A dark thriller set mainly in GLASGOW
Talking Location With … Stephen Clarke – OCCUPIED FRANCE
7th November 2020
#TalkingLocationWith… Stephen Clarke, author of The Spy Who Inspired Me, set in Occupied France
The wonderful thing about setting a novel in Occupied France is that the place has changed so little. You need to ignore the hypermarkets, of course, and Citroëns have evolved a little, but often you only have to squint to be back in 1944.
When researching a novel, I always visit locations. I want to feel the texture of the wall my character leans against, to choose real buildings where scenes will occur. Otherwise the novel will be like those film scenes that supposedly take place in Paris but are shot in Prague.
The mission undertaken by the female agent in The Spy Who Inspired Me happens mostly on the north coast of France. It’s an area I know pretty well, because I myself was sent there on a mission, fortunately without the need for a gun or cyanide pills. I was helping to create a museum of Anglo-French relations, the Centre Culturel de l’Entente Cordiale at the Château d’Hardelot near Boulogne-Sur-Mer.
The Château itself is a folly plonked on the ruins of a medieval castle in the 19th century by a British businessman (he’d never get planning permission these days). Charles Dickens used to visit secretly with his mistress, preserving his reputation back home as a solid family man. I send my spy, Margaux Lynd, and her hapless male sidekick, Ian Lemming (no, not Fleming), here when they hitch a ride on a truck transporting wood.
The forests around Hardelot were harvested by Napoleon to build his fleet of invasion barges, which were abandoned after Nelson proved that Britannia still ruled the waves. And during World War Two, with metals in short supply, Hardelot timber again became a valuable resource. The whole area – including the old auberge where my two characters hide out (which now houses the museum’s offices) – would have been crawling with Nazis. Happily, today the mood is much more about international entente (cordiale).
The beaches in this area are some of the best and wildest in France. The vast expanses of sand are where the Allies did their best to convince the Nazis that the D-Day invasion would come.
Ian Fleming buffs will also know that this is where 007 recuperates at the end of the first Bond novel, Casino Royale. Bond goes for long invigorating swims, which was something I also enjoyed doing when I was working at Hardelot (even though unlike him, I hadn’t been tortured first).
And it was while swimming here that I began to conceive The Spy Who Inspired Me. The idyllic seaside ending of Casino Royale is shattered by an outburst of such brutal misogyny against Bond’s female colleague that I thought there had to be something slightly perverse going on.
So I researched the real female agents who were sent into Occupied France, and discovered spies who were vastly tougher than Bond – there was no Champagne or casinos for these women, no miraculous escapes from torture. And this was what gave me the idea to send someone like (but not exactly like) Fleming back to France with a young woman who would show him what spying was really about.
My two protagonists have to walk through wartime Paris, which in many ways has hardly changed since 1944. There are plaques on walls all over the city marking places where Resistance fighters fell that August.
Some cafés, like the Flore at Saint Germain, look much the same too, with their aproned waiters and retro décor. It was there that famous writers like Sartre and Beauvoir spent much of the war pontificating while others actually fought.
This is partly why I set The Spy Who Inspired Me in April 1944 – the French knew an invasion was imminent and many of them suddenly decided that they’d better do a bit of Resistance. It was especially true of the police, who as a force had actively collaborated with the Nazis, even handing over Allied airmen and commandos to the Gestapo. In the novel, every encounter with a gendarme is a “will he, won’t he?” moment.
My favourite Occupation location in Paris is the Hôtel Bristol, near the Champs-Elysées. Unlike some of its more famous equivalents, this hotel never collaborated. The staff even hid a Jewish architect in one of its rooms for the whole duration – in return, he planned its refurbishment. As a homage to the Bristol’s integrity, I send my protagonists here to meet an English writer called PG Brickhouse. Coincidentally, a certain PG Wodehouse was really interned here in 1944, having been evicted from his house up on the north coast, where my novel begins. So the story’s locations go full circle, a sort of Tour de France (Occupée).
Stephen Clarke
Catch the author on Twitter
And join team TripFiction on Social Media:
Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)
Please wait...
