Hello Michael. What led you to write No Man Dies Twice?

I was working for the Daily Telegraph and had to go to the National Archives to cover the release of the papers on Operation Foxley, an SOE plan to assassinate Hitler. I wrote it up for the paper but even as I did so I realised it would make an amazing basis for a spy thriller.

The files showed that the wartime MI6 Chief Stewart Menzies and his powerful deputy Claude Dansey  were bitterly opposed to the idea of killing Hitler and thought the Special Operations Executive’s plans were highly dangerous. The German war effort was in trouble and most Germans had begun to realise the war was a mistake. Killing Hitler risked turning him into a martyr around whom the other Nazi leaders could rally the German people.

I just thought a turf battle between MI6 and SOE on German soil in the middle of the war with MI6 trying to stop the SOE assassin would make a great spy thriller.

So if it is very much a spy story about British spies, why is your protagonist a German detective?

The setting was Nazi Germany at a time when a lot of Germans were beginning to realise that the war was not going to end well. To have a real feel of the setting, of what it was like then in Germany the protagonist needed to be able to give off those vibes. So I created a situation where SOE had sent someone in and MI6 had killed him off. The detective investigating the case, unfolding the lies surrounding the dead man, was the obvious person to be the protagonist.

Why in Bavaria and not Berlin?  

There were several SOE plans but the most sensible one was a sniper assassinating Hitler when he was at the Eagle’s Nest, his holiday home near Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. When he was there he would take a daily walk. The sniper needed only to infiltrate the surprisingly minimal defences and pick Hitler off as he went for his walk.

So the murder had to take place near to Berchtesgaden and the closest place to there which would have had criminal police detective section was Rosenheim, a small picturesque city with dark streets that would be a perfect setting for a noir novel.

So who is your detective?

Peter Ritter, a First World War hero who was a detective in Munich but retreated to his childhood home away from the big city pressures to do whatever the Gestapo wanted and just get on with his job, solving crime regardless of any political pressure. That makes his life much more interesting. His bosses don’t trust him. His marriage is falling apart. His one refuge is a late evening brandy spent talking to his dead father-in-law. A detective in wartime Germany who is trying to solve crimes while openly antagonizing Nazi officials already has an extraordinarily dangerous job, but then discovering an assassination plot involving Hitler turns his investigation into something far larger than the murder he originally set out to understand.

It sounds like he isn’t going to last long…

He’s not stupid. He knows how to stay just the right side of his bosses but when he discovers that British spies are involved in a plot to murder Hitler, he is torn. Does he call in the Gestapo to stop the assassination or drop his determination to do his job and allow the British spies to go ahead in the hope that killing Hitler could somehow save the Germany he loves. His investigation begins with murder, but gradually becomes a question about loyalty, conscience, survival, and the consequences of choosing one path over another. Meanwhile, the British spies are on the move around him. What should he do?

Michael Smith is the author of No Man Dies Twice.