Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

My latest thriller, Purple Killing, is coming very soon. It is written in a modern style in a scene by scene format, with punctuation which follows reading flow rather than traditional rules. This creates a compelling  narrative, easy to read and hard to put down. This book is a work of fiction, but at its heart there is a real historical cover-up. This drives the plot, but almost all the events and characters are fictional. Some characters appear also in Hitler’s First Lady, but that is a novel much more closely linked to known historical facts and the true story of a family, which appears in both books as the Benedicts. Here most of their story is fiction, as are all the modern characters within the family and in the world beyond.

About the Book

Dr. Rachael Benedict is an American historian and a best-selling author. She has a British connection through her estranged father Saul, an English thriller writer. Saul, whose parents were of Anglo-German origin, has spent much of his life plotting to expose secrets from World War Two, which are so sensitive they have been subject to an extensive cover-up lasting seventy years. As the time approaches for him to make his move to expose duplicity, murder and lies at the heart of the British State, he seeks Rachael’s help. This provokes a killing spree as parts of the security services of both Britain and the United States become engaged in the drama, with one side determined to get the secrets out and the other determined to keep them hidden.

Set equally in the United States and Britain, the narrative grips from the first page, transporting the reader to the heart of government both in Washington and London and on into the darkest corners of the secret states on each side of the Atlantic. Rachael battles forward to unearth the truth both from intrigues of the Nazi era, but also within her own family, surviving three attempts on her life, before finally achieving her goal. Not only does she expose the truth from history and from her own roots, she has to delve deep into her own emotions to find the truth about herself.

Norman Baker, the Lib Dem home office minister, has rightly suggested that to dismiss out of hand a report which the government itself commissioned, which finds that making drug taking a crime does not reduce its use, is both short sighted and counter productive.

Just as America discovered that banning alcohol was no way to combat drunkenness and that all it did was to establish organised crime as a significant element of its economy, so we have seen after nearly half a century of failure that criminal sanction does not stop drug users, but it does create a vast operation of organised crime among the suppliers. Indeed the drug industry is now so large it has to be included in the nation’s GDP; this is one of the reasons why an angry Cameron has been hit with a two billion euro surcharge which he is refusing to pay.

The modern post Thatcher Tory party has managed to gather into its tent the opposite of the old tradition of one nation Toryism. Every kind of prejudice which exists in the political firmament, exists in the Tory party. A drugs policy leading to the most overcrowded prisons and the largest organised crime network in Europe is the least imaginative approach to a serious social issue which needs therapy to be the driver of a better outcome.

The Lib Dems are swimming against the tide in the campaign run up to the general election when few of their current MPs are likely to survive. Norman Baker deserves to be one of those survivors and he probably will be.