Operation Archer follows a grieving engineer searching for healing through hypnotherapy, who finds himself time-traveling back to 1940’s Nazi Germany, where he has to stop history from being rewritten. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story? 

The story was inspired by an incident when I was taking part in a hypnotherapy course in Birmingham in December 1998. We were doing a module called Automatic Writing. The idea was that we would all go into trance while holding a pencil over a notepad and our unconscious mind would write down useful information about the issue we had in mind. However, what happened to me was amazing. I wrote an Airman’s Diary from 1944 which extended to several pages. It featured details of being on an RAF base in 1944 and a subsequent Lancaster bombing mission over Berlin. Soon after this another person doing  the course (who was a clairvoyant) carried out past — life regression hypnosis on me and discovered that I had apparently lived before as an RAF bomber pilot in1944. I had died on a mission over Berlin when my Lancaster bomber exploded after being struck by cannon shells from a German night fighter. I never forgot this incident and when I was planning my first novel I thought it would be a suitable inspiration for the plot. I thought :  ‘What would happen if someone was hypnotically regressed back to 1944 and really did travel back in time and then they couldn’t get back to the present day?’ Things developed from there and I added the plot point that the hero Simon is suffering trauma caused by his wife’s death. I also added another story thread in which Simon takes part in a Special Forces raid on a German underground factory. The factory is manufacturing German flying saucers which can travel at 5000 miles an hour and win the war for Germany. Later Simon discovers that these craft can also travel in time and pass into parallel universes. 

What emotional parallels did you see between bomber crews and Simon’s internal state? 

RAF and USAAF bomber crews in WW2 often suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD), now called simply post-traumatic stress, because of the dangers involved in flying a poorly- defended bomber over enemy territory against massive opposition from enemy fighter planes and anti-aircraft fire. Simon is clearly suffering from PTSD  as a result of his wife’s preventable death and he has treatment from a hypnotherapist in Glasgow. So there are indeed parallels between bomber crews and Simon’s mental state. 

Operation Archer moves between historical fiction, sci-fi, and psychological drama. Did you ever worry about fitting into a single genre? 

Operation Archer is a unique book because it straddles several genres. There is World War Two action adventure rather like the Alistair MacLean thriller ‘Where Eagles Dare.’ There is also a time travel element, plus a love story at the core of the book and also Simon’s journey to  recover  from his grief. I was aware that this is a multi-genre book but that is what makes it so interesting. 

Do you see Simon’s journey as healing, redemption, acceptance, or something more ambiguous? 

Simon is on a personal journey during the book. When we consider the plot it could be described as boy meets girl, boy loses girl because she dies , boy meets girl again by going back in time into a parallel universe. Boy then loses girl, but he subsequently returns to the near past and meets girl again. He then manages to save the love of his life from a preventable death but unfortunately this action has tragic consequences for Simon but in the last sentence of the book there is a surprise ending which I think ties up all the loose ends and will leave all readers with a smile on their face. 

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