Slapton...

One evening in the summer of 2001 I arrived at Slapton Sands for a celebration. An old friend with a fondness for Devon had rented an entire guest house there to mark his 40th. A group of us played pool and drank beer in a basement room equipped with a vintage stereo system and a still intact set of LPs to match – nothing more recent than The Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Harvest period Neil Young.
Hung-over the following morning, I went for a run along the beach. I saw a black blob a mile away on the shingle. Closer- to it became solid and squat. When it resolved itself into a Sherman Tank, I thought my hangover had taken a hallucinogenic turn.
The tank had been salvaged from the sea bed off the shore. It commemorated a military catastrophe called Operation Tiger. Tiger had been a rehearsal for the D-Day landings and on April 28 1944 had cost the lives of several hundred American troops.
All of this was news to me, despite being reasonably knowledgeable on the subject of World War 2. But Operation Tiger was necessarily clandestine. The whole population of that area of the Devon coast was forcibly evacuated before it was carried out. And the American military establishment never addressed exactly what went wrong to result in such a high casualty toll in what was only, after all, a practice.
I read the inscription on the tank. I looked landward at the gently rising Devon hills in a view unchanged since the Domesday book was compiled and wondered at the farm boys from Omaha and Nebraska who had perished at that spot 50-odd years earlier and decided there and then to write a novel about what happened at Slapton Sands.
My American protagonist, Alice Bourne, investigates the mystery in the summer of 1976. I’d been immersed in a mid-70s soundtrack the night before stumbling on the tank. And that summer was a magical one for me and novelists can of course re-visit lost times and places – it’s one of the perks.
But that was the year of America’s bicentennial. The country had been rocked by Watergate and defeat in Vietnam and was re-evaluating its worth and place in the world. It was not the unequivocal America that had confidently entered World War 2 to fight a morally justified crusade against tyranny.
Alice is a post-grad exchange student at the University of Kent at Canterbury when the novel begins. I was there myself in the endless summer of ’76. I was 19 years old and remember it vividly. Aspects of British life strike her as comical and even absurd. They were – even to me, even then. But the 1970s was a fantastic decade and one of the things the novel tries to do is to celebrate a more innocent and exhilarating time.
I provide what I hope is a plausible account of the Slapton tragedy. But this is a novel, not an investigation of a mystery I don’t believe will ever be conclusively solved.
Why am I talking about it here, now? Because before I became F.G. Cottam and tried to make readers turn the pages with increasing nervousness as the shadows lengthened and the witching hour approached, I wrote four literary novels as Francis Cottam. (F.G. is more sinister-sounding than Francis, don’t you think?) Anyway this was the second of them and it is available for download from today on Bloomsbury Reader. Topicality prompts me to mention it – along with the fact that like most of the F.Gs, its cast of characters features a malevolent ghost. It was originally published in 2004 – before the notion of a book as anything other than a physical entity had ever been thought of.
I hope that some of you take a chance on it. I hope that the story intrigues and entertains you, if you do. And if it moves some among you, I’ll be delighted.