And no adding any sort of odd sauce to the dish, either. The bleak, noir world of Bletchley Park - which happened to be criticized by people who were there - is the perfect grim and grimy setting for a crime; the character is a sort of traumatized and disillusioned noir detective, maths style, dismissed and later re-evoked for his brilliance. There's a scene of him losing his badge (for the Nth+1 time). The foolish supervisor is there, the obstructing bureaucrat is there, the loyal but uninspiring coworkers are there...

Fatherland, written by Robert Harris and published in 1992, is set in a world where Nazi Germany won the Second World War. Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries. London: Faber and Faber, 17 February 1986 ISBN 978-0-571-13557-8 Anthony, Andrew (24 September 2013). "Robert Harris: 'Whenever a crowd is running one way, I run the other' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 December 2015. Adolf Hitler: The elderly and increasingly-reclusive Führer of the Greater German Reich, since the end of the war, Hitler has toned down his image by eschewing his uniform in favour of civilian clothing. His speeches are now at a rate that is calm, rather than furious. England. General Edward Whalley and his son-in law Colonel William Goffe board a ship bound for the New World. They are on the run, wanted for the murder of King Charles I—a brazen execution that marked the culmination of the English Civil War, in which parliamentarians successfully battled royalists for control.Harris was a columnist for The Sunday Times, but gave it up in 1997. He returned to journalism in 2001, writing for The Daily Telegraph. [26] He was named "Columnist of the Year" at the 2003 British Press Awards. [27] Personal life [ edit ] Alternative World War II history [ edit ] The world in 1964 in the novel Fatherland where the Germans won World War II. Germany and its sphere of influence are in red; the United States and its sphere of influence in blue; China and Switzerland in yellow

Harris, Robert. "Robert Harris: 'The Ghost' of Tony Blair". NPR.org. NPR . Retrieved 9 December 2015.Achtung Erwartungshaltung: Irgendwie ein Thriller, ja, aber mit anspruchsvoller Verschlüsselungs-Thematik statt „normalen“ Morden (deutscher Text unten - German text underneath) Harris appeared on the American PBS show Charlie Rose on 10 February 2012. Harris discussed his novel The Fear Index which he likened to a modern-day Gothic novel along the lines of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Harris also discussed the adaptation of his novel, The Ghost that came out as the movie, The Ghost Writer directed by Roman Polanski. [25] Columnist [ edit ] And here is the reason that Harris's invention of a nightmarish alternative history is so compelling. The discovery of the truth behind Bühler's murder, and other murders that follow, is also a fictional imagining of how people can manage not to know things. The reader's knowledge is the condition for seeing the characters' wilful avoidance of knowledge. March keeps that photograph on his mantelpiece, for reasons that are not explained, as if he does not explain them to himself. Oblivion is the Nazis' most terrible creation, but it has to be willed. Jericho is clearly at least partially a portrait of Alan Turing, a key figure in the development of modern computing and perhaps most famous for his theories on AI with his Turing test, and someone I find fascinating, so it was very interesting to see how Harris wrote this clearly troubled genius as he stumbled his way through the increasingly intricate plot. And it is a complex plot but credit to Harris for never making it as indecipherable to follow for the reader as any of the codes poor Tom and his team have to grapple with. I was so impressed that even up to the final chapter there were still surprises left in the narrative.