The story behind The Executioner’s House

Last year, I sat watching some grainy film footage of the Nuremburg war crimes tribunal in the building where it all happened. It was 27 years since I had left my Foreign Office posting in Berlin, during the last years of a city split by a hateful wall. Playing my part in exercising Allied right of access to East Berlin, the entire city became part of me – as it still is.

As I sipped a late afternoon coffee, not far from the mediaeval executioner’s house, I couldn’t stop thinking about the tribunal and what it must have been like to have been part of the prosecution teams.

On my train journey back to Munich, I conceived a story that explored just that. I decided that it would play out in Berlin, a city I knew well, and one where, after dark – along shadowy cobbled side streets away from the noise and bustle of the main thoroughfares – the ghosts of a once shattered and then divided city still lurk.

A year later, my new novel The Executioner’s House, was published.

I hope you enjoy it.