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us stand by their sides. Remember …’
    I was about to read on when I saw that the letter that accompanied the folder had fluttered to the carpet. I picked it up. It consisted of a few typewritten lines on an otherwise blank sheet of paper.
    Greetings, Herr Doktor. We secured your address from the Customs carnet in your car and write now to wish you good luck. Kurt, Stephan, and Bruno have made many journeys since we saw you and returned safely each time. Today, Kurt leaves again. We pray for himas always. With this letter we send you Johann’s newest work so that you shall see that Kurt spoke the truth to you. We are of the army of the shadows. We do not fight for you against our countrymen; but we fight with you against National Socialism, our common enemy.
    Auf Wiedersehen
FREDA, KURT, STEPHAN, JOHANN, AND BRUNO .
    Llewellyn put my glass down on the table beside me. ‘Help yourself to a cigarette. What do you think of that? Nice of them, wasn’t it?’ he added. ‘Sentimental lot, these Germans.’

End of the Beginning
    T HE Army of the Shadows
was written to meet a deadline and my haste still shows. Given more time I could have made the story crisper and the telling of it less John Buchanish. Still, the writing of it, and perhaps the deadline too, proved oddly stimulating. For the first time since that night in Harry’s Bar and the news of the infamous Pact I began to think it possible that my career as a writer might not after all be quite over. True, I was waiting to get into the Navy and did not want to start a new novel that I might not have time to finish, but I still had the habit of writing every day, a habit which I had cultivated and one with which I was always comfortable. When my agent reported that a weekly magazine the
Sketch
wanted to commission from me a series of six short detective stories, I accepted immediately.
    Rash? I suppose so. I had never tried to write a detective story, but I had read the great masters of the genre, admired their fearsome ingenuity and deplored the faintly ridiculous set of ‘rules’ for their craft laid down by the early paladins of The Detection Club. The Father Brown short stories of G. K. Chesterton had entertained me, not least because of the author’s effrontery in endowing his detective with a private line to God. Any approach of mine to the puzzle problem was bound to be less fanciful, but at least it could be workmanlike. I must not disgrace myself by cheating the reader. My plots must work.
    That was the week my orders came. They were to report to Room So-and-So at the Admiralty for an interview. I did and had a bad time. The list my friend in the Ministry had put me on was one for men capable of skippering minesweeping trawlers in the North Sea. The essential qualifications were deep-seayachting experience, membership of a recognized yacht club, and an ability to navigate. The interviewing officer was a polite bastard with a humiliating smile. I could have murdered him as well as the friend who thought that all writers of thirty could or should be amateur yachtsmen. Instead, with murder in my heart, I wandered across Trafalgar Square to the Charing Cross Road. There I bought a secondhand copy of Taylor’s
Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence
, then the standard general work on the science of forensic medicine, a murderer’s vademecum.
    Taylor came in two volumes. The first dealt with bodily harm resulting from external violence – blows, falls, stabbings, strangulation, fire, gunshot wounds, and other mayhem. The second volume was all about poisons. A couple of days’ browsing gave me the technical material for six cosy little murder mysteries; six little puzzles with six solutions that could be explained briefly and without elaborate dissection of alibis. A suitable master detective was needed. He would have to fit into small narrative spaces. His entrances and exits must have a clear pattern. He must belong noticeably to the times we were