Mr. P., what is the new book about and what made you switch from the ancient world to the modern?
Killing Rommel is a novel about a true World War II British special forces unit (really the first special forces outfit of modern times) called the Long Range Desert Group and about their partnership with another British special forces unit, the SAS. The LRDG operated out of Cairo and various desert oases, including Alexander the Great's old stomping grounds at Siwa. Its mission was raiding and reconnaissance behind enemy lines, against Rommel and the German Afrika Korps. If you look at the cover art for the new book, the scorpion pin in the center was the badge of the Long Range Desert Group. The group's motto was "Not by Strength, by Guile."

How did you get to that subject from the ancient world?
I got there via Alexander the Great. I was researching Alexander's cavalry tactics for a couple of earlier books. That led me to Frederick the Great, to Napoleon, and to other more contemporary cavalry commanders. Sure enough, I wound up studying Rommel, who used tanks with the same dash and aggressiveness as Alexander used cavalry.

For a while I thought I might write a book strictly about Rommel. He was a fascinating personage, not just as a fighting general but as a man. I didn't know that he had been implicated in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler -- and that he had been forced by Hitler's generals to take poison or face a trial before a Nazi court.

But I couldn't find a way into the story. Nothing was ringing bells. Then I stumbled onto some books about the Long Range Desert Group. That did it.

What do you mean?
The name got me. I loved the sound of it. The Long Range Desert Group. It seemed so British and understated. I thought that was about the coolest name I had every heard. Then as I began to read about the LRDG and learned that they operated behind the lines over thousands of mile of unmapped desert in unarmoured Chevrolet trucks using such weapons as "sticky bombs," which they detonated with "time pencils," and that they called their raids "beat-ups" ... that did it, I was hooked.

You said this was the origin of the Special Forces. Can you tell us more about that, and about the war situation at the time?
Let me start from the beginning. In WWI, when Lawrence of Arabia was leading the Arab Revolt, the British in the Middle East under Gen. Allenby (Jack Hawkins in the movie) had a group called the Light Car Patrols. These were just a few guys taking motorized transport into the desert for reconnaissance purposes. Model T Fords, talk about guts! These were the absolute first guys. But they didn't keep records so nobody knows a damn thing about them any more. Then between the wars, a group of young British officers stationed in Cairo picked up the thread. They started taking cars into the desert just for fun. On weekends and holidays, spending their own money. People thought they were crazy. Ralph Bagnold was the leader. His friends were William Kennedy Shaw, Guy Prendergast, Pat Clayton, Teddy Mitford, Rupert Harding-Newman. Did you see The English Patient? That was the era. In fact the historical character whom the movie called "the English patient" was actually a Hungarian nobleman, at least a self-advertised one, named Count Laszlo Almaszy. He explored the desert with these same British officers. He himself became a Nazi agent, who among other things helped bring across the desert from Libya and plant in Cairo a couple of spies who did some serious damage to the British war effort. The tale was fictionalized by Ken Follett in The Key to Rebecca.

Sounds like a colorful bunch.
I loved the era. I loved the spirit of those characters. Anyway, these young British officers set off into Sinai, to Siwa, all of these romantic Biblical-sounding places in Model-A Fords that they were paying for themselves. They had to solve any number of logistical problems that no one had ever even thought of before, for instance navigation. The desert is featureless. You have to navigate in it the way sailors do at sea. But you can't use a normal magnetic compass because the electrical field created by the truck's engine, not to mention the steel of the frame and the chassis will throw its reading off. The only way to use a prismatic compass in the desert is to stop, get out of the vehicle, walk 200 feet away, then take your reading. So Ralph Bagnold perfected the sun compass, an incredibly simple but very effective device kind of like a sundial. They carried them on the dashes of their Model A's. Radiators. They boiled over in 130-degree heat. So Bagnold came up with an overflow tank that worked as a condenser, what we see now on desert-rigged Jeep Saharas and other such vehicles. Bagnold and his friends came up with "sand channels" and "sand mats" to help tires get traction when the trucks got mired in soft sand. These officers were really the first extreme motor sports characters. Bagnold himself was a fascinating guy. From a very prominent family in England (his sister Enid wrote National Velvet), he was a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, founded by Sir Isaac Newton, who wrote a scientific treatise called The Physics of Desert Dunes which is to this day the definitive work on the subject of granular motion in a fluid medium; the Army Corps of Engineers uses it to predict how riverbottoms will shift and silt up when dredging operations are undertaken.

I can see you're into this!
This is what I'm talking about when I say something grabs you. Usually when a subject seizes me, I think I'm crazy. I think, Who the hell is going to be interested in this stuff except me? Then I discover that a LOT of people are interested.

So what happened with Bagnold? How does this connect to Killing Rommel?
WWII came along. By now Mussolini and the Italians have taken over Libya and other African countries in the south, and they outnumber the British in Egypt by ten to one. If Mussolini puts a move on Cairo, he could capture the Suez Canal, take the Arabian and Iraqi oilfields. It could be a disaster. And nobody knows what Mussolini is up to. Scout planes can't fly that far over hostile desert; their range is a few hundred miles at most.

Enter Bagnold. He just happens to be in Cairo on his way to India, where the Army has sent him. To make a long story short, he goes to Gen. Wavell, the British C-in-C, and says I know the desert and I've got some guys who know it too. Let me form a unit and we'll tell you what Mussolini is up to. Wavell says yes and the rest is history.

Where does Rommel come in?
Bagnold called up all his old mates and got them back to the desert. He scrounged a bunch of civilian Chevy trucks, armed them with Lewis guns and the like (which later became Vickers machine guns and aircraft Brownings) and put out the word for volunteers.

Only men who do not mind a hard life, with scanty food, little water and lots of discomfort, men who possess stamina and initiative, need apply.

That was the text of the initial British Army Circular, summer 1940, seeking volunteers for what would become the Long Range Desert Group. A bunch of New Zealanders (outstanding soldiers, many of whom were farmers and stockmen in civilian life, so they understood machinery and were tremendously resourceful and self-sufficient) signed on, from the Second NZ Division, and the LRDG were off and running.

What about the SAS? Weren't they the same thing as the Long Range Desert Group?
The SAS is the British equivalent of our American Special Forces. SAS stands for Special Air Service. These guys may just be the premier hardcore outfit the in the world. If they're not, it's a helluva short list ahead of them. They were founded by another visionary young officer, David Stirling, and populated right from the start, like the LRDG, with some amazing swashbuckling characters--Paddy Mayne, the most decorated British soldier of WWII; Jock Lewes; George Jellicoe; Sandy Scratchley; Randolph Churchill, son of the Prime Minister; Fitzroy McLean, a member of Parliament who wrote a terrific book called Eastern Approaches, and many many more. The original conception of the SAS was that it would be a parachute-borne commando outfit. But after one debacle in which men were dropped into a sandstorm and many were lost, the whole concept looked like it would fail utterly. It chanced though that David Stirling was talking with a young LRDG officer who suggested that the SAS forget parachuting, too dangerous, and let the Long Range Desert Group deliver them like a taxi service to their raids. Thus was born a partnership that gave Rommel more headaches than anyone could have imagined.

What's the plot of "Killing Rommel?"
It's about a behind-the-lines mission to do just that. In the book at the darkest hour of the North African war (summer 1942), when Rommel's panzers were poised 60 miles from Alexandria and the British in Cairo were burning their code books waiting to be overrun at any moment, the LRDG and the SAS are dispatched on a desperate mission. Their instructions are to use the deep desert routes known only to them, get in the rear of the Afrika Korps and penetrate its formations in the field. From there, they are to locate Rommel and go in after him.

You're not going to tell us how it ends, are you?
I can tell you this. Nothing works out like anybody expects it to.

Was writing something contemporary (or sort of contemporary) very different from writing about the ancient world?
I'm a writer who works by instinct. It doesn't work for me to think commercially or to try to second-guess "the market." I wait till something grabs me. I try on various subjects, waiting till something just compels me to work on it. When it does, I have to follow that. Besides, I don't think the subject is that much of a stretch from the areas I've been working with in prior books. It's still men at war, stories that explore aspects of courage and honor. This war's just modern instead of ancient.

Speaking of which, what was the difference in writing about something contemporary? Were there parallels to your work in ancient fields or was it completely different?
There were many parallels. Though WWII is modern in the sense that in happened within living memory, it's still an era that for many readers has slipped away somewhat into the past, particularly among younger people, for many of whom Vietnam seems as ancient as the Peloponnesian War. So in a way the act of writing about it was an exercise in conjuring a lost world.

The language was different then, the politics, the Weltanschauung as the Germans say--the "worldview"; the day-to-day assumptions that people made and believed in. At the same time, working on Killing Rommel was different from writing about the ancient world in that readers could catch you out if you made a mistake. Ancient Sparta, who's gonna correct you? But for World War II, there are still plenty of people around who remember it vividly and thousands and thousands more who have made the era a subject of study. So the research has to be really rigorous.

Can you give us an example?
For instance, I went to England and searched out the actual combat reports at the National Archives. I have a pile of them in my office a foot high. I went to Africa. I pored over maps. I made my own maps. I spoke to families of LRDG vets. I read dozens of books from both sides of the conflict. The German stuff was absolutely fascinating. And I immersed myself in the era (which is actually around the time I was born), trying to soak up the feeling, the slang, the music.

What was the hardest part?
This will sound silly but it was getting the English right. I mean British English, which is quite different from American English. I have a dear friend who's a BBC journalist, John Milnes from Bradford, West Yorkshire. He "took me school" pretty intensely. It wasn't just things like spelling -- "flavour" instead of "flavor," "mobilise" instead of "mobilize" and so forth -- but the rhythm and the slang, the things a Brit would never say that we Yanks always do. Brits don't "take" a crap, they "have" a crap." They do something "at a pinch" not "in a pinch." The schools. I had to learn what a "sixth-former" is, and a "don" and a "prefect." My English editor Simon Taylor helped out tremendously, as well as numbers of military vets who assisted me in getting the terminology right. It was a helluva job -- I probably went through ten drafts, just correcting the English -- and I'm sure it's still not 100% right.