There’s always a risk, when an author writes a book about how his book was written, that the story might get lost in detail that’s fascinating only to the author. So it is with Staying Alive, the story of Rosie Quarry, the real live person behind the Rosie Ewing series of books by British author Alexander Fullerton.

Fullerton is about the same age as my father, which makes him a teenager for most of World War II. There’s very little about him on the web, but Fantastic Fiction‘ tells me that he was ‘a cadet at Dartmouth at the age of thirteen and went to sea serving first in the battleship Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean’. His first novel Surface was published in 1953 and became a bestseller, and he went on to establish himself as a prolific author of books with wartime themes.

He started his Rosie Ewing series in 1995, producing four novels about her adventures as a secret agent in France after Paris fell to the Germans in 1940. These were based on research so it must have been a bit of a shock when the real Rosie wrote to him and offered to tell him the story of her first mission. Staying Alive (2006) is Fullerton’s record of how they met and talked over a series of days in Paris, interwoven with the story of that mission.

The trouble is, the story of the mission is really interesting, but the back story is clumsily handled and doesn’t really earn its place in the book until the very end.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2010/02/19/staying-alive-by-alexander-fullerton/ ( )