Guy Butler’s Novels of Courage and Daring Span the Nazis’ Third—and Fourth—Reichs!

My career as an architect has taken me to over forty countries, but it was family history that inspired me to write the first book in the Spider Trilogy, Balls of Leather and Steel.   I grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. My father Malcolm had an amazing career in England as a professional soccer player. During World War II, Malcolm signed up for the Royal Air Force and in 1943, he was shot down over Yugoslavia and captured by the Nazis, who wanted to use him in propaganda to demoralize the British public. The local Partizani resistance broke into the POW camp and spirited my father out, but no one else. This launched a fevered hunt with my Dad as the prize pawn. I wanted to write an historical thriller based on Malcolm, but needed a character to play off his wealthy, cosseted background. My father-in-law Chester was born in Germany. He was orphaned and left in the custody of his Polish stepmother just before the war. She also had a son, and to protect him, she swapped the boys’ birth certificates. The Nazis believed Chez was the Polish child and threw him into their labor camps, from which he escaped. He was perfect for the role. In Balls, I had Chez, a Polish resistance fighter known as the Spider, lead the raid that rescued Malcolm from the POW camp. Numerous friends who read the first draft were intrigued by the Spider, so I left a few unanswered questions at the end of Balls of Leather and Steel. This let me launch directly into the second book, A Gordian Web, in which the Spider is the central character. The last book of the trilogy, The Final Fandango, is now completed and ties up all the loose ends. The three books total almost a thousand pages and took four years to write. At the outset I could never have dreamed of the immense satisfaction this venture has given me.