Goodreads asked Stephen Holgate:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Stephen Holgate I worked with the American Embassy in Rabat a number of years ago and greatly enjoyed living in Morocco, with its wonderful balance of the familiar and the exotic. I found that Casablanca is nothing like the movie Casablanca, but Tangier is. To this day, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble very quickly in Tangier. Part of the inspiration for my story comes from people I met in Tangier. I met a private detective who had come to Tangier to help a family defend its good name after it was accused of having helped the Nazis in World War II. I also met a retired agent of the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, a charming man on whom I partially based one of the characters in the book. He told me how, during the war, Tangier was an open city, controlled by no central government, making it a perfect nest for spies and smugglers and other dubious characters. Another source of my story came from a friend who described how the family of a diplomatic colleague of ours had been torn apart during the war. The colleague's mother, my friend told me, had come to the United States with her young son early in the war, assuming her husband, a French diplomat would soon join them. He never did. It was an intriguing story and the basis of much of the book. The only drawback, I later found, was that the story was totally untrue. These elements rolled around in my mind for several years, changed shape and curled around each other until I had the story I've set down. So, Tangier, is a blend of misremembered stories, untruths and bits of conversation imperfectly recalled. Maybe that's what fiction has always been.

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