Goodreads asked Keely Hutton:

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

Keely Hutton The idea for my middle grade historical fiction novel, SECRET SOLDIERS, started with some confusion while I was binge-watching the BBC show Peaky Blinders three years ago. The main character, Tommy Shelby, suffers from PTSD due to his time as a soldier in WW1. My editor and I had agreed that my next book should be in the same vein as my debut novel SOLDIER BOY, so I’d been researching wars and child soldiers. I hadn’t found anything that really grabbed my attention until I watched Tommy Shelby’s flashbacks, which showed him fighting in tunnels. A quick Google search revealed that thousands of sappers and miners tunneled beneath the battlefields of the Great War to undermine the enemy’s position and break the brutal stalemate of trench warfare. Fascinated, I researched whether any child soldiers fought in WW1 and was shocked to discover that over a quarter of a million underage British boys lied about their ages to join the war. When I learned that many of those young soldiers were used as beasts of burden on and under the battlefields, I knew I had found my next story and began researching and writing SECRET SOLDIERS.

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