Ken Lussey Interview

The debut novel by Ken Lussey EYES TURNED SKYWARDS the gripping WW2 novel published by Fledgling Press

My review of the book can be found here, and the author granted me the opportunity for an interview with him, for which I am very grateful.

How did the character Bob Sutherland come to you?

I needed someone who I could maintain interest in and enthusiasm about to carry out the investigation at the core of the book. Bob Sutherland evolved as an ex-fighter pilot no longer able to do what he really wants to do because of an injury sustained right at the end of the Battle of Britain in 1940.

I based his career up until that point – though not his life - on that of a real Scottish Battle of Britain ace who was sadly killed on the day that Bob Sutherland was injured.

To my mind it’s slightly ironic that although Bob is the character I started with and who I ought to be able to associate with most closely, my favourite character in the book is Monique Dubois, the MI5 agent with an exceptionally dark story. Hers is also an incredibly improbable story, until you know she was closely based on a real woman who disappeared during the war after the two German spies she landed with in Scotland were executed.

 

What was the genesis of Eyes Turned Skywards?

I’ve always been fascinated by the way that World War Two had an impact on Scotland and I’ve always been interested in military aviation. Reading about an incident late in the war at an airfield in Aberdeenshire led me to think there was the basis of a “truth is stranger than fiction” novel in it.

Then I realised that writing a novel set in late 1944 might be rather limiting if, as I hoped, it became the first of a series. I’d only have a few months of the war left to mine for material and settings.

I therefore began to look for intriguing real-life stories from earlier in the war. When I came across an account of the crash of a flying boat in Caithness in August 1942 in which the Duke of Kent, the younger brother of King George VI, was killed, I knew I had my starting point.

 

Your first book was a guide to Great Britain, and you are a non-fiction writer; so how was the transition to historical fiction?

Why the long gap from 1983 to publish your next book?

Writing ‘A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Great Britain’, published by Penguin in 1983, seemed a natural thing to do after mis-spending my student days hitch-hiking around Great Britain. But factual writing, though a skill in its own right, was not what I really wanted to do. Meanwhile, the real world had intervened, and I had become a civil servant, doing lots of factual writing!

I always wanted to become a novelist and made a couple of abortive attempts to write ‘the great novel’ over next few decades. When 'Eyes Turned Skywards' was published, 35 years and 5 days after 'A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Great Britain', I did wonder whether it might be some sort of record for the gap between first and second books by an author. Not a chance. It took Harper Lee 55 years to publish her second book, and there are a few other very long gaps too.

As for the choice between historical and contemporary fiction, it was simply a case of finding an idea that really appealed to me; and that led me in a historical direction.

 

How much research did it involve?

More than I could ever have believed possible. These days, there’s a huge amount available online, from websites setting out conspiracy theories about the Duke of Kent’s death through to Google Earth and Street View. But to my mind there’s no substitute for actually going and walking the ground your characters walked and looking at what they were looking at.

That becomes tricky, of course, when your characters were seeing the very different world of 1942. Then it becomes necessary, for example, to visit and work out what the road at the bottom of Berriedale Braes in Caithness looked like before several later generations of road realignments. And it was equally important to make a winter yomp across boggy moorland to find the memorials at the site of the air crash. Sometimes local knowledge is the only way forwards. For example, I had to ask local experts whether Wick had a municipal electricity supply at the time. The need to guard against assumptions about people, about places, and even about the use of language nearly eight decades ago is vital to get the sense of realism I am looking for.

One moment stands out as sending chills up and down my spine. The official account of the cause of the crash that killed the Duke of Kent was given in a written answer to a parliamentary question on 7 October 1942. I’d realised early in the research that the online version of Hansard showed that the answer gave the date of the crash as 15 August 1942 instead of 25 August 1942, but I’d put this down to an error that arose when the records were digitised. It was only when I visited the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh that I realised that the wrong date was given in the original written record, which is truly remarkable given it was about what would have been at the time a very recent and very high-profile event.

 

 

 

What comes easier, the dialogue or the action?

I enjoy both, though perhaps dialogue flows more easily. I set my characters up in a situation and let them have the conversation I want them to have. I hear their voices in my head and simply transcribe what they are saying. I always have an idea of where the conversation is meant to go, but my characters will often surprise me by adding detail or heading off in unexpected tangents. For me this gives a sense of discovery and is one of the joys of writing.

 

Can you describe the area of Scotland the action takes place, it sounds wondrous and vast?

Scotland is indeed wondrous, and it is pretty vast. I used a number of different areas of the country in ‘Eyes Turned Skywards’. The action moves from Oban in Argyll on the west coast to the east side of the far north of Scotland. Scenes are set on the coast of Caithness at the fictional Sarclet Castle and inland at the real Loch More, and pretty much all the way down the coast to Inverness.

 

Did you want to do a sequel?

The sequel to ‘Eyes Turned Skywards’, called ‘The Danger of Life’, has also been published by Fledgling Press. It again features Bob and Monique as its two central characters and its central strand takes place at and around the Commando Basic Training Centre in Lochaber.

Book 3, set mainly in Orkney at the end of 1942, was completed last year and Book 4, set mainly in Stockholm early in 1943, was finished a few months ago. But like everything else, the answer to the question of how they will emerge into the light of day will have to await the world's return to something a little closer to normality.

 

How long can you write about Bob for?

There’s two years of World War Two left after the as yet unpublished Book 4 in the series, so Bob and Monique have plenty of mileage left in them. I’ve even got the opening few pages written of a book that would see them visiting Soviet central Asia in 1972, when they are both 60.  

 

As someone with a long career and long gap in publications, what advice would you offer

Keep on trying. At the end of the day, all you need is one person – the right person – to believe in what you have written as much as you do.

Eyes Turned Skywards is out now from Fledgling Press now on all formats