Operation Tulip is the third and final book in Deborah Swift’s World War 2 Secret Agent series. Our heroine, Nancy Callaghan, started the war with the SOE, as a cipher clerk at their offices in Baker Street. She went on, though, to become a field agent, working as a radio operator in occupied Holland.
Operation Tulip is essentially a spy thriller. I won’t detail the plot because of spoilers. I hope you’ll read it and enjoy it for yourself. It really is a very good read. Deborah Swift is one of those writers who can really hook you into a story and (very unusually for me) I twice nearly missed my stop while reading Operation Tulip on the Tube.
Swift not only tells a good yarn but packs in a lot of history. It’s fair to say that she doesn’t like the Nazis. This was once such a given that it seems odd to be remarking on it, but nowadays so many people are prepared to suggest that extreme right wing politics has something going for it that it is worth reminding ourselves what happened when Europe last decided to give fascism a go. Swift is unsparing in her descriptions of Nazi atrocities. As her historical note (well worth reading) points out, in the winter of 1944/5, when this story is set, more than 18,000 Dutch civilians starved to death with a further 980,000 classed as malnourished. In places, OperationTulip is not an easy read.
Given the amount of historical detail, I would have welcomed more about the relationship between the SS and the Gestapo. I suspect my interest in the details of the organisation of the Nazi party and its agencies is not widely shared but lots of people are interested and, given that both the SS and the Gestapo feature a lot in the story, I worried about the details of the relationship between the two. I would have liked more about this, even if Swift had felt it would have been better dealt with in her historical note.
Swift is such a good storyteller that even a subplot which sees her boyfriend mounting a one-man rescue operation across the allied frontline manages to carry you along, although here we are moving rapidly away from the nitty gritty detail of SOE operations into James Bond territory. It’s all terribly readable, though, and certainly adds even more excitement and tension to an already gripping story.
In summary, this is a thrilling spy story set against a historically detailed background. I enjoyed it Immensely and I’m sure many others will too.
Operation Tulip goes on sale on 10 September and is available to pre-order now.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about ice houses. English Heritage had just restored the ice house at Marble Hill, which is very close to where I live. They claimed that the ice house at Marble Hill was particularly important as ice houses are rare. This made me think about ice houses locally and I wrote about four of them, which suggested to me that they weren’t really rare at all. Then last week, I spent a day at Kew Gardens, so now I’ve updated my old post to add a fifth.
In the days before refrigeration, the only way of providing ice was to store natural ice in an ice house. Ice houses were basically insulated pits. Ice was put into the pit (which had an outlet at the bottom for meltwater to drain through) and covered with straw to provide some insulation. A pit full of ice would last well into summer.
Ice houses were only used by the very rich, so to that extent they were rare. But many grand houses in the country had an ice house.
Marble Hill
Marble Hill House was built in the early 18th century for Lady Henrietta Howard.
One good source of ice would be the Thames, back when it froze, so Marble Hill, set on the banks of the river may well have got its ice from there. Marble Hill’s ice house is conveniently near the house, but nestles in the shade of the trees. It’s a solid brick structure with a door for the ice to be taken in or out. Most of the brickwork, though, is hidden under a mound of soil that insulates the building.
English Heritage have planted ferns and small shrubs over the building. It may well have looked like this when it was built. It wasn’t just functional: it was a status symbol and Lady Henrietta Howard (who had it built) would have wanted it to look attractive. It’s possible that there was some sort of statue at the rear of the building to enhance its appearance from the back.
The ice house was lost for years when that area of the park was allowed to become overgrown. English Heritage have every reason to be proud of their efforts, but it’s hardly “rare”.
Ham House
Marble Hill House is built almost directly opposite the Jacobean Ham House on the other side of the Thames. Ham House has its own ice house built as part of the service area that supplied the kitchens. It’s near the dairy and buttery which sit between the house and the kitchen gardens.
The design is very different from that at Marble Hill, but it works in exactly the same way. At Ham House you can see into the empty pit to get an idea of the scale of the operation.
Hampton Court
Further up the river, we come to Hampton Court Palace. The splendid ice house there is near an artificial lake but some distance from the palace itself. Maybe they galloped the ice to the kitchens on horseback.
Isleworth
I was beginning to think English Heritage was rather exaggerating the rarity of ice houses in the area when our explorations during lockdown took us to a small public park in Isleworth about two miles from Marble Hill. Here there was once a grand house called Silver Hall. It was demolished in the 1950s, but one part of the structure remains. Can you guess what it is yet?
Yes, it’s lost its earth covering that would have provided insulation, but it’s definitely an ice house.
Kew
So to my latest local ice house discovery. It’s in Kew Gardens and was built for the royal palace at Kew — little known, but well worth a visit.
It’s a short walk from the house in well shaded area. (Kew Gardens isn’t short of trees.) It’s notable for having quite a long entrance tunnel, keeping the actual ice pit well away from the outside warmth.
It was a very hot day when I visited and the tunnel was blissfully cool.
The domed chamber at the end is large and suitably impressive for a royal ice house. The ice itself, and the straw that helped insulate it, would have been in the pit below the current ground level.
And there’s more…
There are more ice houses waiting for me to find them. There’s a list on this website: Ice Wells & Ice Houses (london-footprints.co.uk). If my pictures of local ice houses have caught your interest, you might well enjoy the link.
A Word From Our Sponsor
These ice houses were all built before we first met James Burke fighting in the West Indies (in Burke in the Land of Silver). As he climbed the social scale (he was definitely a social climber) he will have often enjoyed sorbets at posh dinner parties and he will have been familiar with the idea of ice houses.
If you are interested in the world of the Long 18th Century (yes. historians really call it that), you might well enjoy James Burke. Why not give him a go?
There was no blog post last week as I was away in Cambridge so I’m sticking with the idea of short posts with pictures and a bit more about daily life. It means that I get fewer views on my blog but people who do read it seem to like it.
Most of the colleges are closed to the public at this time of year, although we did visit Kings and the chapel there is every bit as amazing as people say.
Although the fan vaulting is what makes the building unique, the amazing 16th century stained glass (which somehow survived Cromwell’s Commissioners) is also special. Those tall windows with their elaborate pictures reminded me of the Sainte Chapelle chapel which I saw on my recent trip following Burke’s adventures in Paris. In fact, King’s College chapel was very influenced by the French royal chapel.
Christ tempted by Satan in one of the windows.
With the colleges closed, we spent a lot of our time in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Founded in 1816, the collection has a lot of Georgian and early 19th century material which is particularly interesting to me, partly because of the stories I’ve written set in this period and partly because of the amount of time I’m spending in Marble Hill House these days. Near the entrance of the Fitzwilliam is this statue of George II who paid for much of Marble Hill.
George II wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer and I think the statue catches that.
There’s a lot of 18th-century embroidered upholstery in the museum which, again, caught my eye because of the embroidery in Marble Hill House. You can see an example of embroidered upholstery in the photo below.
I’m interested in who did this embroidering. It seems that they were made by Georgian women with too much time on their hands. They couldn’t be seen doing anything as vulgar as a job, so they really did have a lot of time to fill. You could buy pre-drawn embroidery patterns to stitch, just as you can now, or you could draw your own.
Modern Embroidery Kit
There’s a lot of embroidered upholstery in the Fitzwilliam, which had me wondering if some, at least, were stitched by women for whom it wasn’t a hobby, but a job. I looked for any indication of the people who have produced this work but, presumably because they were mere women, none of them seem to have been credited with their creations.
Henrietta Howard, whose home Marble Hill was, was a great collector of chinoiserie, wildly fashionable in the 18th century. There’s a lot of it in the Fitzwilliam.
Perhaps Lady Suffolk’s enthusiasm for fine china was a reaction against the English earthenware that she must have grown up with. There’s a lot of that in the Fitzwilliam too.
One final exhibit very tenuously linked to Henrietta and then I’ll shut up.
This sculpture is supposed to represent a woman epitomising Reason. (It’s next to a much racier lady representing Love.) Notice the hand touching the face. It’s supposed to imply scholarly or poetic thoughts.
Art historians would have you believe this trope was established in the 17th century, well before this painting of Henrietta Howard was commissioned by Alexander Pope.
My wife, who is not an art historian but likes to check these ‘well-known facts’, looked at over 2,000 portraits in the National Portrait Gallery and found that this ‘hand-to-face’ pose was very rare in the 17th century. It seems to have taken off with Pope who not only commissioned this portrait of Henrietta but had multiple portraits made of himself, many of them in this ‘scholarly’ pose. By 1832, when the sculpture was made, this was a recognised bit of symbolism but it seems likely that Henrietta was the first woman to be shown like this.
So all the way to Cambridge, just to be reminded of our local stately home. It was a fun and interesting trip anyway. I hope you like the pictures.
I’m still playing with the idea of shorter blog posts which don’t involve researching anything so that I can share historical stuff with you. So this week, here’s a bit about how I’ve been using some of the time I haven’t been writing my blog.
I’ve spent an afternoon volunteering at Marble Hill House, which is a lovely Georgian villa near where I live. I’ve written about it HERE. It’s open Wednesdays to Sundays and free to visit, so why not call in?
On Sunday I went to a tango concert by El Chamuyo Tango Quartet and did a bit of dancing.
There’s been some other dancing, inevitably, and dance class, which seems to leave us exhausted. Old age, I guess.
Our son is working in London, so he’s been back living at home after around 15 years. Contrary to what people say about millenials, he’s working incredibly hard so he’s off out before we wake up. In the evening, he has many cooler people to spend time with than his parents, so we hardly see him. We have been doing a fair bit of dog-sitting though.
I’ve also been progressing, painfully slowly, with a rough draft of the next Burke novel, set in the War of 1812.
That’s life here. I hope you are having fun with whatever you are doing.
I’ve been taking part in #HistFicMay where historical fiction authors are invited to answer one question a day about their work. Yesterday’s question was: ‘How do you advertise your book?’
I’d been thinking about blogging about marketing for a while and this question, the day before my weekly blog post, has rather focussed my mind.
I’m self-published, so all the sales efforts for my books are down to me. The bad news is that this takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy. The good news is that (having originally been published by a small press) I know that an indie author will do a better job selling their books themselves than most publishers will do for the vast majority of their writers.
So what do I do?
Let’s start with what I don’t do. I don’t advertise. Historical fiction that isn’t Tudors or Regency Romance is a bit of a niche market. Unless a major publisher takes me up and decides to promote me heavily, I’m never going to sell thousands of books. (That’s why so many writers hold out for publishing deals, hoping against hope that they will be one of the lucky dozen or so that their publisher chooses to put serious money behind.)
About 80% of my sales are on Kindle and most of my books are just £3.99 so any significant advertising campaign is unlikely to pay for itself. I used to work in adverting and an insignificant advertising campaign is simply a waste of money. (Something I’ve confirmed by dipping a toe into Facebook and Amazon adverts.)
Social media
I do make an effort with social media. I post regularly on Twitter (I’m still not calling it X) and I have an author page on Facebook. I have an account on Bluesky too, but, sadly, the platform never really took off.
I don’t expect someone will see a tweet and rush to buy one of my books. I’m hoping that my social media efforts will drive people to my blog. (Well, you’re here, so presumably it works sometimes.) Then, with luck, you might explore my website and buy a book.
The website you’re on right now
I’ve put a fair amount of effort into my website, so I hope it sells the odd book. I’ve trialled selling directly (look at the bottom of my landing page) but so far with zero interest. This is largely my own fault because I’ve downplayed the offer in case it doesn’t work out on a practical level and I end up annoying a lot of readers and maybe losing money. Still, the offer is there so do feel free to take it up.
The main thing I do on the website is blog. I’m pretty religious about blogging every Friday. I enjoy it, which is a good thing because it takes quite a lot of time. Some blog posts get hundreds of viewers (over 450 when I reviewed Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, for example) while others pass almost unnoticed. I’ve looked for patterns so that I can just concentrate on the things that people will read but there honestly don’t seem to be any. It would help if I got feedback from people commenting on my posts, but generally they don’t. I just shout into the void and hope somebody is listening.
Free offers
I do run the odd Kindle giveaway. Many people speak highly of these and they have the advantage they don’t cost anything. The result can be one of my books appearing briefly in the bestseller list except that, given that they are free, I don’t feel that they have genuinely been ‘sold’. I’m not even sure that they have been read. I am certain I am not alone in having books on my Kindle that I picked up because they were free and have never got around to opening.
What I do find depressing is that even when people do read free books, they seem reluctant to review them. Surely that’s the implicit deal between the author and the person they give the free copy to? I do post a line or two on Amazon for every free book that I read unless I really can’t think of something kind to say about it and that’s rare. It would be nice if everybody else took the same approach.
Still, free offers cost nothing and can do no harm, so why not?
The best way to sell
What I have discovered is that the best way to sell a book is to write another one in the series. At the moment, I’m trying to write another adventure for James Burke. Unfortunately, I find myself spending more and more time procrastinating with tweeting and Facebooking and, dare I say it, writing this.
Going forward
I keep saying that I’m going to cut down on my blogging and, reading over what I’ve just written, I think I really have to make an effort to do so. So I will continue to blog on Fridays but maybe not every Friday and the posts might be dug out from years ago when most of you weren’t reading it anyway or may be just some pretty pictures or a few words of wisdom. It’s quite likely that shorter posts will be more appreciated. And I will be cutting down on Twitter. I’m sticking with #HistFicMay until the end of the month but after that I’m going to try to have some tweet-free days each week. I already hardly tweet on weekends and I think I’ll cut out Wednesdays too. That way I might even get a book written.
Tell me I’m wrong
I know that there are people who will say that I’m taking a negative attitude and that I really should make more effort to sell, rather than less. You may be right. I’m happy to be persuaded.
Feel free to respond to this blog and I’ll take all your comments on board. After all, if many of you do reply it will prove that I’m not screaming into the void at all.
