I've always loved books which have a lone investigator uncovering something that powerful forces want to keep hidden. If this involves a journey into the unknown, even better. I remember reading 'Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow' by Peter Hoeg and walking around all day wondering what was going on under that iceberg. I never quite found out, but that book is still one of the biggest influences on my writing.

In Corn Dolls, my hero - sorry, my protagonist - Tom Fletcher uncovered something like that which involved an English village, pagan rituals, the old Soviet Union and the  British police. That's the kind of mix I like, and the reviews the book received suggested that it struck a chord with other people too. But I believe strongly that the important thing with your heroes - sorry, main characters - is not letting them get too comfortable.  No more village mysteries, then. For the second book in the series, I wanted to send Fletcher out on his own to face something even worse.

What was it going to be? 

Well, I wanted it to be linked to the Second World War. For many people of my generation - born after Kennedy but before Sergeant Pepper, if you know what I mean - the war and stories about the war were still massively present while we were growing up in the seventies. (By the way, I would pinpoint the London Iranian Embassy siege in 1979 as the moment when the Armed Forces stopped being 'part of the past' for us and started being 'part of the present').  Anyway, I wanted some of that dominant background presence to come through. And, of course, it had to be set in East Anglia (for non-British readers, that's the rounded bit of Southern England that sticks out into the sea opposite Holland). Those two things meant the book had to be about planes, really. Even today, the flat landscape of East Anglia is dotted with the  A-shaped tracks of abandoned airbases dating from the war - both British and American. 

I get a lot of ideas from flipping through old photographs and maps, putting them together and asking what kind of stories come out. I looked at the photographic record of the old airbases - poignant images of men in their teens and early twenties standing by their planes. One thing that kept coming through in the pictures of the Americans was the use of Nose Art - the pictures of glamorous women which the aircrew painted on the sides of the fuselage (the most famous example because of the 1990's film is 'Memphis Belle' - but of course there are hundreds of others). I thought that despite the humour and the dated sensuality of the paintings, there was something tragic about many of them, as if they were hiding a story.

  I also noticed that - while the most common images were 'girls in swimsuits' etc, a surprising number showed women presented as witches. Now, in some ways, this is understandable. Witches can fly, after all. But it reminded me of something else I vaguely remembered about East Anglia - isn't there some kind of association with witchcraft? Wasn't there someone  in the 17th century who went around East Anglia - around the sites of the 20th century airbases, probably - uncovering witches?

Indeed there was. It was Matthew Hopkins - an obscure and otherwise talentless individual - who styled himself Witchfinder General. Taking advantage of the confusion caused by the English Civil war, he toured East Anglia taking payment from villages in return for unmasking the witches who apparently lived among them. Some 200 people were executed as a result - not by burning, as many people imagine, but by hanging, drowning and crushing, and many men were killed alongside the women.

   I thought about this. I placed some of the 17th century engravings of witch interrogations alongside the photos of the American aircraft 'witch girl' Nose Art. By a peculiar coincidence, some of the women in the engravings seemed - at least to my suspicious author's mind - to resemble some of the WW2 American Nose Art witches. As I brooded over this for a while, I became convinced that this was at the heart of what Tom Fletcher would have to face. The old witches are the Nose Art girls. You see? They're the same women. So that gave me the starting point.

Thinking of the style of the book, one thing I wanted from the Tom Fletcher series is that each book is a fractured take on an existing crime model (so Corn Dolls, as a lot of reviewers noted, was a twisted version of the age-old English village murder mystery - Miss Marple, Inspector Morse and so on - but with a few innovations such as the arrival of the Russian army). I thought Steel Witches might be a version of another crime model:  the private eye-missing-person set-up. You know, where the PI in his shabby office is visited and asked to find a missing blonde; he says he's kind of busy, but in fact he really wants to find her. Hell, the rent bill's just landed on the mat - and anyway, something about the absent woman intrigues him. I love those books - Raymond Chandler, of course, but also writers such as the contemporary US author Loren B Estleman. So  Steel Witches is my take on the private eye format: the guy with the filing cabinet and the shoe leather.

Talking of shoe leather, I had to think about my hero - I mean, main viewpoint character - Tom Fletcher too, of course. When we left him  at the end of Corn Dolls, he'd just discovered that the police were not, after all, the family he'd been yearning for all his life. I thought that the stuff he was uncovering in this book would still have to involve him personally, and not just in the ways he expected. Poor guy, that's what happened. Sometimes people say to me, 'Who is Tom Fletcher? Is it you?' But of course the answer is No. Casting my mind back to the 20th century, I think I've been influenced - and I know this sounds pretentious - by the relationship between mother and son that comes up repeatedly in the work of the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus.

And what about the journey that Fletcher has to make? At the start of the book, we still find him in his flat in Green Street, now converted into a PI office complete with filing cabinet and client sofa. But I wanted his journey to take advantage of the landscape of East Anglia, going to uncover something about the present, about the war, about himself. He travels, in fact, to Norfolk - site of so many of the old airbases, to find one that the Americans built in 1943 - then apparently demolished and denied ever having existed.

What else?  Well, England, dammit. I'm writing this in March 2008, and the text of Steel Witches has been at the printers for a few months now. But looking through the news,  I see so much that happens in the book. Reports of freak weather, floods, fears over uranium dirty bombs, students supplementing their incomes through 'hostess' activity, the police using fresh-from- the-battlefield tools such as drone aircraft to survey the civilian population. All random fragments of the way our society is going - all on the front pages, and all in the book. 

When my agent first read it, she said, 'Is this book set in the future?'

I said, 'No. It's set in the present.' A strange thought.   

© Patrick Lennon 2008