Guest post - Michael Ridpath and Operation Berlin

I've been a fan of Michael Ridpath's work since before I first met him, which in itself is quite a long time ago. He's a versatile and interesting writer and I'm very glad to feature a guest post from him:

'There comes a point in the middle of my research when it’s time to read The Times. 
I suppose it would be possible to do this online somehow, but that’s not the way I like to do it.  In the basement of the London Library in St James’s Square is The Times Room.  Large red leather-bound copies of The Times, each heavy, each three feet tall, line the shelves in cabinets, one for each month.  There are special lecterns upon which you can open them and browse; the Foreign and Colonial news is usually on about page 8.  I love it down there.

My latest novel, Operation Berlin, takes place in August and September of 1930, and so I read through copies of The Times for each day, taking notes of what the Berlin correspondent had to say.  At that time, he was an old hand named Norman Ebbutt, but he is never identified in the paper itself.  There is usually at least one article – or maybe two – on the goings-on in Germany each day.  But I allow myself to be distracted: by the advertisements on page 1 for domestic servants and enigmatic personal messages in a rudimentary code; by the page-long descriptions of the Belvoir Hunt’s outing a couple of days before; by the minutiae of cricket scores by batsmen with at least three initials and two hyphenated last names.  And the advertisements, of course, for Bovril, Beecham’s Laxatives, Imperial Airways and the Austin Seven.

But back to ‘our Berlin correspondent’.  My eye was caught by a short article on 29 August 1930 about a Frau Amlinger who had thrown herself out of a Lufthansa mail plane flying from Frankfurt to Erfurt.  She was the wife of a Reichswehr cavalry officer, Captain Sepp Amlinger, who served in the air force during the war and who had died in an aeroplane accident in Russia.

Interesting.  Very interesting.

Further investigation on my part paralleled that of The Times’s correspondent.  It turned out that Captain Amlinger was part of a secret contingent of the Reichswehr being trained as fighter pilots at a training facility in the Soviet Union.  Cover-ups ensued, and a nice little subplot was born.  Now, all I need to do is book myself onto an Imperial Airways flying boat to Alexandria for £55.  Not tempted by the Beecham’s Laxatives, though.'

Michael Ridpath’s Operation Berlin is published by Boldwood Books on 12 April