The Salvation of Crime Fiction

Last summer I published a book about the Second World War. Victory in the West was my account of the Western Allied advance into Germany in 1945. I had already accompanied my warriors onto the D-Day beaches and through the Battle of the Bulge in earlier volumes. This was the end of their story and of my trilogy. I divided the account into thirds. In the first, they fought their way through slush and mud to the river Rhine. In the second part, the three Allied army groups — Montgomery’s Anglo-Canadian Twenty-First in the north, Bradley’s all-American Twelfth in the centre and the lesser-known Franco-US Sixth Army Group led by Jacob Devers to the south — crossed the great river that once formed the eastern boundary of the Roman empire. In the final third, these nearly four million troops fanned out into Holland, Germany and Austria.