Ely author Jim Kelly on the secrets of Scott’s South Pole race

What if one of the most famous tragedies of exploration turned out to be something altogether more sinister?

In 1913, Captain Robert Scott and his four companions reached the South Pole to find their rival, Norway’s Roald Amundsen, had won the race there. Defeated, they set out on the 850-mile journey back to their ship.

But a year later, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the explorer sent out to meet them at One Ton depot, found their pitched tent, just 10 miles from the depot, with their bodies inside, frozen from the harsh conditions.

Ely author Jim Kelly admits that as a child he had been obsessed with the diary of Captain Scott about his ill-fated adventure and had been puzzling for years over how he could write a story about the expedition.

Then he hit on an intriguing idea. What if Cherry had discovered how the team really came to die when he found a ‘secret’ diary in Scott’s tent? And it stated that their deaths were not results of the cold, or hunger, but of murder. This is the plot of his new book, The White Lie.

Jim says: “The secret notebook is entirely my creation - as far as I know Scott has not left behind a second diary. The idea for this story came from when I was young and I first read Scott’s diaries. I used to fantasise that they had got it wrong and actually Scott had made it to the South Pole first. I couldn’t make that work so then I began to think about the return journey when they were killed by the cold and lack of rations. And because I write crime novels, I wondered about whether they could have been murdered. Obviously, the diaries give no hint of that.

“So I had to find a way around that and it was a big problem that held me back for a long time. And I just thought, let’s imagine that Scott doesn’t want it to be made public, that they’re being tracked down by somebody. And so he instructs everybody to leave that out of their diaries and he’ll leave a special diary, which will be taken back to London and given to the government.”

With everyone involved in the expedition long dead, Jim had carte blanche to write whatever he liked about the expedition. But he was careful not to trample on the reputations of the people who were there.

His hero Falcon Gray - named after Scott, whose middle name is Falcon - is an orphan brought up on Cherry’s estate. In 1969, a decade after Cherry’s death, he receives a small red diary, found in Scott’s tent, that states that their deaths were actually murder. Falcon, who studied at the University of Cambridge, is now living in a campervan in Fen Ditton. Meanwhile, the Moon landing is about to happen. Hoping to find out the truth, he sets out on a journey to the South Pole, but someone is determined to keep the truth hidden.

Jim says: “I had a lot of fun writing the secret diary because I just read the Scott diaries over and over again until I could kind of pick up his style and the tone of voice. I think I got close to it.

“I’m not a big fan of Scott. I don’t think he was a particularly good leader, but undoubtedly, he’s an extremely good writer. What’s extraordinary is he gets better and better as it becomes more and more obvious that he’s going to die. I think he was thinking who was going to read this diary. It does achieve a kind of level of majesty towards the end, I think it’s an incredible achievement. And when I think how difficult it is for me to write and I just get up in the morning and drag myself upstairs with coffee, and look at the laptop, here’s somebody who is dying in freezing cold conditions and every day he’s writing. I think it’s extraordinary, and in many ways, the diary is a great achievement. So the idea of playing with that diary, which is a very kind of writerly thing to want to do, is fascinating and I love the idea of overturning a preconceived idea of the past.”

The White Lie is deeply researched. As well as the diaries, Jim read biographies and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the expedition, The Worst Journey in the World, and his biography - Cherry: A life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard - by Sara Wheeler. He also paid visits to the Scott Polar Museum in Cambridge, where he was deeply moved by the objects on display.

“I would get the train every morning and go to work in the University Library. If I was lacking inspiration I could bicycle down to the Scott Polar Museum where I would go and kneel down just beside Oates’s sleeping bag,” says Jim.

“People sometimes have considered it to be old fashioned to have boxes in museums with things from the past in but actually, it really works. It’s like a touchstone. If you feel something’s not quite coming alive, that’s quite a way to get you back up back on track.”

But apart from Scott’s diary, the starting point for Jim was The Worst Journey in the World.

“Cherry lived his life backwards because all of the amazing stuff is when he’s young, and then he lives a very long, very sad life. He was really tortured. And at one point, I think he had catatonic depression. The last line in Sara Wheeler’s biography is something like ‘Cherry was buried in the family plot at Wheathampstead along with his secrets’. And I thought that was fantastic. It’s as though she’s passing the story on. I just thought, well, what are those secrets? So that provided some motivation to the story because in my book Cherry is the one who’s left the secret diary.”

For the rest of his life after he returned from Antarctica, Cherry struggled with guilt, wondering if he could have saved the lives of Scott and his team if he had continued into a blizzard to try to find the men.

Jim says: “In retrospect, there was really no chance of finding them and it was very unfair, but you can see he was such an honourable kind of character that it would probably prey on his mind. Also, I think he was suffering from PTSD.”

This is Jim’s 19th novel. A former journalist who worked on he Bedfordshire Times, Yorkshire Evening Press and the Financial Times, he is the author of the Nighthawk crime series for Alison and Busby, and the Philip Dryden series for Penguin. His first book, The Water Clock, was shortlisted for the John Creasey Award and he has since won a CWA Dagger in the Library and the New Angle Prize for Literature. This new book has taken him 10 years to write but he would not give up because the real-life events were so exciting, that he knew he had to find a way to make the novel work.

Why does the Scott Polar expedition still capture the imagination a century on from the events? Partly, Jim believes, it is Scott’s diary and Cherry’s account that are gripping pieces of literature in themselves.

He says: “My wife (Midge Gillies) writes biographies and history. And whenever she gets a subject, the real key to it is whether they wrote a diary. Once you’ve got a diary, you’re inside someone’s head. You don’t have to worry about working out what they saw. And obviously, sometimes when people write diaries they don’t write the truth. But at least you’ve got some sort of inner voice speaking to you. Scott does that.”

The other thing that keeps people talking about these events is the debate about Scott himself.

“Half the people think he’s sort of a great hero and shouldn’t be criticised and pretty much the other half think he is an idiot and people lost their lives because of incompetence,” says Jim.

Admiring “heroic failure” is part of the British psyche, according to Jim.

“It’s the Charge of the Light Brigade. It’s Dunkirk,” he says.

He cites the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, who explained why the British like amateurs more than experts.

“He said that the British are really good with freedom. And we don’t like being told what to do too much. Therefore, we’d like people in charge, who actually are a bit shambolic,” says Jim.

This seems to explain a lot about the British psyche and more recent events.

He adds: “What we don’t want is the kind of autocrat who tells you exactly what to do and is incredibly efficient. We prefer the gifted amateur, the amateur cricketers and the amateur footballers, and we’d like everybody to be not too great, but trying really hard and playing it in the right spirit. That’s the Scott effect.

“And and sometimes that gets people killed, because this wasn’t a game. And maybe it shouldn’t have been taken in quite that sort of amateurish way. You think of all of the hours in that first winter that they spent playing football outside, or, producing the South Pole Times when they could have been skiing, for example. We don’t want to take it too far, of course. Amundsen, who is the victor in all this, is a pretty colourless and unpleasant character. But a little less of the amateur, I think, would have gone a long way.”

The White Lie by J.G.Kelly is published by Hachette UK.