Best-selling author Simon Scarrow heads to Cambridge with A Death in Berlin

Best-selling author Simon Scarrow, whose books have been published in more than 25 languages and sold six million copies, will be presenting his latest tome, A Death in Berlin, at Waterstones in Cambridge next week.

Known for his Eagle of the Empire series, Simon started writing World War II thrillers in 2021.

His first, Black Out, was a Sunday Times bestseller, while the second, Dead of Night, also received good reviews.

Now we have A Death in Berlin, which the writer insists can be enjoyed as a standalone tale.

“It’s the third in a crime series set in Berlin during the Second World War,” says Simon, speaking to the Cambridge Independent via a Zoom video call from Mauritius – in 32-degree heat.

“And it’s following the investigations of a guy called Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke.

“So the idea is that the series will follow the story arc of Germany’s fortunes across the Second World War, and his struggle to fight crime but at the same time survive under the Nazi regime.

“And I don’t know yet whether he’s going to survive the Second World War – we’ll just have to see as the series evolves.”

Is the character of CI Horst Schenke based on anyone in particular?

“No, he’s a fictional character,” says the seasoned storyteller, who did his master’s degree at the University of East Anglia.

“But, like a lot of historical fiction, you use a fictional character to get close to the real characters.”

Schenke is an investigator with the Kripo unit. The Kripo – or Kriminalpolizei – was the German criminal police force at the time, who were responsible for investigating crimes and enforcing Nazi policies.

Simon made some research trips to Berlin to investigate the Kripo, among other things.

“One of the things that I find with doing the research for the series – which is completely different from the other books that I’ve written – is that when I finish doing the research, I come away from it feeling slightly soiled and dirty,” he notes, “because there’s absolutely nothing redeeming about Nazi Germany.

“It is an entirely unpleasant and nasty phase of history, and the people involved were little better than bloodthirsty gangsters.”

He continues: “It’s a complicated thing, really, I’ve often wondered this, because on British television we went through this long period where it was Dad’s Army or it was Goodnight Sweetheart…

“And once we had this German woman living with us when I was a student, and I was desperately trying to find something on television that we could watch together – and it just seemed to be wall-to-wall World War II.

“The only thing that we could find was Red Dwarf, and the episode opens with Arnold Rimmer, as Ace Rimmer, on a German bomber – it was that episode!

“I think there’s an enduring fascination, partly because it’s one of those great warnings from history – don’t let’s go here again.

“And when I’ve been to Berlin and done research trips there, one of the things that impresses me about Germany is that they do embrace this idea of history as something that you learn from.

“There’s some pretty grim episodes there that we need to account for if we’re going to have an accurate understanding of our past and not make the same mistakes again.

“Whereas unfortunately in Britain, there seems to be the opposite tendency, which seems to be, ‘Oh, we must always look at our history as some sort of glorious past which mustn’t be called into doubt or have a shadow cast over it by something as inconvenient as the truth’.

“So I think that there’s a degree of that involved – but I think it’s just one of those kind of extreme periods of history that is fascinating because it’s so extreme.”

Simon adds: “It’s our last gasp of us having done something significant in the world and that’s why we’ve got to keep revisiting it, that could be something to do with it as well.”

Simon believes that the best way to conduct research is to read all the historical accounts you can, and to go to where a particular book is to be set – “because you really don’t get a sense of it until you’ve actually been”.

And he notes: “Just turning a corner in Berlin, sometimes you’ll come across an entire street still covered with bullet marks and shell marks from the Russian attack in 1945.

“So it’s a city that wears its history pretty heavily, and I think it’s all the more fascinating because of that.”

Simon will be discussing A Death in Berlin, and taking part in a Q&A, on Tuesday, 18 March, from 6-7.30pm at Watersones in Cambridge.

Tickets, priced £8 general admission (£5 Waterstones loyalty cardholders), are available from waterstones.com/events/an-evening-with-simon-scarrow/cambridge. For more on Simon, go to simonscarrow.co.uk.