An economic crisis, three million unemployed, a Tory government doing little for the poor, a split Labour party, the rise of populist leaders offering simplistic solutions and the scapegoating of immigrants and minorities…welcome to 1935.
Blackshirt Masquerade is a thriller set within the British fascist movement. One thing I was advised to do is to make clear at the outset that I’m not a fascist. In the same way I suppose that other crime writers make clear they are not serial killers, hit men or leading members of drug cartels. Politics though is different, and my book is set before fascism was exposed as the genocidal evil it became.
It would have been easier to write about 1930s communists, as they have acquired a romantic appeal to anyone who doesn’t read too deeply into the atrocities of Stalin and other leftist movements of that era. The International Brigades and no end of radical poets and writers add to the mystique.
The unpalatable truth though is that during the early thirties quite ordinary people joined the British Union of Fascists with motivations not that different from those joining the communists or the Independent Labour Party. Indeed, people flipped from one to the other in search of radical solutions in the face of the torpid National Government. All the fascist supporters that pepper my books cannot be heel-clicking villains and racist thugs or they simply become caricatures.
(See my previous blog on how the Nazis make perfect villains).
Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, later re-badged simply as British Union were only around for eight years. His party is largely forgotten now, perhaps because it failed to come even close to power. However, it is a well-worn cliché that we have a habit of forgetting the lessons of history. Hitler and Mussolini did not just spring into power fully formed, and nor did Franco or dozens of other autocrats of the mid-twentieth century. Some ‘populists’ of today are taking notes from the same playbook.
There was no social media in 1935 but if it had existed, the likes of Joseph Goebbels and William Joyce (‘Lord Haw Haw’) would have used it to stoke the flames of mistrust, discontent and bigotry. The ‘Post Truth’ world would have suited them well.
Political fighting on the streets is ugly in any era, but as I composed scenes where communists and fascists went boot to boot on the streets of London, my television was showing riot police clashing with protesters from cities as diverse as Hong Kong and Seattle. Black-uniformed ‘anti fascists’ were marching through London unaware of the irony. I watched footage of the run up to the 2020 US elections in horror as flag-waving militias squared off against each other and slogans replaced political dialogue. As I was completing the launch of Blackshirt Rebellion, thugs fired up by far-right rhetoric were rampaging through my local town.
In Blackshirt Masquerade, Hugh Clifton must weave a path between characters he is forced to rely on, those he seeks to defeat and those he will betray. Although he is opposing fascist schemes, he is not armed with some superhuman foresight. Any reader will know how disastrously Europe’s flirtation with fascism ended, but the ordinary Britons of 1935 populating the novels have no inkling of the horrors ahead. Unemployment, low wages and the fear of a second Great War were far more on their minds than what that man with the funny little moustache was up to in Germany. Desperate people were grabbing at straws and on the surface voting fascist was no more evil than voting for any other fringe party. My challenge as an author has been to explain the appeal, and to allow characters to discover the dark underbelly of the movement for themselves.
It is hard to imagine how any well-informed person of modern times would deliberately adopt a fascist agenda, knowing how disastrous it proved in the mid-twentieth century, but incredibly ‘Neo-Nazi’ groups are springing up across Europe. Are they ignorant of what the real Nazis did, and how they failed utterly, or are they just ignorant? The world has no use for extremism – fascism isn’t cool, kids.
Blackshirt Masquerade, and Blackshirt Conspiracy are available worldwide from Amazon, from Barnes and Noble, and can be ordered from your usual book store. Look out for Blackshirt Rebellion on pre-order from Amazon UK and Amazon.com.
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