Murder at Bletchley Park, the eighth novel in my Blind Detective series, featuring my blinded war veteran Frederick Rowlands, has been one of the most fun to research and write. I’ve always been fascinated by the wartime intelligence centre, which employed around 10,000 people — many of them women — most of whom were engaged in top-secret code-breaking activities which helped to bring the war to an end as much as two years earlier than might otherwise have been the case.
Visiting Bletchley Park — a former country house purchased by the British government in 1938 as a base for its Code and Cypher School — was an inspiration in itself. Here, in the Victorian mansion that housed the administrative offices, and in the cluster of huts surrounding it, I could imagine myself back in the 1940s, with rooms reconstructed to show how they might have looked at the time. It wasn’t only contemporary objects, such as the heavy, bakelite telephones and government-issue furniture that created this atmosphere, but personal items — a cigarette packet, a powder compact — left on the desks, which made me feel as if the owners had just stepped out for a minute.
At Bletchley Park, too, were displayed the famous ‘Enigma’ machines, first captured from the Germans and later instrumental in cracking the Enigma code used by the German army, navy and airforce. In Hut 11 was to be seen a replica of the ‘Bombe’ machine, built by Alan Turing to speed up the search for the Enigma cipher keys. All this, supplemented by contemporary photographs and first-person accounts in books such as The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay, and Tessa Dunlop’s The Bletchley Girls, helped me set the scene for my murder mystery— which begins when one of the female code-breakers is found murdered, and a cache of top secret documents goes missing.
The plot of Murder at Bletchley Park hinges around wartime treachery — in particular that of the individuals later notorious as the ‘Cambridge Spies’. Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends — about Kim Philby — gave me further insight into that most secret and sinister trade: that of espionage. The fact that I was already a huge fan of works by John Le Carré and Ian Fleming — both of whom worked in British Intelligence during the war — provided another thread in the web of intrigue, betrayal and murder I was trying to weave.
Murder at Bletchley Park contains several thinly disguised portraits of historical figures, including Alan Turing, and other famous code-breakers such as Dillwyn Knox. The spy John Cairncross, who actually worked at Bletchley Park, also features as a character, as does the even more notorious Anthony Blunt, who recruited, among others, Guy Burgess — another ‘Cambridge spy’ encountered by my Blind Detective. Of course these are all fictional characters, and my story is only a ‘what if’ piece of speculation. But I felt I had got to know these people, over months of reading and watching films about them, to imagine how they might have behaved, if a murderer had turned up in their midst.
Murder at Bletchley Park is published by Allison and Busby.
