About Iain Jackson

Your Charles King novels are set during the First World War, but they are not conventional war stories. How would you describe the series?

I think they are espionage novels first and foremost, but they are set against the enormous, unsettling machinery of the First World War. One of the real motivating factors for me was that when people talk about the First World War, the immediate image is nearly always trenches, mud, the Western Front, and perhaps the Christmas Day football match. That is all part of it, of course, but the war was so much bigger than that.

I wanted to open that world out. The First World War was not just a few miles of northern France and Flanders. It was diplomatic, imperial, maritime, political and deeply personal. It reached into ports, hotel rooms, embassies, railway stations, hospitals and safe houses. That hidden war – the unofficial conversations, the assumed identities, the compromises and the quiet intelligence work – really interested me.

The first book, A Masquerade of Duty, is very much about appearances: who people seem to be, who they pretend to be, and who they are underneath. The second book, The Blindness of Power, takes that further. It looks at what happens when identity itself starts to become unstable, and when people live behind masks how it begins to change them.

Who is Charles King?

Charles King is a decent man. He's honourable, proud, and very much a product of his time and class. That matters, because part of his journey through the books is seeing some of those assumptions challenged. His view of the world is slowly altered by what happens to him and by the people he meets.

When I first started writing King, I think I saw him in some ways as an everyman. He was the person through whose eyes we would see the war, the intelligence world and the consequences of both. But as the books have developed, he has become much more his own person. He has his own instincts, flaws, loyalties and limits.

He also has a group of recurring characters around him, and I think that really helps define him. Some of them operate at a level of almost pure duty. King never quite does that. He understands duty, but he is not blind to its cost. He is brave and capable, but he is not invincible, and he does not always have the answer. That is what makes him interesting to write.

The books feature real historical settings and institutions. How much research goes into them?

A lot, but I try not to let the research become the point of the book. The First World War is incredibly well documented, so the danger is that you can fall down endless rabbit holes and never come back. My aim is to know enough so that the world feels convincing, but to keep the story moving.

The early intelligence world is particularly fascinating because it was still forming. People now talk about MI6 as if it has always existed in this polished, recognisable form, but its beginnings were much looser, stranger and more improvised than that.

There is one detail I absolutely love, which probably says something about my sense of humour. When Mansfield Smith-Cumming was appointed to head what was then the Secret Service Bureau, he wrote in his diary on his first day: “Went to the office. Nothing happened. Came home.” I find that wonderfully absurd. The beginnings of what we now think of as MI6 or the Secret Intelligence Service were, in part, a man in a monocle sitting in an office, apparently doing very little, and then going home for his supper. That mixture of seriousness, chaos and absurdity is irresistible.

Why did you choose this particular period of the war?

The early years of the war have a real uncertainty about them. Nobody yet fully understands what the conflict is becoming. That gives the books a slightly unstable quality, which I like. The characters are operating in a world where the rules are changing as they go along.

In The Blindness of Power, the shadow of Gallipoli hangs over the story. That campaign has always struck me as one of the great examples of ambition, misjudgement and human endurance colliding. It also lets the story move well beyond the Western Front – through places such as Geneva, Marseille, Alexandria and Imbros. That was important to me, because I wanted readers to feel the sheer scale and reach of the war.

The series has a strong atmosphere of secrecy and disguise. Is that deliberate?

Yes, very much so. I am interested in people who are performing versions of themselves. Espionage obviously gives you assumed names, false documents and hidden motives, but in a way everyone in the books is playing a role. Some do it for patriotic reasons, some for survival, some for revenge, and some because they no longer know how to do anything else.

King is repeatedly forced to become someone else, and that changes him. He is not just putting on a disguise and taking it off again. There are always consequences. 

What kind of reader do you imagine enjoying the Charles King books?

Readers who enjoy historical fiction with atmosphere, intelligence and moral complexity. If that doesn’t sound too grand! There is action, of course, but I am not trying to write simple adventure stories. I like danger that is physical, but also emotional and ethical.

I hope the books appeal to people who enjoy First World War history, espionage fiction, and character-led thrillers. I also like a sense of texture: the sound of a railway station, the smell of a harbour, the tension in a quiet room where everyone is being terribly polite and absolutely no one is telling the whole truth.

What can readers expect as the series continues?

The series follows Charles King through the war and through the consequences of the life he has been pulled into. Book three, The Burden of Silence, moves into North Africa in 1916 and explores what happens when intelligence, honour and survival begin to conflict even more sharply.

I want each book to work as a satisfying story in its own right, but also to build a larger arc. King changes. The people around him change. The war changes. By the end, I hope readers will feel they have followed not just a sequence of missions, but the making – and perhaps unmaking – of a man.

Finally, what do you enjoy most about writing Charles King?

I enjoy putting him in situations where the outcome is uncertain and where there is no neat answer. Sometimes he works it out. Sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes events simply overtake him, and he has to survive them as best he can.

That feels true to him. He is not a man with everything planned out, and he is not someone who always knows what the right thing is. He is physically and emotionally put through the wringer, and he has to keep going.

The historical setting gives the books scale, but Charles gives them their centre. Through him, I can explore courage, loyalty, identity, class, duty and the quiet damage all of those things can do. That, for me, is where the real story lies.