Journalist and author Robert Hutton talks to us about his latest book 'The Illusionist' and how his first spy book shone a light on MI5's Secret Nazi Hunter Eric Roberts.
Robert Hutton started as a computer scientist but fell into journalism, and then stumbled across a true WW2 spy story that so excited him he wrote a book about it, Agent Jack. His latest book, The Illusionist, is about Dudley Clarke, the eccentric genius who realised how the Allies could use stage magic to deceive the Nazis. Robert’s day job is as political satirist for The Critic magazine, and he hosts the podcast War Movie Theatre. You can find Robert's books on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
I read a lot of the early Biggles books, the ones set in WW1, which were written to prepare boys for the war that the author, WE Johns, was sure they would have to fight. They were surprisingly frank about what was involved. And I loved The Lord Of The Rings, which I now know was informed by Tolkien's time in the trenches. So in ways I didn't understand, it was hanging over me. Then as a teenager I devoured the early Terry Pratchett books -- I think I have signed copies of the first ten Discworld novels, and Evelyn Waugh's comic novels, especially Scoop, which all aspiring journalists should read. But the book that in retrospect changed my life was Robert Harris's Selling Hitler, about the Hitler Diaries. It opened up to me the chaos of newspapers, but also the possibilities of writing non-fiction that could feel like a thriller.
Utterly. I started when editors would ask me about "this internet thing", and when few people had mobile phones and they were expensive to use. If you wanted to talk to someone, you'd go and knock on their door. The papers I worked for came out once a day. Then I moved to Bloomberg, which had been doing instant news since well before anyone had an internet connection. Political editors on newspapers would laugh at the way that I had to file stories constantly, updating them as events changed, writing different possible drafts in advance of a big event so that we could be prepared for all the likely outcomes. These days, that's how everyone lives. Politics has got much faster, too. There's an expectation that everyone will react to everything instantly.
I stumbled onto the story of Eric Roberts, who was the subject of my last book, Agent Jack: it was part of a release at the National Archives, which I was covering as a reporter. When I read it, I very quickly thought there was a book in it, but I assumed Ben MacIntrye was going to write it. A few months later I ran into him, and asked him if he was. He said he was busy with the SAS, and that I should give it a crack. I went home that night and wrote the first page, which is pretty much how it appears in the book. With Dudley Clarke, the process was a little more considered. I had come across him when the file on his arrest was released, but I hadn't really known much about him. As I began looking for interesting wartime stories, his name came up again, and I began to realise he was a far more important figure than I'd appreciated.
But with both of them, I was looking for a strong story, a journey they had personally gone on.
I think the worst was already coming out in Nancy before the war. She was already quite an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. But generally war creates opportunities. For Eric Roberts, there was the chance to become a full-time spy. The Fifth Column fascists thought they saw a similar opportunity.
For Eric there was very little. His work had been controversial even within MI5 and was hushed up after the war, with the vast bulk of the records destroyed. But there were these amazing transcripts of conversations between him and the British fascists who thought he was passing information to the Nazis. And once I knew what I was looking for, I realised that there were traces of him all over the archives, so it was possible to begin to trace his war.
With Dudley I had the opposite problem: his unit had kept a huge volume of records. If you want to know how many people he had under his command in any week of the war, it's there. The trick was to find the narrative in all of that detail.
Dudley Clarke was an eccentric but creative army officer who in 1941 realised that a world war allowed the use of deception on an entirely new scale: instead of persuading your enemy to put his troops in the wrong part of his lines, you could persuade him to put them in the wrong country altogether. He'd learned stage magic from his uncle, and he applied those tricks to put on a vast magic show, starting in the Mediterranean and eventually around the entire globe, giving the Axis powers a false picture of how the Allies were fighting the war. If you've heard of Operation Mincemeat or the D-Day deceptions, you need to know that before anyone in London had done anything deceptive, Clarke and his team in Cairo had done everything.
Clarke was incredibly forward-thinking about the military. In 1940 he wrote a blueprint for the modern special forces soldier, and in 1941 he proposed sending men into combat in helicopters. So I think he'd have taken all this in his stride. He was certain deception had a future, even as it was assumed that technological advances meant it wouldn't, and he was right: There are dummy tanks and guns on the ground in Ukraine right now, and other deceptive techniques in action.
I'm still working that out. My books take a couple of years to research and write, so I need to be confident about a project before committing to it.
I'm not a huge re-reader, but I love Robert Caro's multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. I have them on audiobook, and I find I come back to listening to them as I'm walking or working in the garden. And I will never get tired of reading Sherlock Holmes.
Sitting in an archive, reading a document no one has touched for 80 years and realising that it changes our understanding of some piece of history.
