I was born on the South Coast of England and like Lucie, the heroine of ‘Dancing Into Danger’, I spent my childhood at dancing lessons and competing in Music Festivals. I danced professionally from the age of seventeen, graduating to dancing in West End Musicals and eventually creating my own one woman show.
At this point, having learned a lot about production and marketing, I formed a corporate event company, creating imaginative productions for major corporate clients and leaving my performing career behind as the company grew. Relocating to East Devon and during the various Covid lockdowns, my quartet of novels was born. My husband and I have two daughters, both published authors, they are my sternest critics.
Research for Dancing into Danger
Having committed myself to the historic WW2 theme, I have read widely and some the books I have read are listed here. Because my novel feature women, I am particularly interested in the courageous females who were trained as agents to be either parachuted into occupied countries or landed by small boats on dark beaches. Some of these women gave their lives and withstood brutal treatment at the hands of their captors. Notable amongst these are Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Khan whilst arguably the most well known woman agent was Odette Churchill who survived brutal treatment and returned to tell the story at the end of the war. A film was made of her exploits called ‘Carve Her Name with Pride’.
One of the most relevant books I stumbled across, relevant because it is set in Brittany, as is Lucie’s story is ‘The Next Moon’ by Andre Hue and Ewen Southby- Tailyour. The historian M.R.D. Foot calls it ‘the best account of what life was like for an SOE agent in the field that I have read for over forty years.’
I also read ‘A Life in Secrets’ sub-titled ‘The Lost Agents of SOE’ by Vera Atkins, who was in charge of the women’s section of SOE. For a longer read, I suggest ‘Fighters in the Shadows’ by Robert Gildea, a comprehensive and gripping account of the French Resistance. There are many books written by the people who lived through this dangerous time, some may be out of print but sometimes you can find them on the web, second- hand, battered but still immensely readable.
Having just published ‘Dancing into Danger’ on Amazon, I am now focusing on the other three novels. The next one to be published will be Phoebe’s Story, provisionally titled ‘A West Country War.’
Deirdre Dee Writer 