Ridpath’s New Path Forward

By Ali Karim
I first learned about Michael Ridpath’s latest historical thriller, Operation Berlin (Boldwood), during a conversation with the author at last year’s final CrimeFest convention in Bristol, England. Having long been a fan of World War II-set crime novels, thanks in part to my admiration for the late Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels, I was an ideal audience for Ridpath’s tale. As a student of 20th-century history, I am fascinated by the machinations that lead to the creation and then fall of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), and the period between the two world wars in Europe. Operation Berlin is rooted in that era.

Here’s a plot synopsis:

Berlin, 1930. Historian Archie Laverick, scarred mentally and physically by the Great War, travels to Berlin to research a famed Prussian general. His quiet study is shattered when he crosses paths with Esme Carmichael, a spirited young American intent on making her name as a foreign correspondent. When a shooting at a Saxon castle leaves a young Jewish woman accused of murder, Archie and Esme are drawn into a perilous hunt for the truth.

Their investigation cuts through the glittering façades and lingering scars of a nation still reeling from war—where resentment simmers, political alliances shift, and the first shadows of a new conflict fall across Europe. Amid whispers of blackmail and betrayal, the pair must navigate intrigue and danger to unmask a killer hiding in plain sight.

Released just this week in Great Britain, Ridpath’s first “Foreign Correspondent Mystery” lives up to my expectations. Here’s the start of a review I penned for Shots, in which I called Operation Berlin

one of the most engrossing narratives I have had the good fortune to read this year—or rather live through. I found myself immersed completely in this Golden Age mystery, escaping the anxieties of today ...

Vivid characterisation is on full display with the two main protagonists, (Sir) Archie Laverick and Esme Carmichael. Laverick is the heir to Yarmer Hall in Yorkshire’s West Riding—a British aristocrat who survived the horrors of trench warfare in World War One, but returned with both physical and mental scars. His muscular manservant-cum-batman, Arthur Lister, is always by his side, managing his episodic fugues (induced by ‘shell-shock’). Haunted by his war service, which claimed the life of his brother Fred, Archie manages his demons by researching and writing about former historical wartime generals (which he publishes to much acclaim).

Via his cousin Duncan Mandeville, Archie travels to Berlin (with Lister) to research a biography of a Prussian general [Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher] who fought the French forces during the Napoleonic Wars. ...

Archie requires an [English- and] German-speaking assistant to help him research the Prussian general. This secretarial support comes in the form of Esme Carmichael, a young American woman ... aspiring to become a foreign correspondent for a Chicago newspaper. What better place than the hotbed of political and social intrigue [that is] 1930s Berlin for an aspiring young journalist from Montana?

Operation Berlin marks a significant change for this English author, who in the past has given us tense thrillers set in the generally un-thrilling finance industry, and others that feature a Boston-reared homicide detective sent to solve crimes in the place of his birth, Iceland. Wanting to know more about where Ridpath comes from and where his career might be headed in the near future, I recently e-mailed him some queries that he was kind enough to answer.

Ali Karim: Before we talk about your new series, can you tell us a little about your childhood? And were you a reader at an early age?

Michael Ridpath: I was brought up in a very small village at the foot of Nidderdale, [a valley] in Yorkshire. I fantasized about traveling the world and I read books that fed this fantasy, such as Willard Price’s Adventure series, Biggles, [Leslie Charteris’] Saint stories, and the adventures of the Swallows and Amazons children. I devoured dozens of Enid Blyton books. Although they are disappointing to read now, I’m sure that I absorbed much of the pace of mysteries and adventure stories from those.

AK: And your family?

MR: There were loads of books in my house. My father didn’t go to university, but he did subscribe to the Penguin Classics as a young man in the 1950s. We had, and I still have, a bookshelf of them in the various colors for each country—green for France, purple for Latin. I loved the orange ones—Russian.

My mother read all the time, and I scoured her bookshelves for material. She loved thrillers: she was particularly keen on Dick Francis.

A perceptive German interviewer once asked me whether there were writers in my family whose example I was following. I told her there weren’t: my compulsion to write was my own thing. Then she asked me whether my parents had passed on their passion for books to me. I realized that I was just trying to write books that my mother would like to read!

(Left) Michael Ridpath.

AK: Were there any specific adult-level books you read early on that led to your own creative writing career?

MR: There were two. The first was Liar’s Poker (1989), by Michael Lewis—an exposé of the life of traders at the U.S. investment bank Salomon Brothers. I knew Michael well—I was one of his clients [back when he was a bond salesman]—and I was impressed not only by the quality of his writing, but also by the way in which he had abandoned a lucrative career in investment banking to become a writer.

The other inspiration was the books of Dick Francis. So much about them appealed to me: the sense of pace; the integrity of the main characters; the way Francis wove horse racing into wider stories; and most of all, the sheer enjoyment I felt in reading them.

So, when I decided to write a book, I tried to combine Dick Francis and Michael Lewis—to write a “Dick Francis in the City.”

AK: What about your education? How did that lead you to seek employment in the financial sector?

MR: I studied History at Oxford University. Many historians at Oxford ended up in the world of banking in the 1980s.

I don’t think this is as ridiculous as it first sounds. History, when well taught, teaches you to analyze cause and effect and to explain and persuade readers of your analysis. A lot of understanding financial markets and businesses involves these skills. I was also good at sums, which probably helped.

AK: Your first novel to see print, Free to Trade, starred an ex-Olympic runner immersed in London’s financial jungle, whose lovely colleague is eventually pulled lifeless from the Thames. How did that book’s publication come about?

MR: Free to Trade was never supposed to be more than a bit of fun. I was a bond trader writing little more than my initials on a dealing ticket, so I decided it would be good for me to take up “creative writing.” The first exercise I did was to write the first chapter of a novel. So I wrote about a bond trader who gets involved in a massive trade that first goes wrong ... and then goes right. I absolutely loved writing that chapter—which became the first chapter of Free to Trade. So I decided to forget about the exercises and just carry on with the book. Three years and three drafts later, I had the novel, a thriller set in the City.

I sent it off to a list of agents. At that point, I had moved to a venture capital firm and I knew all about rejection, being responsible for rejecting business plans myself. But, to my surprise, the second agent I sent it to, the late Carole Blake, accepted it with alacrity and set up auctions in the UK, the U.S., and Germany for the book. When Free to Trade was published in 1995, it got to No. 2 on the UK bestseller lists and was translated into 35 languages.

AK: Did you continue working in the financial sector while your writing career was taking off?

MR: I tried to continue working in finance, but there was a lot of publicity involved with the publication of Free to Trade and it wasn’t really possible. Sadly, I was a single father of two small girls at the time, so the flexibility that writing offered came in very useful.

AK: The adage “write about what you know” seems to apply, as you followed your debut work with a string of successful financial thrillers. Can you tell us a little about that period?

MR: In my opinion, “write what you know” is a great help when you start out as an author, but over time, writing what you don’t know begins to sound more interesting. So, for about 10 years after the publication of Free to Trade, I searched for financial topics that interested me, researched them, and wrote thrillers based on them. For example, I wrote books about a virtual reality start-up (Trading Reality), bond trading in Brazil (The Marketmaker), and the dot-com boom and bust (Fatal Error).

AK: You seem to be a natural storyteller, and my experience is that successful writers are usually also avid readers. So can you please tell us a little about your own reading habits?

MR: There’s no doubt you can learn something of the craft of writing from reading “how-to books,” which have become ever more sophisticated. But I’m still learning how to write from writers who are better at it than I am.

I try to split my reading 50/50 between crime/thrillers and as wide a range of fiction as I can find. In 1994, I started writing notes on every novel I read—the first was Disclosure, by Michael Crichton. I try hard to avoid looking for what’s wrong with a book; it’s too easy and teaches you nothing. Rather, I look for what’s right with it. It’s amazing what you can learn from a writer like John Grisham, for example, with this frame of mind.

It’s not just craft, though. I trust my instinct when writing or, in particular, when reading through drafts of my own books. Some things just feel right. I try to figure out why, but if I can’t figure it out, I will usually stick with whatever feels good, even if it seems to break the rules of the craft.

AK: Archie Laverick, one of the main protagonists in your new Operation Berlin, is—like a number of characters you’ve created—a lover of libraries, and of collecting books. Tell us a little about your own thoughts on literacy, libraries, and book collecting.

MR: I have spoken about how I loved reading as a child. Like so many writers and readers, I borrowed many of my childhood books from libraries. I still enjoy the reference libraries I work in, like the British Library or the London Library or the Duxbury library in Massachusetts—I spend half my year in America. [Editor's note: Michael Ridpath is also married to an American.]

Book collecting is partly about libraries and beautiful leather-bound books. But, frankly, it’s more like collecting football stickers as a child. It’s competitive; there are arbitrary rules framing the collection; it’s expensive (football stickers took far too high a share of my pocket money), and it’s essentially pointless. This is especially true of Archie’s collection of early printed books, where he is seeking one from each town that printed books in Europe in the 15th century. The more I have found out about book collectors, the more this initial impression has been reinforced.

I have one not-quite-incunable, a collection of sayings by Valerius Maximus printed in Mainz in 1544. I hope that will be my only one; otherwise, I really will be in trouble.

AK: Until recently, you may have been best known for your Icelandic detective series featuring “fish out of water” Magnus Jonson, a Boston homicide cop seconded to the Icelandic Police Force (and introduced in 2010’s Where the Shadows Lie). You also penned the 2021 non-fiction book Writing in Ice: A Crime Writer’s Guide to Iceland. So tell us, why does Iceland appeal to you as a crime-fiction backdrop?

MR: Iceland is an extraordinary country. It’s a mixture of old and new. Although the landscape looks ancient, that is only because it is so new—the lava fields, the volcanoes, the fjords were all created relatively recently in geological time. Its society, too, is a mixture of the old and the new. It’s a modern, progressive, highly educated, and technologically sophisticated country. Yet every farm has a rock at the bottom of a field inhabited by elves; the sagas of the Norse settlers live on in the landscape and the minds of its inhabitants. Plus, they have a really well-developed sense of irony.

The problem with writing about Iceland is that everything that seems so extraordinary to a foreigner seems just normal to, say, your average Icelandic detective. Which is why my man Magnus left Iceland when he was 12, moved to America, and became a homicide detective there. So, when he returns to Iceland [partly to investigate the unsolved murder of his father], the Icelandic expression glöggt er gests augad applies—clear as a guest’s eye.

AK: You started out writing finance-world thrillers set in the 1990s, which many readers might now consider a historical period, and then went on to concoct modern Icelandic mysteries. But amid the Magnus Jonson series, you penned a couple of spy novels (2013’s Traitor’s Gate and 2015’s Shadows of War) starring a well-educated and well-connected young Englishman, Conrad de Lancey, and in 2021 you delivered The Diplomat’s Wife, a standalone that finds an older woman visiting Europe in 1979, hoping to solve a mystery that remains from her days as a foreign service officer’s wife four decades before. Now, in your mid-60s, you have begun this Foreign Correspondent series. Would it be fair to say you’ve come full circle, as far as your time-period interests are concerned?

MR: From my perspective, there isn’t a circle. I like to write about foreign worlds which require some research and some effort to understand not only the setting but the people in it. This could be the financial world in the 1990s, Iceland in the 2010s, or Europe in the 1930s. And I like to write about foreigners, or outsiders, or expatriates in these worlds.

AK: Where did the idea originate for Operation Berlin’s detective duo, Esme Carmichael and Archie Laverick, and how did it then gestate?

MR: I like the 1930s, and I liked the idea of a detective solving crimes around the capitals of Europe in the 1930s. But who should this detective be?

I came across a book: Last Call at the Hotel Imperial (2022), by Deborah Cohen, about the young men and women who left America in the 1920s and ’30s to travel to Europe to become foreign correspondents, people like Ernest Hemingway, John Gunther, Bill Shirer, and Dorothy Thompson. The women in Cohen’s book particularly grabbed my interest. My detective could be a young woman with no money and a one-way ticket to Europe, determined to find a story to make her name.

That was Esme. But I decided she should have a sidekick or partner. Someone different to her. British then, and a man. I mentioned earlier that my childhood was in a Yorkshire village; perhaps this man could be a minor landowner in Nidderdale. With shell shock. I have long been fascinated by how, in the ’20s and’30s, millions of men were walking around London and Paris and Berlin with shell shock. No one mentioned it; everyone knew it. Archie has it. As a historian writing military biographies, he has a reason to spend time in European capitals and a reason to look for research help from someone like Esme.

AK: Your new novel contains a vast array (or perhaps “cabal” would be a better word) of characters. Beyond your two main protagonists, we have supporting as well as secondary players, and “walk-ons.” I applaud how deftly they were each portrayed; they stood upright, distinct on the page. So how difficult was it to manage such a large cast but still keep the novel pacy?

MR: Good characterization in thrillers or crime novels is really difficult. You don’t have time to stop the action for a couple of pages to explain the backstories of newly introduced characters. I’m still learning how to do it. It’s one of the things I focus on when I’m taking notes of other writers’ books. Somerset Maugham is brilliant at it. There are certain techniques: pick a trait and repeat it; make a character’s motivation clear and repeat that; show a character who seems to be one person, but actually has a second hidden personality that is revealed. Repeat that. And try to do all this in chunks of single sentences rather than single paragraphs.

I believe that repetition is important when describing people or places. After the third repetition, the reader feels as if they are familiar with the character (or the place). They recognize them.

But I still have more to learn here.

AK: You’ve been quite a busy guy. Operation Berlin is just out this month, but you have also made a novella sequel, Operation Lost Hours, available to download for free here. And next year will bring us the sophomore Foreign Correspondent novel, Operation Vienna. Can you tell us a little about how you see this series shaping up in the future?

MR: It turns out I really enjoy spending my mornings in a big city in Europe with Archie and Esme. I have just finished lounging about the cafés in Montparnasse in Paris in 1932, and I am starting to research Moscow in 1933. There was all sorts of fascinating stuff going on in Russia in 1933. I’m happy; I think I’ll be doing this for a while.

AK: Finally, what recent books have passed over your desk that you have found interesting?

MR: I recently read Luke Jennings’s latest book, Medusa, the latest in his Killing Eve series [the inspiration for BBC America’s popular 2018-2022 spy drama of that same name]. It’s brilliant! I love his wit and the way he deals with the extraordinary relationship between his two heroines, Eve and Oxana. Who would have thought that a nanny on a super-yacht could be so dangerous? It’s the first of the series I have read: I need to go back to the beginning.