And it comes up to the 1990’s when a faculty member at a college in Cambridge is murdered, his body floats in the River Cam in Cambridge, and he was part of the group who was researching what might have happened to stolen properties, who might have them and where were they appearing in auctions.
* Apart from your own knowledge in this area what sort of research did you do into the Nazi regime and this time period?
If you are doing art history in that period then you are dealing with the Nazis as well, I have read quite a lot about the Nazis and so on, and there use of paintings, at first they started to burn the stuff; there was this huge bonfire in Munich were some wonderful paintings were loaded on the ground and burnt, so they destroyed quite a large amount of stuff. Then they realised that this is stupid and they started selling it - that did actually happen so it’s not totally fiction.
It’s a story of a group of people, who are completely fictional as for as I’m concerned, who get embroiled in this other stuff that is factual - I don’t know if people died or were killed later on; but later on in the book I have this younger guy who is at an auction in New York and sees a painting that he knows belonged to his father, it was stolen by the Nazis, and he starts making lots of noise at the auction house.
Two days later he is killed crossing a round in New York, he is actually killed in the hospital he’s not killed in the road; he is hit by a car that didn’t stop and taken to hospital where he is killed.
And this is the first of a number of accidents, well they are not accidents but planned attacks on people who are beginning to question the ownership of things appearing in auction, and it escalates.
And it looks as if there are people who are trying to stop this group from doing what they were doing and it got quite nasty.
* The central character Adam Locke is an art history professor so how much is the character based on yourself?
On no not at all, he is much smarter than myself. It’s an ambiance than I know about and I know the inside of universities as well as outside lecturing - it’s art of me as I have been an academic for all of my working life. But I am much older than Adam Locke in the novel.
* This is your debut novel so how did you find the whole experience?
Well it’s something that I have always wanted to do and, in fact, I wrote this book, initially, nine or ten years ago but I ended up with a thousand pages, which was too long. I had people in London who were interested in publishing it if I could hack it down to half the size - at the time I tried to do that but I felt that I was wrecking what I had so I stopped.
So some years later I started again but in the States it has been in process of being published for two years so it has been a long process.
* Well you have touched on my next question really the literary world is quite cut throat with many novels falling by the wayside so how easy/or difficult a process was it getting the novel published?
It wasn’t very difficult as it was a company in the States who publish anything they think is worth publishing and you pay for it basically. I had quite a lot of contacts with publishers in Britain and I had some very nice things said about the book but they seemed to think that it was too long and too heavy for it to be really saleable in that form.
But as I started to hack around with it it seemed to lose to me, I suppose I was looking at it in too much of an academic fashion, but then I must have had a brain burst because I just attacked it one day- but it took quite a long time.
Anyone can try to have a book published, in a way, if they are prepared to pay for it and it’s a much less expensive process in Britain that in the States - the reason I used the States was because this particular company had quite a nice article written about then in Time magazine and it sounded like a good possibility, and they have done a good job.
* What do you hope people will take away from reading Somerville?
Three more book (laughs). How is that for an answer? I have a professional interest in this period of time and I’m very interested in art, I’m a painter as well, so it’s been my life.
Some people find it nicely academic, I have had some very nice things said about it, I tried not to make it too heavy I didn’t want to make a textbook or anything, of course it’s not a textbook, it’s not the truth and it’s not what really happened but it’s based upon what might have happened.
I was looking for something that might have happened so I thought ‘well if the Germans want to make money and they have these fantastic paintings they want to sell them what are they going to get in return? Do they want money for them?’ Pharmaceuticals seemed to be the obvious thing.
When the Second World War broke out northern Switzerland was quite pro German, they speak German; it’s Swiss-German but it’s German. Switzerland is a small country and it was divided because in the south Italian was spoken and in the west you have French - so there were three languages in one country.
But the north was German speaking and there were quite a few nasty occasions when the Jewish people living in northern Switzerland at that time were disturbed, let’s put it that way, by people in Switzerland.
* Finally what's next for you? Do you have more novels in the pipeline?
I do, I have five more actually written. I’m going through them very carefully having experienced this first novel but these others are in a similar kind of vein. The second one is about an institution that was a psychiatric institution in Sussex which was active at the end of the second war - my mother was in nursing, she specialised in psychiatric nursing, and she was the night sister in sole charge of this hospital in Sussex.
And this story is about somebody who was a nurse themselves who suffered enormously when a V2 rocket fell on a market in London and teams were sent out to help the wounded - and as a nurse she suffered from it and finds herself in a psychiatric clinic.
In this clinic, after the war, there is an officer who was involved in the Arnhem drop and who suffers a nervous problem - he attacked a senior office when he killed a German who was already dying - he is working in the garden of the psychiatric facility. And the story follows the relationship between the nurse and this man.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw