Matt Killeen
About Author
Matt Killeen was born in Birmingham and, like many of his generation, was absorbed by tales of the war and obsessed with football from an early age.
After careers in advertising as a copywriter and in music and sports journalism, he completed a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
In 2010, he became a writer for the LEGO Company, and now writes fiction full-time. The adventures of Sarah in Orphan Monster Spy and now Devil Darling Spy were inspired, in part, by the young female SOE agents of WW2.
He lives near London with his soulmate, children, dog and musical instruments.
Interview
DEVIL DARLING SPY
USBORNE BOOKS
MARCH 2020
The sequel to the Carnegie-nominated ORPHAN MONSTER SPY, DEVIL DARLING SPY by MATT KILLEEN returns to WWII but this time to the Congo in Africa, where young spy Sarah uncovers an evil plan to wreak havoc through pestilence.
As Sarah confronts the Nazi's desire for victory, through whatever causes necessary, she must build the inner resources she needs to help defeat them, without turning into a monster herself.
Author MATT KILLEEN tells us more about DEVIL DARLING SPY:
Q: Before becoming a writer, you worked at LEGO - really? What was your job?
A: Yes! I was a writer for the LEGO Group for eight wonderful years, working primarily for LEGO Club and its successor, LEGO Life. There were five million members of LEGO Club...I'll probably never write anything again that gets read by so many people!
Q: What's been your favourite all time LEGO purchase?
A: The LEGO staff discount, which I miss terribly, allowed me to pick up a few (actually a lot of) choice items which litter my office, mostly unfinished. But my childhood was built on LEGO Space and the all-time greatest set is, for me, the Galaxy Commander (6980). Best. Xmas. Ever. There are those who rate the Galaxy Explorer (928) more highly, but a) I never owned the Explorer at the time, and b) there's something about the blue cockpits and white wings and the spikiness of the Commander that's ridiculously exciting.
When I was four, I wanted to be an X-Wing Pilot, an astronaut or work for the LEGO company...one out of three isn't bad, and I played a lot of X-Wing at uni.
Q: Orphan Monster Spy was your debut novel. What brought you into writing and how long did you spend writing your debut novel? What was the biggest challenge in getting it written?
A: Start to publication took five years. I initially began the book for my MA in Writing for Children. I had three years, so that's exactly how long it took. I need a deadline, or procrastination and fear will consume the time. The MA submission was okay, but it had some problems and I wasn't sure how to fix them. I panicked a bit and got some dubious advice...there comes a stage when you need someone to suggest edits who is willing to stake their reputation on them. I was lucky, by hook or crook, to find my agent, who did so.
I had been a professional writer for a good while before I started the MA - how I became a writer is a very long story I won't get into. I was enjoying writing fiction bits for the LEGO company but that's a lot of time inside the head of my inner seven year old boy. I wanted to do something darker, older and more complex. I'd written film scripts at uni, when I wasn't playing Elite and X-Wing, so I started there.
Q: How did Sarah, your main character in this and Devil Darling Spy, emerge?
A: Moving to London, I passed Stockwell Tube Station every week or so, and there's a war memorial mural dedicated in part to Violette Szabo, the SOE agent. I knew her story but was shocked to see how young she was when she was executed, and to discover she was just 21 when she had volunteered. It made me think of how useless I was at 21, little more than a teenager...and that's when Sarah dropped into my brain, pretty much fully formed, and telling me what to do.
I wrote chronologically and, in retrospect, the scene on the dock in Friedrichshafen, where she goes back to get the Captain, was pivotal. She decided she was going to do that, that she wasn't going to be saved, or even save herself. That's the moment I understood her, when I really knew who she was.
She is, I accept, in some respects, a 'thinly veiled author avatar'. We share the ability to soak up damage and keep putting one foot in front of the other. And in the wish-fulfilment department, she can play the piano, while I learned listening to The Cure with two fingers.
She told me that she could parkour at a time when I couldn't walk without two crutches. She has a facility for languages that I would love but just cannot emulate despite my best efforts. All that said, the things that I, as author, do to her, make this reading a bit problematic, psychologically speaking.
Q: How did you feel when you started the second book, and how did writing Devil Darling Spy compare with writing Orphan Monster Spy?
A: It was a nightmare really. I had a notion as to the plot and the conclusion, but it was a mess of journeys and events in my head. And the more feted Orphan Monster Spy became, the more the pressure built, the less likely it seemed that I could write anything as good again. I missed a deadline - I hate doing that, it's anathema to me - and the whole project got pushed back a year.
I didn't make it easy on myself, though. I chose difficult subject matter, took on a lot of extra responsibility...I don't know what I was thinking. In the end I had to make myself write it - I had 45 working days left which meant 1400 a day and I didn't go to bed until I'd done them. That was how I got over myself - old school panic style. It came to me, the characters spoke, became people. Phew.
Q: Orphan Monster Spy is set largely in a boarding school, in war time Germany. Why did you decide to take the action to Africa for Devil Darling Spy?
A: I knew that the story would be set in 1940 and I wasn't much interested in Dunkirk or the Battle of Britain as there's a lot of stuff out there about the fall of France...at the same time I had just read The Kaiser's Holocaust by David Olusoga and Casper W Erichsen, which discusses the extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples by Imperial Germany at the start of the 20th century.
It wasn't just the pre-echoes of the Holocaust that I saw in the book, but the reality of the whole Imperialist framework that just tutted about the atrocity, as it had the horrors of the Congo Free State before it. I suddenly 'got' empire and colonialism in a way I hadn't before. I would burst into rooms carrying the book, demanding everyone listen to me, the way Sarah does with Red Rubber in Devil Darling Spy. I knew I had to write about it.
One of my intentions behind the books, and my school talks, is to try and establish the moral complexity of the war - and colonialism is inextricably linked to that. To who we think we are. The West African Ebola virus epidemic and the global reaction to it contained all the same elements of colonial thinking, racism and intricacy...and it all fused in my head.
I needed a theatre of war for this to all play out and discovered the civil war that took place in French Equatorial Africa (modern day Chad, CAR, Gabon and the DRC) where the Gaullists and Vichy supporters fought over France's soul, using African blood. The Battle of Libreville supplied the chokepoint. I saw the harbour, the ships, the whole thing.
Q: How did you go about researching the setting and the historical background for this novel, particularly the colonial powers' impact on this region?
A: Well, I already knew a lot about WW2 and the Holocaust when I started Orphan Monster Spy, and I naively thought that setting the sequel in Africa and writing about colonialism would be just a matter of research. But there's a real paucity of easily available sources on colonialism and Africa in general.
Setting the book in the AEF was stupid, really. Everything written about it was in French, and Monsieur Bertillon est douanier a Charles de Gaulle is the extent of my understanding. It's notable, I think, that this lack of attention is itself colonial thinking. Why is there no Streetview in Libreville? What makes my street in a UK suburb more important than the capital of a country of two million people?
I got there eventually, and I had some very good readers on the history and culture, but I think everyone needs a serious education on Imperialism and colonialism. It's never been more important...
Q: Did you have more fun researching the gadgets and vehicles of the time - there's a great chase scene in the book between a battleship and a submarine!
A: The Battle of the Atlantic is 'one of my areas', for a few reasons...it started with The Cruel Sea, which I think is one of the greatest books written about war and remains a firm favourite. From the other side, the original Das Boot is one of the best war films / series ever made. I watched it with my father in '84. He was a workaholic so watching five hours of TV was a big deal.
There had been a submarine versus destroyer engagement off the coast of Gabon while the Battle of Libreville was going on, and Sarah's involvement came from thinking about City of Benares and Wilhelm Gustloff tragedies, of refugee ships being torpedoed, not to mention the 17,000 odd refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean since I started thinking about the book.
I have also spent many hours of my life playing submarine simulators. I got one of them working again - the newer ones have swapped immersion for superficial sparkle - and I ran the attack on Virulent over and over again, until I did it, just to prove to myself that it was possible. I was gratified to read Simon Parkin's A Game of Birds and Wolves recently and discover that the Royal Navy of WW2 played their own game, over and over, until they found anti-submarine tactics that worked.
Q: Why did you decide to bring in real historical characters to the novel, even though many of your readers won't know of them?
A: In Orphan Monster Spy I wanted to make Lise Meitner a character because she had inspired part of the story and I really wanted more people to know who she was and what she did, so heinous was her airbrushing out of history. There's also a strand of what if? to these books, and while not counter-factual as such, they run alongside the history. If the Captain knew a nuclear scientist who had sussed the whole thing, it could conceivably have been Lise Meitner. She was one of humanity's smartest cookies.
I'm fascinated by the tipping points and the individual acts that change history. Admiral Canaris was a perfect example of this. He was no saint, unquestionably right-wing and a murderer on occasion, but his anti-Hitler activities provoke a great deal of debate. Did he really keep Spain out of the war, single-handed? If so, it's difficult to imagine a greater contribution to the allied cause by any other individual.
What was the extent of his work for the British? He was certainly arrested, tortured and executed by the SS in the final days of the war, but so were a lot of people who barely warranted that attention. He captures the complexity and grey morality of the Captain's work rather well. Would a fictional character do so that successfully? Would he seem too convenient a cipher? Anyway, I have plans for the Admiral...
The war crimes of Unit 731 in Manchuria were something I wanted to talk about, and Devil Darling Spy largely transplants details of their atrocities to Central Africa. But a character based on Shiro Ishii would seem far-fetched, like a cartoon villain, so horrendous and monstrous an individual was he. Also, he was never held to account for what he did. He was put to 'work' by the United States who were only too happy to have his research, so any chance to personify him and prevent the world from forgetting what he did had to be taken.
Q: You also have much to say about feminism, was this an important part of the characters for you?
A: I'm not sure I know how to write any other way...but I'm struggling to think of many more important issues to be honest. The greed, hate and wilful ignorance that has so consumed society is at the heart of most of humankind's problems, and they are largely patriarchal in origin.
Whether you're preoccupied by the economy, the climate, education, healthcare, or just basic happiness, social justice is the starting point of any realistic answer, and bringing down the patriarchy is a major part of that. Where women have agency, education and self-actualisation, society prospers. And this is in everyone's interest.
Q: How does it feel having written about Ebola at a time when a new virus is doing the rounds?
A: I've always had a terrified fascination with disease and contagion - I can probably blame those scary Rabies posters you could see at the channel ports in the '70s and '80s - and briefly considered a career in that area, until it was clear I don't have the aptitude for the science involved.
Devil Darling Spy was partly born of watching the West African Ebola virus epidemic play out - a disease so uniquely horrible that it occupies a special place in our nightmares - and seeing the same cycle of superstition and colonial condescension that so plagues its eradication, all while families were extinguished. Now it's back in the DRC, of course...from a global pandemic point of view, EVD is actually a very poor candidate in that it's very easy to spot at its most infectious, but in human terms it's an excruciating tragedy.
I'm no expert and certainly in a dangerously, semi-informed place, but there is, at time of writing, a bit of panic going on about COVID-19. There's a lot of unthinking racism, a bit of paranoia and way too much ignorance, but all that does rather mirror society at large at the moment. Also, humans are very poor at correctly judging risk.
That said, the way that the United States delivers its healthcare - in that it doesn't deliver any for a great many people - is likely to be sorely tested by the coming months. The answer to surviving a pandemic are trained healthcare professionals, preparedness drills and global co-operative programmes - all things cut by Trump in the last few years. Meanwhile a significant number of the population can't afford to get tested, let alone be hospitalised, and can't afford to have a day off in a culture where there are little or no employment protections. That's a recipe for disaster right there. It already costs nearly 1,000 lives a day from preventable Influenza in winter.
Surviving pandemics means paying your taxes and spending them on healthcare. Western Society is currently allergic to this form of civilisation, so...we'll see. We can't keep hoping that the next nasty is going to be as difficult to catch as SARS or as less lethal as Swine Flu. The latter almost seemed like a joke, didn't it? There have been nearly one and a half billion cases since 2009.
Wash your hands.
Q: What would you like your readers to take from Devil Darling Spy?
A: War, conflict and violence are complex. That's not to say that evil mustn't be confronted - it absolutely must, on every occasion - but do not allow yourself to be wooed by easy notions of goodies and baddies. Morality quickly becomes grey once you pick up a gun.
WW2 has been a common refrain in UK political discourse over the last four years, often in the mouths of people who do not understand what happened, why it happened and what the allies did to win. Which brings us to colonialism...the former-imperial powers (and I include the US in this) have spectacularly failed to accept responsibility for the damage inflicted by their empires and the mindset they conferred.
All major powers are tainted by a past that they are happy to shrug off, while billions still suffer in a quasi-colonial world of voracious and exploitative corporations. We need to teach this history in schools, the way the Holocaust is taught to German children. Never more than right now, with people talking about empire as some golden past, rather than a bloody reign of institutionalised theft, rape and murder.
Q: Will there be a Book 3? What are you writing now?
A: Sarah will return, but publishing being publishing, I don't know when. As for the next project, I live at the whim of the same capricious beast. I've been writing about Soviet combat medics on the eastern front in WW2 - usually young women who were considered combatants so were bandaging the wounded while being shot at - and about the Nazi movement in the US before the war and their summer camp programmes. Yes, Nazi summer camp. That's the pitch.
Q: What are your favourite escapes from writing?
A: I love football. It's an endless, unpredictable soap-opera narrative at the macro-level, and a personal emotional rollercoaster of belonging and disaster at the level of my club. Joys and sorrows too, as my team's song says. The football, as the Mitchell and Webb sketch says, is never over, but it's also a yearly cycle of rebirth and re-affirmation, which rewards engagement with the chance of the highest highs, at the risk of lowest of lows.
I also love videogames. There's nothing better for my brain than space trucking in Elite: Dangerous or presiding over the flan-like collapse of the Roman Empire in Total War. I like a big story-driven, single-player adventure but I don't really have the time for them. Give me a 30 min burst of meaningful and meaningless activity...I go to Erangle and Miramar [maps in Battlegrounds] for the views.
Then there is mandatory child-care, of course. The 'escape' is demanded, and acquiescence is obligatory.
Q: If you could go anywhere you wanted to research a new book, where would it be?
A: Is that 'dream destination' or 'dream book research'? I'm plotting a visit to Volgograd, that's the new money Stalingrad, for research - hopefully next winter - but queuing for that visa is not something I'm looking forward to.
If I can figure out a research angle to get me to Japan, I'd be very happy. I wrote extensively about Anime and Japanese Cinema at Uni and it's been on me to-do-list since forever.
I would also like to return to Hawaii to 'research' Waikiki Beach for a few months or so, just to make sure I was right to love it so much. To doublecheck.
Devil, Darling, Spy
Orphan Monster Spy
