Death in Captivity: A Second World War Mystery

"This is based very directly on Michael Gilbert’s own experience of being a prisoner of war during the Second World War. He served in the armed forces, was captured in Italy, and was in a prisoner of war camp. While he was there, he had the realisation that in the work of the detective novelists of the 1920s and 1930s, the most difficult thing was to draw a plausible circle around your suspects. You have to do that in order for such a book to be good: it has to be one of only, say, these eight people, and there’s no way that a random homicidal maniac walked in off the street, did it, and left, because that’s not interesting. Exactly. So he realised that a really good and unusual example of the closed circle is the prisoner of war camp. Entry and exit is very tightly controlled. The whole point is that no one gets in or out, so that’s what he decided to work with. He wrote it later, but it reflects his own wartime experiences.. And it’s a really good mystery, but with the added context of being set in an unusual place, and based on his unusual experiences during the war. It’s a nice little record of something you don’t necessarily get to read firsthand all the time. No. And I was particularly drawn to it because my grandfather was in an Italian prisoner of war camp. So that’s why I initially picked it off the shelf. He was a very long way from home: he was from Johannesburg and enlisted there. His unit was brought to Europe, where he was captured, and placed in a prisoner of war camp in Italy. He then escaped, and tried to walk down the length of Italy to meet the Allies, who were coming north, but he didn’t make it, he got captured again. That time he got taken to Munich, and he spent the rest of the war in a camp in Munich. Having heard those stories from him, I was interested to read a whodunnit based on such similar experiences."