The Dorset Book Detective

I had the pleasure of speaking to The Dorset Book Detective. Here’s the opening question and for the complete interview, follow the link below!

Please tell me about your books. What drew you towards writing mysteries?

I write historical mysteries set in the 1920s, mainly in Weimar Germany. The main series is the Alaric von Trelow Mysteries and follows a former German intelligence officer after the First World War as he navigates the wild and erratic political, social and even artistic world of the Weimar era, and solves crimes along the way.

The key thing about my books, to me, is that they are very, very accurate to the history. The characters are fictional, but the world, the material, the attitudes, the technology, are all really rigorously researched and usually play a part in the plot events.

When I started writing I wanted to create something purposeful, not just something good to read, but something a reader came away from having learned something. I studied history at Oxford and have always believed that studying the past not only tells us where we’ve come from, but it can educate us about where we might be going. That seemed a really important thing to do, but you have to get people to want to read it, not just write a treatise. I wrote mysteries because I loved them as a genre myself, I’m a natural puzzle-solver, but they are the perfect platform for looking at a world, an environment, a way of thinking. The reader is already there solving a puzzle, trying to figure things out. Hopefully they’ll figure out the lessons and learnings in the history too. I hope so.

Read the entire interview on The Dorset Book Detective

Jason Collings
October 2026