The Real Life Inspiration for Betrayal at Blackthorn Park
I’m often asked about the inspiration behind my books. Sometimes it’s tricky answering that question. (“Well, five years ago I read a book about a woman who did something completely unrelated to my topic, and then four months before I pitched I heard this one song. Oh! And there was this one time someone told me about their grandmother…”) However, occasionally it’s very easy to trace the inspiration-to-book pipeline.
The second book in my Evelyne Redfern series, Betrayal at Blackthorn Park (out October 1), is one of those easy ones.
Finding Inspiration
When we left Evelyne, the amateur sleuth at the heart of the series, in A Traitor in Whitehall, she was in the unique position of being offered a new opportunity during the war.1 While I was trying to figure out what I wanted her second case to be, I happened to read a book called The Department of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Damien Lewis2 about the Special Operations Executive (SOE). In his book, Lewis describes how the SOE developed, tested, and manufactured weapons of sabotage. One of the places they did that was the Firs.
“Winston Churchill’s Toy Shop”
The Fir is a country house in Whitchurch in the county of Buckinghamshire, which was requisition by the government for use in the war effort in 1939. Over the course of the war, it became the location for MD1, the organization that developed weapons for covert use by commandos in the SOE. MD1 would go on to be responsible for the limpet mine, the sticky bomb, the PIAT anti-tank weapon, and various time delay fuses.
The MD1 began its life in the London offices but, following an air raid, decamped to the countryside in 1940 and set up shop at The Firs. There, workshops and testing grounds were developed. There also was some limited manufacturing of weapons.
This earned the house the nickname “Winston Churchill’s Toy Shop.”
Becoming Blackthorn Park
I knew while writing Betrayal at Blackthorn Park that I wanted Evelyne, a newly minted field agent in the fictional Special Investigations Unit, to be sent on her first seemingly underwhelming assignment that would turn out to be much more dangerous than her handlers expected. I decided to send her off to the countryside to make a security assessment at a secret weapons development facility where, while just minding her own business, she stumbles across a murder.
Immediately, I remembered The Firs and decided to draw inspiration from the real place while imagining the fictional Blackthorn Park. I imagined a Tudor manor house where the former bedrooms had been turned into staff offices and drawing rooms into workshops. I gave Blackthorn Park grounds where testing fields could be built and a lake where water-based mines could be tested. And perhaps most importantly, I took the idea of a sort of “one-stop shop” for weapons development, testing, and manufacturing and made it and the people working there a central part of the plot of Blackthorn Park.
The Firs Now
In 1945, with the end of the war, MD1 and the SOE moved out of The Firs and, presumably, it was returned to its owner. A Google search tells me that the building went up for sale in 2021. At the time it was offices, but planning permission had been granted to turn it into flats.
No spoilers here!
This was the inspiration for the film of the same name, which I don’t believe received a particularly warm reception. Having not seen it, I can’t speak to its quality, but the book is a good overview of the SOE.