A Death in Berlin September 2022
Interview with David C. Dawson
- What’s it all about?
It’s a gay love story set against the rise of fascism in Berlin at the start of 1933, six years before the start of the second world war.
Simon Sampson is the BBC’s first radio correspondent, based in Berlin. But he has a secret life. He’s a spy for the British intelligence services.
And he’s gay, or ‘other’ to use the vernacular of the time. In the late 1920s Berlin was a magnet for gay men around the world. It was liberal and packed with gay clubs. Homosexuality was nearly legalised in Germany until the Nazis took over.
In A Death in Berlin Simon faces a personal conflict when he’s ordered to spy on Justin, his first love at university. Their love is rekindled but Simon isn’t sure whether he can trust his former lover.
- What inspired you to write this particular story?
I wrote the first in this series A Death in Bloomsbury after picking up a book – it’s always a book, isn’t it? – about gay men in 1930s London. It was fascinating. I’ve never written a period piece before and wanted to see if I could do it.
A Death in Bloomsbury proved very popular so this is the sequel. I’m a huge fan of Berlin. It’s a wonderful, vibrant city. I spent three months living there in the fall of 2021 and came across this incredible story about the world’s first ever sexual research institute set up in the city just after the first world war.
More research uncovered amazing stories of senior officers in the Nazi party who were gay, even though the party targeted gay men for extermination in the same way it targeted Jews and other “non-Aryans”.
There was a lot of research to do, to make sure that all the references I made were accurate for the time. For example: one of my characters used the phrase “from the get go” until I discovered it wasn’t in use until the 1960s.
The book takes a lot of actual events and people of the time and lays a fiction over the top of them. For example, Hitler was on the rise in Germany, but Fascism was also on the rise in Britain. I explore this threat in the book.
- What’s your core motivation in writing this book?
I’m part of the London Gay Men’s Chorus. There’s a Jewish man I sing with who’s in his eighties. He lived in Paris when, at the age of four the Nazis invaded. His parents were murdered by the Nazis but he survived, thanks to a French family who hid him and his brother.
This book is in part dedicated to him and his astonishing life.
He gives talks to organisations on what we should learn from history but how we so often fail to do so.
The fate of gay men during the war has seldom been explored in fiction. I thought it was time to do so.
- Which secondary character would you like to explore more? Tell me about him or her.
Florence Miles or Bill as she prefers to be called. Florence is Simon’s boss at the intelligence services and she’s a very strong woman. She wears her hair in a short, Eton-crop, always wears trouser suits, and chain smokes.
She’s based on a real person who was very senior at the BBC in the 1920s called Florence Milnes.
Like Simon, Bill must keep her sexuality hidden. In 1930s Britain lesbianism didn’t officially exist. The powers that be considered it impossible for a woman to love another woman. Hence there were no anti-lesbian laws.
Astonishingly parliament had considered introducing them but decided against it “for fear of encouraging certain women to experiment”.
- What was the hardest part of writing this book?
Keeping the dialogue authentic. There were so many words that we use now that weren’t in current use in the 1930s. The word gay meant happy or carefree.
The word homosexual was hardly used at all, even in medical circles. There were so many euphemisms. Gay men would refer to themselves as being ‘other’ and spoke of ‘homogenic love’. Love between women was called Sapphic love.
I also had to write German dialogue. I’m very fortunate in that I met a marvellous person in Berlin last year called Barbara who’s very knowledgeable about the period and could check the German for accuracy.
- Tell us something we don’t know about your heroes. What makes them tick?
Simon has gained in confidence since the first book and now stands up to Bill much more than he did in A Death in Bloomsbury.
He’s an idealist. He’s partly motivated partly by patriotism but he also has a strong sense of what’s morally right. So he’s troubled that his own country makes him illegal because of his sexuality. This leads him to face a major dilemma in the book.
- What was the weirdest thing you had to Google for your story?
If the secret services were monitoring my search history, I’m sure they’d be very concerned about the number of times I looked for fascist or Nazi references!
The hardest problem I had was getting distracted by the amazing stories I came up with time and time again during the research.
The most astonishing piece of information I came across by chance was that homosexuality was legalised in Poland as long ago as 1932.
- Is there going to be a sequel?
Definitely! This first book might end on a “happy for now” for Simon Sampson, but his life is about to go through major turbulence because of world events…
Release Blitz, Interview, Excerpt & Giveaway:
A Death in Berlin by David C Dawson
The Simon Sampson Mysteries, Book 2
Berlin 1933: When the parties stop…the dying begins
The city that’s been a beacon of liberation during the 1920s is about to become a city of deadly oppression. BBC foreign correspondent Simon Sampson risks his life in a bid to save thousands of gay men from the growing Nazi threat.
This is the second in the Simon Sampson mystery series. The first, A Death in Bloomsbury, was hailed as ‘a good old-fashioned John Buchan-esque mystery reworked for the twenty-first century’.
Simon moves to Berlin where he meets British author Christopher Isherwood and his lover Heinz. He’s also reunited with his banter-partner Florence Miles, better known to her friends as Bill. She’s recruited him into the British intelligence services and he’s got the task of hunting down communist spies.
But when Simon is ordered to spy on an old college friend, his loyalties are brought into question. Who are his real enemies? And how much can he trust his masters?
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Genre: Romance, historical, mystery, and suspense
Special Release Blitz Excerpt:
PROLOGUE
Berlin, April 1933
The cardboard box held between a hundred and two hundred files. A lot of paper. It probably weighed between thirty and forty pounds, and was the thirty-first box Simon had carried that evening. He leaned against the side of the truck to catch his breath.
“No slacking,” hissed a commanding voice behind him. “We haven’t got time to be idling around. They could turn up at any moment.”
“Who’s they?” Simon slid his cardboard box into position beside the others in the open back of the truck. “No one’s going to want to come out here at three o’clock in the morning.”
He stepped aside to allow Bill to place her cargo alongside it.
Yes, that personal pronoun ‘her’ is correct. Bill’s real name is Florence Miles, but she prefers to be called Bill. Miss Miles, or Bill, works for the British Special Intelligence Services, which was also known as MI6. Bill is Simon’s commanding officer and should be asleep in her bed in London’s St John’s Wood. How she came to be alongside her subordinate, loading a truck with confidential files at three o’clock in the morning on the outskirts of Berlin’s Tiergarten will become clear later.
“Take your pick. The police, the Sturmabteilung, the Sicherheitspolizei.” Bill reeled off the names rapidly. “Berlin is absolutely swarming with authoritarian men who’d much prefer we weren’t here doing this.”
She took out a cigarette and lit it. “You of all people must know your enemies by now.” She exhaled smoke into the warm evening air and waved the cigarette vaguely around her head. “They’re everywhere darling. It would only take one man with insomnia out walking his dog. If he spots us he’ll do his patriotic duty to the Third Reich and report what he’s seen. Then this place will be full of spotty faced youths in uniforms and boots before you can say Heil Hitler.”
Simon took the glowing cigarette from her mouth, threw it on the ground and stubbed it out with his heel.
“Then you haven’t got time to indulge that disgusting habit, have you?”
He turned and walked back towards the building to retrieve another box of files. There was a full moon that night and its dappled light filtered through the trees in Berlin’s thousand-acre park. It had made it easier for Simon and Bill to find their way around in the gloomy corridors of number one Beethovenstraße as they raided the building’s archives. But it also shone an unforgiving light on their activity, making it plainly visible to anyone who might venture by.
As Simon reached the open doorway of the elegant nineteenth century building he heard a man’s voice in the distance call out in German.
“Halt! Was machen sie da?”
Simon turned and ran back to the truck. Bill was already struggling to secure the truck’s tailgate.
“What kept you?” she asked. “Start the engine and get us out of here. I always knew this was a damn fool idea.”
Simon climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut. He pushed the metal pin beneath the dashboard to fire up the starter motor and the truck’s engine roared into life. The passenger door swung open and Bill clambered in beside him.
“He hasn’t got a hope of catching us,” she said. “I think he’s from the Sturmabteilung, judging by the tasteful shade of brown he seems to be wearing, but the poor love’s only on a bicycle.”
There was the sound of a gunshot and the glass in Simon’s wing-mirror shattered. He wrenched the gear lever into first and the truck lurched forward. A second gunshot shattered the glass in the back of their cabin and Simon instinctively ducked as if to avoid the bullet.
“You were saying?” he asked. “He doesn’t need to be fast if he’s as good a shot as that.”
By way of confirmation a third gunshot caused the truck to swerve drunkenly from side to side.
“Damn. He’s hit the tyre.” Simon struggled to change into second gear and accelerated east along the perimeter of the Tiergarten. The back end of the truck had dropped on one side and it bounced and swayed across the width of the road.
Bill turned to look through the glassless rear of the cabin at the open boxes in the back of the truck. “Slow down. If you go any faster the files are going to be thrown all over the road. We may as well stop and simply hand them out to anyone who’s interested.”
Simon ignored her and pushed the gear into third as he saw the Brandenburg Gate ahead of them.
“Are you listening to me?” Bill shouted. “Where are you taking us anyway?’
Simon’s knuckles whitened as he fought to keep control of the vehicle. “The British Embassy.”
“Are you mad?”
“Can you think of anywhere else nearby?” he shouted back. “We’re not going to get very far in this contraption. Not now the tyre’s blown.”
“But you’ll cause a major diplomatic incident if we bowl up there. His Majesty’s Government will be very upset.”
“It’s not the first time we’ve upset them. They should be getting used to it by now.”
The truck swerved onto Ebertstraße and past the Brandenburg Gate where two police vehicles were parked. Bill turned her head to watch as they sped past.
“That’s torn it,” she said. “They’re after us. We haven’t got a hope now.”
“If you can’t think of anything optimistic to say, old thing, then keep your bally mouth shut.”
Bill sniffed. “Oh, and we’ve just lost two boxes of files overboard.”
Simon turned the steering wheel and the truck skidded into Behrenstraße. “Nearly there,” he said triumphantly. “It’s just up here on the left.”
The front wheel of the truck clipped the edge of a stone block laid at the side of the street and the truck lurched up into the air. To Simon it felt like time had slowed down. He clung to the steering wheel even as the truck rolled over sideways, lifting the wheels from the ground. It crashed onto its side in a shower of broken glass and Bill was catapulted across the cabin to fall on top of Simon. The truck slid along the road and came to a halt a few yards short of the entrance gates to the British Embassy.
“Are you alright, old thing?” Simon asked.
In the confines of the cabin Bill did her best to lever herself away from Simon. “Never better,” she replied. “But I think we’ve got some explaining to do.”
There was the screech of tyres as two police cars pulled up alongside the upturned truck.
“And it sounds like the German police are going to be leading the questioning.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
Check out Book 1 in The Simon Sampson Mysteries
Everyone has secrets… but some are fatal.
1932, London. Late one December night Simon Sampson stumbles across the body of a woman in an alleyway. Her death is linked to a plot by right-wing extremists to assassinate the King on Christmas Day. Simon resolves to do his patriotic duty and unmask the traitors.
But Simon Sampson lives a double life. Not only is he a highly respected BBC radio announcer, but he’s also a man who loves men, and as such must live a secret life. His investigation risks revealing his other life and with that imprisonment under Britain’s draconian homophobic laws of the time. He faces a stark choice: his loyalty to the King or his freedom.
This is the first in a new series from award-winning author David C. Dawson. A richly atmospheric novel set in the shadowy world of 1930s London, where secrets are commonplace, and no one is quite who they seem.
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To celebrate the release of A Death in Berlin, David is giving away 2 e-sets of The Simon Sampson Mysteries (2 eBooks so far)!
Enter the Rafflecopter giveaway for your chance to win!
David C Dawson writes thrillers with gay heroes in love at their core. His latest book A Death in Berlin is the second in the Simon Sampson Mysteries series. It’s a thriller based in 1930s Berlin, when gay men were known as ‘other’.
His debut novel The Necessary Deaths won a bronze medal for Best Mystery & Suspense in the FAPA awards. Rainbow Reviews said it was “an exciting read with complex characters”.
David worked for the BBC as a journalist. He lives near Oxford in the UK, with his ageing Triumph motorbike and two cats.
Connect with David:
Website. https://www.davidcdawson.co.uk
Amazon author page. https://geni.us/DCDawsonAmazonAuthor
Facebook personal: https://www.facebook.com/david.c.dawson.5
Facebook books page: https://www.facebook.com/pg/davidcdawsonAUTHOR/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7244384.David_C_Dawson
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidcdawsonwriter/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/david_c_dawson
