Bodo Pfündl asked L.D. Beyer:

What were your inspirations for Terry Fogel's character? I loved him!

L.D. Beyer It may sound strange, but Terry Fogel more or less developed on his own. When I wrote an Eye For An Eye, I had been researching my own ancestry both for personal reasons and for another book I was also working on. From a family history standpoint, I was able to verify family legend that my grandfather was indeed in the IRA, from about 1919 to the truce and treaty in 1922. I read everything I could on the IRA, and “The Troubles,” both history and fiction, covering not only the time my grandfather was a “volunteer” but also the decades that followed, up until the 1990s. Several years ago, I spent time in Limerick and in Dublin, researching my family tree and the IRA. I met with historians, folks at the military archives and two men and a woman at a “Republican” bookstore who still felt bitter about the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland twenty years earlier.

I began to wonder what happened to all those IRA soldiers after the Peace Accords. Certainly some went back to their families and their former lives and tried to pick up the pieces. And some, like I had found during my visit, wished to continue fighting if they could. But some I suspected, offered themselves up as Soldiers of Fortune, serving as mercenaries to the highest bidder.

What I like about Fogel is his personality. He is a terrorist certainly but he’s not driven by ideology, religion, money or the things that drive most radicals. He looks at life as a game and so long as he has the money in his pocket to buy a good Irish whiskey at the end of the day, he is content.
Terry Fogel is definitely a character I would like to see return in a later book.

That other book I was working on, by the way, is an historic thriller set in Ireland during the War for Independence (1919-1921) and is titled The Devil’s Due. I hope to release this over the summer.

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