In Warrior, Matthew Hervey finds himself back in South Africa. What drew you to South Africa, and what in particular made you think that this was a place where you could situate two novels?
You have to march towards the sound of the guns, and in the mid 1820s the sound was in South Africa. The trouble was with the Xhosa and other tribes – generally referred to at the time as Kaffirs – who were cattle rustling for the most part, but it worried the authorities because there had been two bitter ‘Kaffir wars’ within recent memory. In Company of Spears the action is set against this background of frontier skirmishing, in which Hervey and his men run up against a marauding Zulu force at the Umtata River. In fact, whether there were Zulus at the battle of Umtata River is disputed: some historians insist that they were an independent renegade group – all of which I explain in the afternote to the story. But the whole point is that no one really knows for sure because Zulu history at that time was not written down: the Zulu simply had no technique of writing. Partly because of this, I felt that there was unusual latitude to insert Hervey and his men into real history. I had known for many years of the murder of Shaka, and always believed that there was a good story to be written about it, but it was not until I began the real research that I discovered just how rich a vein of adventure there was to tap into. The epic of Pampata’s flight and the climactic battle at her father’s kraal seemed to me to be positively Wagnerian.
The other attraction of South Africa was, of course, that it was a place that Hervey had been to before. The Cape, and Natal – Zululand – is a colourful setting in terms of geography, flora and fauna, without being ‘exotic’ in the Indian sense, and readers may perhaps observe that in neither Company of Spears nor Warrior are Hervey and his associates charged by elephants, hunted by lions, savaged by crocodiles or bitten by snakes, for that would be perilously close to cliché
– if not an excess of it. And so the only ‘encounter’ is with a leopard, in the night, unseen, over in a flash – and the glimpses of other fauna are more mundane, like the weasel, or of birds. It is much the same in Prester John, the first novel set in Africa that I read (at fourteen).

One of the special features of Warrior is its detailed depiction of Zulu history. Was it an easy subject to research?
As I said, Zulu history is oral, and therefore depends on transcriptions of stories retold over the generations. The first of these were recorded in the late nineteenth century, but over the years there have been exploitative accounts – especially lurid – with an eye to commercial success. In 2001, some time before I began researching for my own Hervey Zulu tales – and before I knew about Google and AbeBooks – while killing a couple of hours before the grounds at Glyndebourne opened to admit pre-opera picknickers, I came across two books in a second-hand bookshop in Lewes by two South African historians (the best things frequently happen by accident). First was an account published in 1964 of the life of Dingane, Shaka’s usurper, by Peter Becker, director of Bantu studies at the Institute of South African Languages. Even more apt was the second, however; a biography of Shaka published in 1955 by E A Ritter, the son of a Natal magistrate, who grew up with the Zulu at the turn of the nineteenth century. It seemed to me that here was as faithful an account of Shaka’s life and the habits of the Zulu at that time as any to be found. And then a little later, while browsing the dusty shelves of my favourite library – the Royal Institute of Defence Studies in Whitehall – I came across a 1973 PhD thesis from the university of Port Elizabeth by John Burridge Scott, entitled The British Soldier on the Eastern Cape Frontier 1800-1850. Such things are gifts from the gods! And then when I came to write the books after the obvious ‘field work’, I retired to my study in the Highlands of Scotland – like John Buchan – with pen and paper. Once the first draft was complete, I had intended leaving my Highland fastness
and taking the sleeper train from Aberdeen to London to discuss the technical details of language and one or two other things with the dons at the School of Oriental and African Studies, but the gods suddenly bore me even more gifts. After the day’s writing I had taken to repairing to the fireside comforts (it was midwinter) of the splendid Castle Hotel, former dower house of the dukes of Gordon, up-river on the edge of nearby Huntly. Here I could enjoy a glass or two of decent claret and the Castle’s excellent venison stew. The owner’s wife, who was South African, liked to employ foreigners, and one evening a tall, slim and strikingly handsome black girl in her late twenties brought me my stew. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked hopefully. ‘East London,’ she   replied. I almost held my breath as I asked, ‘Which East London?’ I received the reply I had wanted. ‘So you are Xhosa?’ I asked, clearly with a note of doubt in my voice, for she laughed and said, ‘Yes.’ And thus it was that in the wilds of Banffshire in the depths of winter I had found my Xhosan – and by extension Zulu – interlocutor.

One of the many pleasures of the Hervey novels is re-meeting characters from previous novels. Hervey's friend Fairbrother is particularly interesting in this respect. Is he drawn from history or your imagination?
The master/slave progeny was, of course, always a feature of plantation life, but in the southern states of America, usually within a couple of generations, all trace of the white genes had disappeared. In the Caribbean, however, things were not so cut and dried. When I was a young officer I spent some time in Jamaica training with the Jamaica Regiment, where I met a number of officers with ‘cafe au lait’ complexions – handsome, well-made men who were very much at home in the field. But Fairbrother is an educated man as well as being extraordinarily good in the field. When I was at theological college in the 1960s I met a young curate – Ewen Ratteray – who had trained at Codrington College in Barbados, and I was much taken by his learning and his measured way of speaking (he is now the Right Reverend Ewen Ratteray, Bishop of Bermuda – the first black priest to hold that appointment). Fairbrother is, I suppose, a conflation of the men I met during that formative time. But the important thing is that while he has the attributes of an insider, he is an outsider. So too in many ways is Hervey, and that may account for their mutual attraction. And I think we shall see more of Fairbrother, for close male friendship in the army is tricky: there is always the matter of relative seniority to take into account. Fairbrother’s semi-detachment from the army allows Hervey to speak to him in an entirely different way from that
in which he would be obliged to speak to a fellow officer, who by definition would always be either his subordinate or his superior.

You started writing while still serving in the Army. Did this inform your vision for the Matthew Hervey series?
Let me put it this way: I could not have written the series (and so far there are only ten books – a million words!) without having been a soldier for a substantial period. I have been lucky in my service: I have seen a good deal of service ‘in the field’, as they say, and also in Whitehall. At the Staff College you find that if you can write, your card is marked: officers are needed in the MoD who can write policy papers and briefs for senior officers and officials, but when you are told you are going to the MoD you groan, because there is always the fear that you’ll never be let out. Actually, I enjoyed my first tour in the MoD – as a young major – in particular, for I discovered
that a well-turned phrase could have a powerful effect, and it was here that I undoubtedly honed my writing skills. In addition, during the forty-five minute railway journey home each evening from Waterloo, I re-read Hornblower, and I think, in retrospect, that ‘it all began here’, but without my knowing it. The other advantage of serving in Whitehall, and later in the diplomatic world, is that you are at the interface of politics, policy and practice, and you see human nature at its best and its worst. In a sense, everything I write about I have experienced – except the historical context, of course.