The Best Of Our Spies: Nathalie Mercier went missing a month after the Allied landings in Normandy. Gerlis was inspired by writers like ‘Ian McEwan,’ ‘Graham Greene,’ and ‘John le Carre.’The author’s best books include: Rather than forming a concrete picture of the finale, he allows his characters to shape the climax. He doesn’t know the ending when he sits down to write. Gerlis does what he can to give his settings a sense of authenticity. With a plot in tow, the author will create his characters, initially developing them in his mind before putting their biographies on paper so that he can refer to them later on. For instance, in ‘The Swiss Spy,’ the author placed the focus on Stalin’s unwillingness to accept the possibility that Hitler could attack the Soviet Union. Once he settles on a significant historical event, he looks for an interesting plot. His novels start with extensive research.

Fortunately, his days as a journalist instilled a love for research in Gerlis. WW2 was a global event, yet it created opportunities for the author to explore intimate stories about simple people. He just knew that he was happiest when writing about the Second World War. He couldn’t explain why he was so excited to write stories set in the past instead of the present. He was determined to stray from WW2-based espionage fiction.īut he couldn’t do it. In fact, after ‘The Best of Our Spies’ came out, the author tried to write something new, a novel with different themes. But when he wrote his first novel, Gerlis had no intention of making historical conflicts such as WW2 and The Cold War his primary focus. Today, people know the author for writing spy thrillers based on fact. Later on, Gerlis shifted the line to chapter 18, where it belonged. The sentence created a foundation from which Owen Quinn, the author’s hero, emerged. Years later, Gerlis was vacationing in France when the first line of the 18th chapter of ‘The Best of Our Spies.’īack then, Gerlis thought it was the perfect line for his first chapter. He knew that he wanted to write a book about D-Day, but he had neither plot nor characters. He was covering the 50th anniversary of D-Day when the thought of writing a novel about those events came to him.Īt the time, he had no idea that ‘The Best of Our Spies’ would become his first novel. His work took the author to the US, China, and the Middle East.

He even joined the BBC team that covered the 911 attacks.

He edited ‘Breakfast News,’ made documentaries for ‘The Money Programme,’ worked as the duty editor for BBC TV News on the day of the Omagh bomb, and more. In the two decades that followed, Gerlis filled numerous positions at the BBC.

The Best of Our Spies by Alex Gerlis