Christine Wells – WW II Women Spies

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Christine Wells’ World War II historical fiction celebrates strong, courageous women with story lines that faithfully reflect the true lives of real spies and resistance workers.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s binge reading episode Christine talks about the remarkable boom happening at the moment in wartime fiction and her fascination with the heroic women who were sent behind enemy lines. 

And we’ve got three E-book copies of Christine’s latest spy thriller The Juliet Code to give away to three lucky readers. A woman spy dropped behind enemy lines. A mission that went critically wrong. Now the war is over but Juliet can’t forget the people she left behind . . . ENTER DRAW now. Offer closes May 23.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

• How Christine got her start in romance
• Her ‘behind enemy lines’ fascination
• Why women readers love WWII fiction
• Popularising buried true life history
• The woman who inspired Bond’s Moneypenny
• Christine’s favourite spy series– soon to be on TV

Where to find Christine Wells: 

Website:  https://christine-wells.com/

Facebook: @ChristineWellsAuthor

 Twitter:  @ChristineWells0

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny Wheeler: But now, here’s Christine. Hello there Christine and welcome to the show.  It’s great to have you with us.

Christine Wells: Hi Jenny. Thanks so much for having me.

Jenny Wheeler:  We’re living in extraordinary times of pandemic. You’re in Australia and I’m in New Zealand and we’re both in some degree of social isolation, so give listeners a picture of where you are and how social distancing is affecting you.

Christine Wells: I’m in Brisbane and as a writer who is a bit of an introvert, I have to say that I probably am coping with social distancing a lot better than most people.  Not a lot has changed from the perspective of work.  I do have two children and they’re both at home doing their schoolwork via the internet, but I don’t call it homeschooling because they’re both in high school and very capable of organizing themselves. 

Dealing with ‘social isolation’

I’d say that I am missing my friends. I think everybody’s going to have a big party when all of this is over, but it’s something we all have to do and I’m happy to abide by the rules.  I don’t think that they’re as strict as they are in some other places.  We can still go out and get coffee as long as it’s takeaway and we keep social distancing and so forth.  I’m just looking forward to seeing my family again and my friends.

Jenny Wheeler: Australia is doing pretty well with their bubble and I’ve heard somebody suggesting – actually today is ANZAC Day, the day that our two countries celebrate, or honor should be the better word, war heroes – and I’ve heard somebody suggest that we should start an ANZAC bubble, that the first thing we should do is try and get the borders between Australia and New Zealand open again so that we could each visit each other.  I thought that sounded like a great idea, to create an ANZAC bubble.

Creating an Anzac Bubble?

Christine Wells: I think that’s an amazing idea because I can see that foreign travel is not going to occur for us for quite some time. New Zealand has been quite successful with their isolation as well, so wouldn’t that be wonderful and it would stimulate the economy as well.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s exactly it because we’re also concerned about letting our tourist industry flourish again. I’d certainly be very happy to come to Australia and I think Australians would be happy to come here. So maybe that is something for the future.

Christine Wells:  Yes.  What a happy thought.

Jenny Wheeler: You are a trained lawyer and you were working as a lawyer before you turned to your fiction career. I wondered how that transition happened. Was there a once upon a time moment when you felt you had to write fiction?

Christine Wells: I don’t know that it was a once upon a time moment. I always loved writing fiction throughout high school but I let it go by the wayside when I did my law degree because I knew that I would be most likely to spend more time on writing than on my law books.  

Getting ‘addicted’ to writing

I did start again a few years into my work life and I became addicted.  Every spare moment I had, I was writing. So when people say to me, oh, I’ve got a very demanding job, I’m too tired to write when I get home, I don’t believe it because I’ve been there.  I think if you’ve got the chops to write novels, then you really need to be able to do it under any kind of circumstances.

Jenny Wheeler:  Out of curiosity, how many years were you working full-time and writing at night. How long did that go on for?

Christine Wells: I think it would have been about two years.  Then my husband, who was very patient but quite tired of never seeing me, suggested that maybe this was a career and I could give up law and write full time.  It took me a long time to decide to do it because obviously the income is nowhere near commensurate. But it seemed like a good time. We were planning a family, writing is a very flexible career, and I couldn’t see myself being a corporate lawyer and giving that the full amount of time it required and also being a mother.

Pursuing a full time career

I know women do it. I don’t know how they do it. But because I was so wrapped up in the writing, it seemed like a good idea to make the switch. And the funny thing about that is, once I announced to my law firm that I was leaving to pursue a writing career, all of these would-be playwrights and directors of film and other writers came out of the woodwork.  It’s amazing how creative people are in their spare time.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. There are quite a few people that I’ve spoken to who trained as lawyers and are now fiction writers.  You started in romance, but you’ve recently switched to historical fiction – most recently two World War II mysteries, The Juliet Code and The Traitor’s Girl. I wondered what attracted you to the historical genre?

Christine Wells: I’ve always loved historical fiction, primarily historical fiction set in Europe, and Britain particularly.  I couldn’t sell that kind of book in Australia when I started out, this was late 90’s. 

The evolving publishing scene

At that stage they wanted Australian history but not convict.  There wasn’t really a lot of scope there and so I looked overseas to see what I could do, how I could fit my voice into what was being marketed over there. I found historical romance, which was Regency-set historical romance, and I’d grown up on a diet of Georgette Heyer so I decided, that’s what I’m going to try and  I really loved riding them. They were great fun.  

I did ten of those for New York publishers, Penguin and Pan MacMillan. Then Kate Morton came on the scene during that time and made such a success of writing European-based historicals.  I think most of hers are Britain.  This was the kind of thing I’d always wanted to write, and my editor at Penguin Australia who had bought the rights to my historical romance, suggested that I do something for them along these lines. That became The Wife’s Tale, which is partly set in 18th century England and partly set in present day Australia.

Behind enemy lines

And then I moved on to World War II because I just love spies and the women who were being sent behind enemy lines into France really captured my imagination. I love writing about strong, capable women and this is a smorgasbord of women to really dig my teeth into, to mix a metaphor.

Jenny Wheeler: Did you have another author name for your fiction?

Christine Wells: Yes. Historical romance. It’s Christina Brooke.

Jenny Wheeler: Okay. Yes, your romance is what I meant.  Because I didn’t see any of the romance on your current website and I thought you must have done that.

The two spy books that you’ve published in the last few years present fascinating information about the way that spy organizations worked in the 30’s and 40’s, the double cross system, for example, which is covered in The Traitor’s Girl. I wondered about how you did that research and whether it’s easy to research that information these days.

Declassifying WW II files

Christine Wells: I think a lot of people are writing non-fiction accounts of these wonderful women who were involved in World War II spying because the National Archives in Britain has started declassifying MI5 files on all these different operations that were undertaken during the war.  The Archives themselves make fascinating reading, you can actually order those or you can visit the Archives at Kew in England.  

The research – I really love doing it so it’s not a chore, but it is very involved and you scurry down many avenues trying to find just the right detail and piece together the reality of what happens.  Non-fiction writers don’t need to bring all of that color and detail that fiction writers need, so we have that extra layer of research to do, I think. 

Jenny Wheeler: The Juliet Code is set partly during the war and partly after and focuses on three women who are sent into Paris as spies. They’re parachuted in as wireless operators.  Can you tell us without giving away the plot lines in that book, how much of it is fact and how much is fiction?

True wartime heroines

Christine Wells: Almost all of it is based on fact.  The main character is based on Noor Inayat Khan, a wireless operator who was actually scared of gunfire and didn’t like to lie, but she was sent to work behind enemy lines in France and turned out to be extremely brave.  

Unfortunately she died in one of the camps, was murdered actually in one of the camps, which does not happen to my fictional heroine, but her experiences, the training and her capture as well was heavily based on Noor Inayat Khan.

The friend, Lucy, was partly based on Nancy Wake (a New Zealand born nurse and journalist).  There was an incident where they broke into the files in the office of the SOE to see what the instructors were saying about them.  Nancy Wake actually did that.  I thought that was so fun and I couldn’t resist putting it in the book.

Separating fact and fiction

The antagonist Strasser is very heavily based on a real Nazi Commandant called  Josef Kieffer, who used to interrogate all of the spies who were captured in France in a very luxurious mansion on Avenue Foch, which is just near the Arc de Triomphe.

Jenny Wheeler: One of the things hinted at in the book is that possibly there was some betrayal going on right at the beginning, so that the Germans may have even known before those women landed, that they were coming and that they knew their names and their covers and that kind of thing.  Is that possibly true?

Christine Wells: I think it’s fairly well accepted that it happened now.  There was an agent called Déricourt who seems to have betrayed the network in Paris to Josef Kieffer and often the Nazis were there waiting for the agents when they came parachuting in or they would often land a light plane in a field somewhere, so a lot of these agents were picked up as soon as they arrived.  

Sensitive ops and betrayals

My heroine parachutes.  She baulks when she has to jump from the plane so she’s blown off course and that’s how she escapes being captured immediately.  But yes.  There was a lot of inter-service rivalry between MI6 who considered themselves to be the professionals at this game and the Special Operations Executive who were considered to be Cowboys essentially, and set to wreck any sensitive operation the MI6 were undertaking.

There is a suggestion that MI6 were instrumental in the betrayal and that they were working some other scheme in the background.  Whether that’s true or not, we don’t know and we probably never will because I think the relevant files might’ve been eaten by rats or somehow destroyed many years ago.

Jenny Wheeler: Probably somebody ensured they were.

Christine Wells: Yes, that’s the implication.

Tracking down war criminals

Jenny Wheeler: The tracking of the Nazi officer responsible for the deaths of many spies after the war ended got very complicated too, didn’t it? The agents continued to try and track down some of these higher Nazi officers, but the powers that be became very interested in using the intelligence that they had and weren’t so interested in taking notice of the crimes they’d committed.  That is referred to in the book and I gather that is also what happened?

Christine Wells: Yes. I think the powers that be really wanted to draw a line underneath the war and get on with the next phase. They were concerned about the Soviet threat and the Germans had a lot of intelligence that the Allied Forces were after.  It was the SAS who were the paramilitary elite fighting force, who were determined to hunt these Nazis down.  They had a policy they called Nacht und Nebel, which is Night and Fog.  Any agents found behind enemy lines by the Nazis were taken, they were stripped of their identities and they were executed so that their relatives would never know what happened to them.

Disappearing into ‘Night & Fog’

They’d disappear into the ‘night and fog’ and as vengeance I suppose, the SAS were determined to find all of their men and to bring the perpetrators to justice. In almost an unauthorized operation, they kept going.  One of my characters, Mac, is one of these SAS men who’s determined to hunt down this Nazi, who actually held his sister captive.

Jenny Wheeler: The Traitors Girl begins with a murder trial and I thought that as a former lawyer you had a great deal of insight into writing those scenes with the trial. Did you have a transcript of the trial to go on or did you have to make it up?

Christine Wells: I made it up based on things I’d read. And my father was a barrister.  I never did trial work but I do get how it works and how cross examination works and everything like that. So hopefully brought a bit of authenticity too to the scene. 

Women readers love WWII fiction

Jenny Wheeler: I was listening to it in an audio book and it was very dramatic.  Kept me awake.

Christine Wells: Thank you very much.

Jenny Wheeler: This niche of World War II historicals has blossomed hugely.  There’s almost too many of them coming out now.  Why do you think there’s so much appeal for this period of history now?

Christine Wells: I think that it’s especially popular among women because we can see women coming into their own power and stepping up, being asked to do things that they were never meant to do and really showing what they were capable of.  I think that that is a real appeal of the World War II era for me.  I think as well, it is an era where you have the black hats and the white hats. It’s very clear that the Nazis must be stopped, they are a worthy adversary and you have the clear-cut lines drawn in that war, whereas with other wars everything’s a little bit blurry.

French Resistance investigated

We are never quite sure whether we should be involved in some wars.  Vietnam clearly doesn’t lend itself to that same level of certainty as World War II. 

Jenny Wheeler: And in these more recent wars so many civilians have got caught up in the conflict that it’s slightly uncomfortable.  I’m thinking of Syria and Afghanistan and so forth. Quite a lot of collateral damage with civilians that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable.

Christine Wells:  Absolutely. And the reality is that of course there were civilians involved in World War II as well.  I think perhaps we view it all with a lot of nostalgia, especially with the French Resistance.  I think it’s so hard to imagine what life would have been like under the Occupation and there’s a lot of gray area with the French Resistance which actually I’ve written about in a new book that’s coming out next year called Under The Paris Skies.

Always ‘gray’ scale in wartime

You know, who is a collaborator?  What sort of pressure are you under as somebody who’s been occupied for years and can’t see an end in sight?  Do you just try to get on with your life or do you stand up and fight and perhaps be killed for your beliefs?  There’s a lot more gray even in World War II than we like to think but I guess it’s far enough in the past that there’s a lot of nostalgia around it as well.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. One of the other undercurrents in the books is a clear indication how undervalued and almost patronized women were.  Although they were being sent into these very dangerous situations, they weren’t considered equal to the men in any way, really. They weren’t paid the same way. They didn’t get the same recognition.  That that comes through very clearly.

The woman who inspired ‘M’

Christine Wells: Yes. I think women turned this to their account when they were dropped behind enemy lines. It was to their advantage that they were not taken seriously.  It’s how they managed to slip through a lot of difficult situations by batting their eyelashes and flirting a little with the German officers.

But the reality is that a lot of them were instrumental in planning operations. A lot of women were involved in planning D Day, for example. There was a very highly regarded spy mistress, they call her now Vera Atkins, who never even received officer status until after the War and yet she ran the F section of the Special Operations Executive. So women were doing the work of men, but being paid lowly wages.

‘Forgotten’ women coming to light

Jenny Wheeler:  It was also mentioned poignantly that if they did die on the job, there was no pension for their dependents back home.  They could leave a child that would not know what had happened to their parent and they wouldn’t even get any compensation.

Christine Wells: Well, it’s interesting. The women were not supposed to be there under the Geneva Convention. They were not supposed to be used in any way in war, in combat, or on the front lines, or behind enemy lines.  They had no protection under the Geneva Convention either so if they were caught, they would be tortured and executed as spies.  

So yes, they were unlike the military men who would have certain benefits and their families would know what happened to them.  I think subsequently families were informed about what had actually happened to these women.  It was supposed to be a secret, but it was discovered.  I’m not sure about receiving pensions. I imagine not.

Jenny Wheeler: Is there one thing you’ve done more than any other, that you would credit as being the secret of your success as a writer?

Secrets of writing success

Christine Wells: I think you have to be persistent as a writer.  Sometimes you have bad luck.  The publishing industry is very up and down and all you can control is the stories you write.  There are times when things don’t go so well and you just have to pick yourself up and keep going.  

I call it the pit of despair and I know that writers who’ve been in the business for years and years will invariably go through some trough in their career, whether because the GFC meant that the sales went down, or their book came out on 9/11. 

I know somebody whose book came out on 9/11, well, nobody was going to the bookstores that day.  But the publishers don’t remember that later on, they look at sales and say, oh well sorry, we can’t buy another book.

Persistence a key attribute

So I think persistence is key. You have to keep going and remember that you’re a writer and no one can take that away from you and keep putting all your effort into the stories and not worrying so much about the sales.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s right.  I imagine that being in this time slot of the Second World War, the pandemic is probably not going to be affecting any of your plot lines or storylines long term.  

I’ve spoken to romance writers who are having to think about how they’re going to write their next book because they’re trying to do contemporary stories, and none of us really know how the world’s going to look in another six months or so.

There’s one New Zealand writer who’s just had a book out set in the Whitsundays in a tourist resort where people are flying in and out all the time, and she’s got no idea whether for books two and three that will be a realistic scenario.  As I say, you probably don’t have anything like that that’s going to affect you too much long term.

Let’s enjoy our fantasy world

Christine Wells: No, I don’t think so. Not the subject matter of the stories. I probably wouldn’t write a book about the Spanish flu epidemic at this stage, but that was unlikely anyway.  If I were a romance writer, I would pretend the pandemic never happened and let people escape to the Whitsundays. I think that sounds marvelous right now.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, we did think that possibly readers might like to just live in that fantasy world for a while.

Christine Wells: Yes, I think it’s a bit too soon to be setting books in the pandemic era.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes.  It’s just that people say it’s affecting our heads so that if you see something on TV where people hug, you get that feeling now of oh, look, they’re getting too close.  Somehow it’s messed with our heads.

Mental challenge of lockdown

Christine Wells: It has, and it’s been a real challenge to continue to be creative.  Even reading, everybody said oh, I’m in lockdown, I’ll be able to read a book now.  But the reality is that people’s attention has been so fractured by news updating all the time and circumstances changing with school status and all of these things that it’s been very hard to settle down to even read a book. 

I think everything is settling down a little bit more now, but these book sales that we thought would skyrocket – it didn’t actually happen.

Jenny Wheeler:  It’s good that you’ve mentioned reading because this is The Joys of Binge Reading and so we always like to ask about your reading tastes and whether you like to binge read, and if you do, what books you like to read, even if they’re not actually binge read books.  What are your current favorite reads?

Christine’s favourite reading

Christine Wells: I have absolutely been enthralled with a series called Slow Horses by Mick Herron.  I describe it as a little bit like John Le Carré with more humor.

 It’s about a group of MI5 rejects who get sent to a building in Slough to fester away because they can’t be fired for various reasons, but they want to keep these people away from proper operational work.  Of course, they get involved in operations and hijinks ensue.  He’s such a wonderful writer on top of being a very good storyteller that I went through the series like a dose of salts.  That’s my binge read. (The series is to be made into a TV series starring Gary Oldman)

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Now circling, looking back over where you’ve come from, you’ve had a very successful and long career.  Is there anything that you would change if you could now, looking back, if you wanted to rewrite history, what is it, if anything, that you’d like to change?

What would you do differently?

Christine Wells:  I think that it’s too difficult to say because I’ve tried to be smart about my career but the industry is so uncertain and strange that no matter how you try to plan, something else comes along and messes with that.  I don’t really know.  I think it all just happened the way it was meant to.

Jenny Wheeler:  It sounds like you’ve found your niche and you’re very much focusing on that niche and not letting yourself be distracted by the next big thing.

Christine Wells: Yes.  I find indie publishing extremely alluring and I always keep up with what’s going on and I think, oh my goodness, I’d love to do that.  I really need to concentrate on what’s in front of me, which is the next book for William Morrow in New York at the moment.  I’m very focused on historical fiction at the moment.  It’s really my first love so I’m very excited to be able to write in that genre.

Under Paris Skies next book

Jenny Wheeler:  You mentioned that you’ve got a book coming out, Under the Paris Skies.  When you look ahead, what are your plans for the rest of this year and moving over into the first part of next year.  What’s next for Christine the writer?

Christine Wells:  I have revisions from my editor on Under the Paris Skies.  That’s going to release in the American summer of 2021.  I also have just been given the go-ahead to develop the new book, which will be the 2022 book.  I’m really excited about that.  That’s going to be great fun.

Jenny Wheeler: And that will be another World War II one will it?

Christine Wells: Yes, at the moment it will be.  I still have to write a submission.  First I pitch the idea and they say, yes, that sounds good, and then I do three chapters in a synopsis.  Then that’ll be the question. But this one’s a World War II.  Under the Paris Skies is French Resistance and it involves the Dior’s.  Catherine Dior was a French resistance worker, so she features prominently in this novel too. Catherine was fashion designer Christian Dior’s sister, and his famous Miss Dior perfume. (1947) was named after her

Where to find Catherine online

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Now, do you like interacting with your readers, and if so, where can they find you online?

Christine Wells: I love interacting with readers.  I am mostly to be found on Facebook under Christine Wells Author my website is christine-wells.com.

Jenny Wheeler: We’ll put links to all those social media contacts, your website and your books into the show notes that we publish with each blog post, so people will be able to find you easily by going to the website.

Christine Wells: Thanks very much, Jenny.

If you enjoyed Christine’ World War II historic fiction you might also enjoy: Soraya M. Lane’s Women At War series or Fiona Valpy’s French resistance fiction.

Thanks for Technical Help

The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with fantastic technical help from Dan Cotton and Abe Raffles. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project.  Seek him out at dcaudioservices@gmail.com or check our show notes. He’s fast, he takes pride in getting it right and he’s great to work with.

Our voiceovers are done by Abe Raffles, another gem of sound and screen.  Abe has 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a camera man, director and also as a voice artist and TV presenter.  I think you’d agree that his voice is both lighthearted and warm. He is super easy to work with no matter what the job. You’ll find him at abe@pointandshoot.co.nz.  The full details are in the show notes on the website. That’s it for now. Thanks for listening. Hopefully see you next week.  Bye.