Steven Pressfield was born in Trinidad, British West Indies, and has remained an Anglophile all his life, though his first words were spoken with a Scottish accent, thanks to his nurse, Nan, from Inverness. His book The Legend of Bagger Vance was made into a movie directed by Robert Redford and starring Will Smith and Matt Damon; his Gates of Fire is a favorite of U.S. Marines and Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, the city of Sparta in Greece made him an honorary citizen. He lives in Los Angeles.

Mark Thwaite: What gave you the idea for Killing Rommell?

Steven Pressfield: I was researching Alexander the Great, trying to learn about his cavalry tactics. There's practically nothing extant from ancient texts so I did what I sometimes do -- find parallel resources in the modern world. I started reading about Frederick the Great, which took me to Napoleon, which took me to U.S. Civil War cavalry commanders, which took me to J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddell Hart, thence to Heinz Guderian and inevitably to Rommel. Guderian and Rommel, though they were commanders of armoured divisions, used their tanks the way Alexander used his cavalry mounts -- for shock and as weapons to break through enemy defenses, them tear the foe up from the flank and the rear.

Now I was hooked on Rommel. I thought of tackling the subject from a number of different angles, none of which really grabbed me. I couldn't quite connect to Rommel emotionally. Then I stumbled onto the Long Range Desert Group, a British/New Zealand/Rhodesian outfit that fought behind the lines in the desert war against Rommel. Now I was REALLY hooked. I loved those guys. I loved the name, Long Range Desert Group. Like the SAS, these were the very first special forces, crossing thousands of miles of uncharted desert in unarmored Chevy trucks and lend-lease U.S. jeeps, carrying all their own fuel, water, rations and ammunition. Great swashbuckling, fascinating characters. That's where the story came from.

MT: How long did it take you to write your novel? Is this the normal speed for you!?

SP: It took longer than normal -- two and a half years. Most books take me about two years. But this was much harder because of the research.

MT: How much research did you have to do for Killing Rommell? Do you enjoy the research?

SP: A ton. And I do enjoy it. Here was the tricky part: in my other books (which are set so far into the past -- ancient Greece and Macedonia and even farther back), no one can check up on your accuracy, or at least not with any real authority. Who knows how the Spartan phalanx really fought? Who can tell me I'm wrong if I describe an evolution of Alexander's Companion cavalry? But World War II is another story. Not only are so many actual veterans and veterans' wives still alive -- and their memories are vivid and their attachments to accuracy passionate -- but there are thousands and thousands of serious students of World War II, who know much more than I do or ever will. So the fact-checking became a major industry unto itself, not to mention getting it right on language, slang, everyday life, none of which I knew first-hand. I couldn't trust my instincts and I couldn't fake it. It was a helluva task, believe me, and I'm sure I still haven't got it all right.

MT: How do you make sure the history doesn't swamp the narrative?

SP: Sometimes I like the history to swamp the narrative. Part of the reason I love historical books is the history itself. I love historical non-fiction. Memoirs, letters, the real stuff. It's like traveling to another world, only in time instead of place. I love the slang of other eras. I had never heard the phrase "getting a rocket" or "receiving a rocket," meaning being chewed out by a superior for poor performance. I can think of a hundred others that were just great fun for me. I love to load up my stories with physical details. In "Killing Rommel" for example, the interior of tanks. I think it really adds to the illusion of reality for the reader to tell about how the tank commander stands in his turret while the tank is on the move -- how hot it is, how noisy, how his wireless headset works, where he braces his left foot, the rack next to the wireless set in which he carries his Mills bombs, the odd paperbacks he's reading, his cigarettes (and what brands they are) and boiled sweets and looted German chocolates.

As for the narrative, I have such a fear of boring the reader that, if anything, I err on the side of too much story. So I don't worry too much about that.

MT: What was the biggest challenge in writing your book? How did you overcome it?

SP: There were huge challenges to the story, as there always are for all writers. What's this thing about? What is our theme? How is it embodied in the characters and in the action? What is the protagonist's journey? How do the subsidiary characters support and reinforce this for the reader? What's the climax? What does it mean? Why would anybody be interested in this?

But the toughest part, as I said above, was trying to achieve verisimillitude. Making the Englishmen and New Zealanders sound like Englishmen and New Zealanders of that era. Getting the history and the hardware right. The geography of the desert, the equipment, the elements, the timing of battles, the music of the epoch, the concerns that the individual men and women had.

My secret weapon was my dear friend John Milnes of the BBC, who's retired now and living in his ancestral domicile in Bradford. He went over the manuscript with a brutal fine-toothed comb. I received many a rocket from him. I was "on the mat" many times. And I could tell we STILL weren't getting it all right. Roger Field of the Blues and Royals helped enormously, as did the copy editors at Transworld -- and a Yank named Jack Valenti, who founded the Long Range Desert Group Preservation Society in the States. And of course I read a million books and took notes endlessly.

MT: Do you think that novels can help us understand history more clearly?

SP: Absolutely, because the novelist can go where the historian can't. The novelist is free to use his imagination, to fly back in time on the wings of inspiration. He can speculate; he can go out a limb. The great writers of historical fiction (and I include Shakespeare) can make you feel like you're right there.

Why does history as it's taught in school seem so dry? An endless recitation of dates of battles, memorization of the Plantagenet kings and so forth. It's Snoozeville. The novelist can bring it to life, get inside Boudica's head or Disraeli's heart. And he can invent wonderful minor characters who never existed. He can give us Pip or David Copperfield, who are great characters in fiction of ANY KIND, not just historical.

MT: What do you do in your spare time?

SP: Sex and boozing.

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

SP: I wish I knew who my readers were! I get lots of e-mail from soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. I get passionate letters from Greeks and Greek-Americans. Sometimes I'm surprised at how many women read my books (which doesn't seem very female-friendly on the surface.) No, I'm not really sure. I write for myself really. I'm trying to write books that I myself would like to read.

MT: What are you working on now?

SP: I'm superstitious and don't want to give away too much. I'll say this: I'm working on a multi-volume project with continuing characters. It's military and political and it's set in the near future. This one's REALLY going to take some research!

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

SP: Two contemporary (sort of) books I love are Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, which won the (U.S.) National Book Award in 1963 -- and a book by the South African/English author Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower. I also love Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises." These are books I can come back to again and again. And the King James Bible (not any of those dumbed-down modern translations ... I hate them!)

But there is still no comparison, in my view, to the ancients, particularly the Greeks. Homer at the top of the list. Plato, Plutarch, Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, all three of the great tragic dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. I know modern readers find these heavy going, but that's their loss. All of these are absolutely towering writers. I can read them again and again.

And of course Shakespeare. That goes without saying.

MT: What are your top tips for the aspiring writer!?

SP: My tip(s) for aspiring writers is to read my book The War of Art, which is about the craft of writing. It tells everything I know about this crazy profession/art/mystery!

MT: Anything else you would like to say?

SP: Only to state again the value of reading, not just for civilization but for comfort, insight, inspiration. At the end of Killing Rommel, one of the characters gives a eulogy (in the chapel at Magdalen College) for the central character of the book, R. Lawrence Chapman -- called "Chap" -- who is an editor and publisher. At the risk of quoting myself, I'm going to include the whole passage:

Literature was his religion. He believed in the written word, in the soul-to-soul communion between writer and reader that takes place in the silence between the covers of a book. Chap venerated the novel. To him fiction was not merely a medium of amusement or diversion (though he set considerable store by those) but a field upon which the experience of a single individual could be made accessible to others with a power and immediacy that no other medium could reproduce. Chap saw in the novel a universality -- a level pitch upon which disparate human beings, through entering via the imagination into the experiences and consciousnesses of others, could discover a commonality across the divisions of tribe, race, nation, even time. Universality. Empathy. These were the qualities Chap worshipped. These were his gods and, if I may declare it of him, he embodied their virtues in his own person in finer and fuller measure than any man I have ever known.