Goodreads asked Jason Hewitt:

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

Jason Hewitt THE DYNAMITE ROOM really was the result of many interests simultaneously coming together. I have a History and English degree and I knew I wanted to write a World War II novel, but it is a well-trampled period for novelists and so I wanted to find a new and interesting angle. I toyed with the idea of an alternative history – what if the Germans had successfully invaded Britain in 1940? Then, in a public library I stumbled across a book called Where the Eagle Landed by Peter Haining. It is a book that looks into some of the mysteries around the German invasion. In it I found a story about German bodies in the summer of 1940 being washed up on Shingle Street beach in Suffolk and the fear the locals had that some were still alive and loose in the Suffolk countryside. That was it. I had it. This was the start of the story. I wanted to keep the characters enclosed in one space so that I could build a claustrophobic tension. The house, Greyfriars, came from my love of gothic horror. It is a house that is haunted but not in a traditional sense. I then needed to put someone else in the house with my Nazi officer – the most unlikely person for him to be ‘trapped’ with. From that eleven-year old Lydia was born.

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