The Joys of Binge Reading

Kelly Rimmer’s sweeping World War Two historical suspense has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide and made international best seller lists, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler. And on Binge Reading today, Kelly talks about her latest historical saga, The Paris Agent and two otherwise ordinary women who become spies in World War II France.

It’s a powerful story which threads their lives – they are real life woman – into history, leaving an indelible story of courage and family ties.

Giveaway This Week – Beach Books

In our Giveaway this week, we have Page Turners For The Beach, a wonderfully entertaining, light hearted holiday mix to download for free including Hope Redeemed, a Spanish novella, #6 in my own Of Gold & Blood California mystery series.

You’ll find the links for where to download these free books in the show notes for this episode on the website, The Joys Of Binge Reading.com.

DOWNLOAD BEACH pageturners

https://books.bookfunnel.com/pageturnersforthebeach/imv7lrf7 i4

And remember if you enjoy the show, leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for other people to discover the show and great books they will love to read.

Links to people and places in the episode

Violette Szabo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violette_Szabo

F Section of SOE: F-Section,

Diana Rowden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Rowden

SOE Special Operations Executive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Operations_Executive

M. R. D. Foot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._R._D._Foot

Henri Dericourt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_D%C3%A9ricourt

Nicolas Bodington: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bodington

Kelly Rimmer, The Things We Cannot Say: https://www.amazon.com.au/Things-We-Cannot-Say/dp/1525823566

Scrivener Writing Software: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

Aeon Timeline: https://timeline.app/blog/introducing-aeon-timeline-3/

CSIRO Parkes Observatory: https://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/

Wernher von Braun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun.

Polin: Polish Museum of Jewish History: https://polin.pl/en/about-museum

Irena Sendler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler.

Irena’s Children: https://www.amazon.com.au/Irenas-Children-Extraordinary-Warsaw-Ghetto/dp/1476778515

All Adults Here by Emma Straub: https://www.amazon.com.au/All-Adults-Here-Emma-Straub/dp/1594634696

Dear Mrs Bird by A. J. Pearce: https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mrs-Bird-AJ-Pearce/dp/1501170066

Bookouture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookouture

Where to find Kelly online

Website: Kellyrimmer.com

Twitter: Kelrimmerwrites

Instagram: kelrimmerwrites

Facebook: @kellymrimmer

Introducing historical suspense author Kelly Rimmer

But now here’s Kelly. Hello, via Kelly and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Kelly Rimmer: Hi, Jenny. It’s so good to be here.

Kelly Rimmer Historical suspense author

Jenny Wheeler: Now I think you are somewhere in Central New South Wales, Australia. And for, we’ve got a lot of international listeners. So for them, new South Wales is the state that has Sydney as its main

Kelly Rimmer: right. That’s right.

As you know, it’s quite a big state, and there’s this big mountain range at the edge of Sydney, and then there’s this whole beautiful countryside on the other side.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. you’ve written about something a long distance from Australia. The Paris Agent is your latest book. It’s a fascinating dual timeline mystery with multiple romance lines moving from England and World War Two to the 1970s with the daughter of one of those people that was involved in the war.

You’ve written more than a dozen novels and the most recent ones have all been historical. I’m interested in how you made that transition and how you feel about historicals themselves.

Kelly Rimmer: I didn’t mean to become a historical fiction writer. My second book, which was published digitally, was set around the forced adoption scandal in Australia, in the fifties, sixties and seventies.

And, that was my first taste of historical fiction. But as I said, I wasn’t a huge historical fiction fan, and I was following stories that piqued my interest.

The Things We Cannot Say The Things We Cannot Say – Kelly Rimmer’s story sparked by Polish refugee grandparents

And this all culminated in a story that I’d been daydreaming about for a long time, since I was pregnant with my son, who’s 14 this year.

It’s inspired by my own family history. My grandparents were Polish Catholics who were displaced by the war. And I wrote a book called The Things We Cannot Say.

I loved that experience so much that I’ve accidentally continued with historical fiction since then.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s wonderful. I didn’t actually realize there was a family connection with that book. The Things We Cannot Say.

Kelly Rimmer: Yes. my grandparents, it’s not exactly their story, but it was inspired by the fact that we didn’t know what their story was and we knew we never will.

My grandfather in particular is a complete mystery because they came to Australia by Ahan, a refu, a displaced persons camp in Hah, where they lived for several years, and they ended up in Fremantle and then from Fremantle to Blacktown in Sydney.

They really reinvented themselves after that. I was in my early thirties, reflecting on the fact that I’m part of an Australian family. And I asked myself how did we end up here? My grandparents were Polish. So it came out of that.

A story inspired by spy Violette Szabo Violetta Szabo a courageous SOE spy in France

Jenny Wheeler: Wonderful. tell us something about The Paris Agent, the stories premise. Tell us how you got into this.

Kelly Rimmer: My daughter’s name is Violette. It’s a family name from my husband’s side.

And when I was pregnant with her, and we were talking about names, you do the Googling thing, trying to think about famous people with this name.

Or what the meaning of the name is. And I stumbled upon Violette Szabo, who was an SOE agent, in the F section of the SOE.

Her story was so inspiring and had stuck with me. I loved the idea that we were naming my daughter after someone so incredible.

And I had always intended, always hoped that I would come up with the right premise to write a book that was inspired by her.

And, maybe two or three years ago, I heard a podcast about Diana Rowden, who is another SOE agent, who I had never heard of, even though I’d done a little bit of reading about the SOE.

And I’ve also found her to be just such an incredible woman. The idea for this book came out of their stories, their real-life stories.

Balancing fact and fiction in historical narrative

It’s fiction. I’ve taken a few liberties here and there with their stories. And they weren’t actually close friends, but in my book, my characters inspired by them are friends.

But for the most part, where I could, I followed the real history.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Now in your story, Charlotte, the daughter, they are recently bereaved. Her mother has died. She’s an only child, and her father’s terribly distressed by the death of his wife.

She starts to feel that perhaps it would help him get over his grief if he reconnected with someone that he’d always said he wanted to find in the war. A friend.

She decides that she’s going to help him to find this man, who he credits with saving his life at one stage. And she opens, as they say, the proverbial can of worms, doesn’t she? Tell us a bit about that.

Kelly Rimmer: Yes, so, best of intentions, they decide to look into his past. He knows he was injured in his service in the SOE, but he can’t remember much about the day he was injured because he has got a brain injury and obviously there’s a fair degree of trauma there as well.

They scratched the surface of the past, trying to find the agent who he believes saved his life.

Through that investigation they realize that the whole scenario was much more complicated than he remembered, and they discovered the stories of Josie and Eloise, who are my two, agents in my story, my protagonist in my historical threads of this story.

Betrayed in head office before they ever got to the enemy

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Part of its foundation is the understanding that’s emerged since the war that the Special Operations Executive, the branch of the British Secret Service that handled all of the dispensing of agents over France.

The ones that were so tremendously brave as to jump out of planes into enemy territory and work to support the Resistance…

Some of those people were betrayed from within the SOE even before they set foot on French soil.

And that’s all emerged rather more recently. Can you talk a about that whole situation? When did you become aware of it?

Kelly Rimmer: I started reading a book by M.R.D. Foot, who was the official historian for the SOE, and quickly realized it’s such a different world (they were operating in.)

It’s only 80 odd years ago, but it’s such a different world that the SO E was operating in and information was so much harder to move around.

Michael Foot, M.R.D. Foot talks about ‘the fog of war,’ which is a phrase I’ve used in the book to explain how the SOE lost agents and lost information.

If we had a major event like a war now, obviously you would have data retention policies and you’d be squirreling away every little piece of information that you can, but that wasn’t the case, particularly at the end of the war.

There’s plenty of scenarios where agents landed and were met by Nazi troops on the ground as they were landing.

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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Henri Dericourt – a likely traitor, protected by bosses

In hindsight, it’s very clear that there were people in the SOE who were betraying information through to the Nazis, but at the time they were operating blind in so many ways.

As soon as I came across that idea and this, gentleman named Henri Dericourt, who was thought to have potentially been quite senior in the SOE, and was very good friends with his second in command, best friends/

He was eventually tried for being a double agent, but was acquitted most likely because his friend Nicolas Bodington, perjured himself to get his friend off.

As soon as I came across that story, I thought it would be really interesting to write about these agents who have the best of intentions. Who have taken to their training with every, ounce of energy and, and dedication that they have and who go off hoping that they can do something to turn the tide of the war.

But they’re really fighting an uphill battle because there are people within the SOE who are working against them.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. And the other terrible thing is that they did not enjoy the normal protection of the rules of engagement of war. Did they tell us what their likely fate was, if that when they did get captured?

Unprotected by the Geneva Convention Diana Rowden – another remarkable English agent in France

Kelly Rimmer: That’s right. They were not uniformed and they didn’t have the protections of the Geneva Convention, so they were treated terribly.

There are most horrific stories about their treatment if they were captured, because the Nazis saw them as illegitimate operatives in their territory.

They would kill them, or capture them and basically torture them. It was horrendous.

Jenny Wheeler: The professor that you refer to, he obviously was a real life person.

In your book Charlotte and her dad made contact with him to see what he can tell them about this agent that her father’s tracking down.

Tell us about the process of balancing fact and fiction.

You’ve got a lot of real-life characters whose stories you’re dealing with. How do you manage that fact and fiction aspect of it?

Kelly Rimmer: Yes, in this book in particular, I found that really challenging.

I’ve written quite an extensive author’s note at the end of this book explaining what’s fact and what’s fiction because there are so many real people who inspired different aspects of this story,

I’ve connected them in ways that they didn’t necessarily, the real characters didn’t necessarily connect, because as a novelist, particularly as a historical fiction novelist, you’re trying to balance honoring history and people’s real stories.

You want to be telling a cohesive and, engaging story. There’s this creative tension versus the ethics of using people’s real stories.

Michael Foot – the official historian

This time, I followed the history quite closely in many aspects of the book, but in other aspects, I have taken liberties and moved things around and moved people around.

So it’s all there in the author’s note.

Michael Foot operated professionally as M. R. D. Foot was the official historian to the SOE, and he did write a book about the SOE which is how we know so much about it. It took him years to get it published.

In 1964, he was finally given permission to publish it.

And that’s why we can, from the comfort of our homes, read and get a real insight into the things that were going on.

But the secrecy around the SOE was so intense that it was drilled into these agents from the very beginning of their kind of connect.

They would be approached and recruited. from the very beginning, it was really drilled into them that every aspect of this is absolutely top secret.

And so even after the war, the government did obscure and there were, documents destroyed accidentally. Documents destroyed intentionally.

There was a fire, there was genuinely a fire in the Baker Street Records which mostly took out records related to the Belgium section of the SOE, but it did destroy a whole bunch of information that would’ve been great for historians to access.

Did the triple spy fake his own death? Henri Dericourt – body never found after ‘Air Opium’ crash…

And so I used all of those scenarios and then wrote a fictional version of Michael Foot because this character was going to be integral in my story.

I think where Michael Foot alive, he would be very disinterested in being the star of a novel, so, him personally, I haven’t based the actual character on him, but rather on his job.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. And I did look up Henri Dericourt because I was rather fascinated by the whole story.

I see that he died in rather mysterious circumstances after the war.

Although, as you say, he wasn’t convicted, it seems like his reputation was in indelibly tarnished.

Tell me what you think happened to him because he died mysteriously and his body was never found.

Kelly Rimmer: That’s right. He found it very difficult to reestablish himself, even after he was acquitted and he eventually ended up working in Laos for a – the nickname of the route he was flying – he was a pilot — was Air Opium.

That should give you some insight into what he was doing.

He died. I think it was 1962. He was on a plane that was loaded with gold. It crashed and his body was never recovered.

There is speculation that he may be faked his own death and started a new life, which is so unfair – if it did happen it’s so unfair to think that this man will get off scot-free.

I hate the thought of it, but is a possibility, most likely.

Kelly Rimmer’s remarkable writing process

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Were the bodies of the other people on the plane found?

Kelly Rimmer: You know, I don’t know that, but I assume that the gold was recovered if there was gold there. I can’t imagine a plane full of gold crushing and nobody bothering to get the gold back.

Jenny Wheeler: Exactly. Yeah. The story is intricately plotted and I’d be really interested, and I’m sure the listeners would too, to hear how you approach writing a book like this. What’s your process?

Kelly Rimmer: I’m not a super organized person in any other facet of my life, but when I write, I am an obsessive plotter.

Before I start writing, I usually know the first and last sentences or have an idea of the first and last sentences.

I do know exactly what will happen in every scene and I usually plan out where the story’s going, particularly with a multiple narrative story like this, I generally have an idea when I’m going to switch narratives.

I write quite a long outline and then I use Scrivener to manage my writing. I move that across into Scrivener, and then I write it in chapters.

Not necessarily in order, because when if I feel like I’m getting blocked, it usually means I haven’t spent enough time daydreaming about that scene, and so I will skip the scene and go on something else that does feel like it’s going to flow.

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Kelly Rimmer – WWII Dual Timeline