You began your writing with works of non-fiction, including such important books as When Reason Fails: Portraits of Armies at War. Why did you decide to switch to fiction?

Michael Goodspeed:I suppose it’s because humans have a tendency to study life through stories. As children we love them, and as adults we carry that over into news, novels, movies, and TV shows. We try to make sense of our problems through stories. We crave someone else’s context; and fiction readily provides not only context, but also an alternate perspective and someone else’s personal understanding of a situation.

Do you see similarities between these different styles of writing?

Goodspeed: In both types of literature, fiction and non-fiction, you examine issues and present a case. Non-fiction serves primarily to inform, while fiction serves not only to inform, but also to entertain and make a statement about your subject. So in this sense, I think that writing fiction and non-fiction are probably two sides of the same coin. Besides, I’m certifiably human and a sucker for a good story.

Your character Rory Ferrall is back now for a second tour of duty, having learned skills in military espionage in your Great War novel Three to a Loaf. Did you as an author find he’d developed new qualities or attributes in your mind, or is he essentially the same character?

Goodspeed: For me, in writing a novel, the characters become real people. I suppose it’s a kind of self-imposed delusion. When I work out the plot and imagine the characters and how they develop in the circumstances they find themselves in, I end up with a well-defined image of who these people are and how life has sculpted them. In Rory Ferrall’s case, he’s an interesting guy, someone who has lived intensely, personally experienced some of the most catastrophic and formative events of the twentieth century, and of course he’s been influenced by them.

So a character grows and changes?

Goodspeed: I see a person’s life as being similar to a body of water. If it flows and doesn’t stagnate, it changes shape, it takes new directions; and over time its character changes, sometimes subtly, sometimes wildly.

In this book Rory is twenty-two years older. He’s been a Mountie in the North, he’s lost his wife, changed careers, and now he’s thrown into another set of challenging circumstances. He’s the same person, but the world has made some changes in him. He’s been wounded and hurt in his life; he’s had some quiet triumphs and grown stronger in some ways, more vulnerable in others. He’s learned a lot, he’s savvier and less naïve; but there’s still a core sense of decency and diffident stoicism about him.

Readers of Three to a Loaf will note you’ve shifted voice here, to a third-person narrator. Why?

Goodspeed: I wanted to explore in detail two other main characters, and to do that I wanted to view them in situations Rory couldn’t have witnessed. So, the point of view changed.

Many readers say that once they start your novel, it is very hard to put down, which is a compliment you must find gratifying as a writer. Yet you consider your works more than just page-turning thrillers, isn’t that so?

Goodspeed: Thanks for the compliment. I certainly hope people enjoy my books.

I’ve always thought that the best stories should leave the reader or the audience thinking and mulling over the underlying issues after they’re finished. And to do this, you can’t propagandize your themes. You absolutely have to respect your reader’s intelligence. Themes have to be balanced and fairly presented.

The reader has to believe that your settings, plot, and characters are credible; and then the themes you weave in through the characters’ conflicts and their moral quandaries should relate somehow to your readers’ lives and their world. In this way, good novels should be more than just entertainment.

A lot of the best themes are timeless and endlessly multi-dimensional: love, loyalty, fear, integrity, courage, ambition, how to respond to evil. I believe that if a story is going to connect, its themes should say something about the world we live in; and the themes that you develop have to surface naturally in the characters, the setting, and the plot. That’s what I aim for; but it’s up to the reader to tell me if I hit the mark.

In your first Rory Ferrall novel and now in this one, he is engaged in high-stakes intelligence operations behind enemy lines. While that is a constant, the Great War and the Second World War themselves are very different conflicts. What to you is the essential difference?

Goodspeed: We should never have fought the First World War. It was a colossal miscalculation on everybody’s part. Nobody envisaged the scale or the duration of the destruction, and the issues we were fighting over could and should have been resolved by other means. The Second World War was very different. Nazism had to be thoroughly extinguished, and that could only be done by force of arms. People like Winston Churchill understood that fact as soon as Hitler came to power. But it was almost too late when we finally went to war, and by then everyone went into that conflict with their eyes wide open.

How does that difference impact on Ferrall?

Goodspeed: I think it had a huge impact on Rory Ferrall, as it did on the rest of the world. Those generations had suffered enormously; they sincerely wanted to believe that war was completely ineffective, that the threat to them wasn’t really an existential one, that somehow things would all work out for the best. Rory Farrell has seen the true face of the Third Reich, and despite everything he’s been through, he knows we absolutely have to win this conflict. At the same time, he’s also unhappy about having to fight a second time. On a private level, his own world has just been shattered; and on top of this, in the early days of the war, he’s not at all certain that we’re going to win.

Readers might be interested that between writing these two novels, you served for a year in Kosovo. What was that experience like?

Goodspeed: It was a fascinating time. A lot was going on. It was highly rewarding, with a very intense work schedule. I was on the Military Civil Advisory Team and I was privileged in my own small way in helping to build Europe’s newest country and help patch up a troubled part of the world. It was a people-watcher’s paradise. I got to meet scores of interesting individuals, not only from Kosovo, but from almost every nation in Europe. It was a tremendous experience; the only down side to it was that it was a long year away from home.

Did you find any time for writing?

Goodspeed: I did, usually very late at night.

Can we expect to see another return of Rory Ferrall?

Goodspeed: I certainly hope so. The man led a remarkable life.