, perhaps an extreme form of everything I’ve just said is a police detective under Nazi rule – how do you reconcile yourself to investigating everyday crime when all around you, people are being killed in their tens of thousands, cities are being bombed almost out of existence and in your world, everything you know is turned on its head? You’re forced to do your job to the Occupier’s tune, including turning on your own people, so how far do you go along with it and how far do you dare react to it? The tightrope you find yourself forced to walk to survive while trying to do your job under the constant scrutiny of friend and foe alike will inevitably take their toll.

Which brings us to Eddie. A shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, he’s an ethically complex man, constantly on the edge. Morally ambiguous with an underlying sense of right and wrong, he’s willing to do bad things for good reasons. As one character says, he’s not a bad man, he just sometimes forgets to be a good one.