Thrilling History with James Becker, author of THE LOST TREASURE OF THE TEMPLARS

James Becker, author of THE LOST TREASURE OF THE TEMPLARS and the bestselling thrillers of the Chris Bronson series, joins Fresh Fiction to discuss his fascination with history, his current release, and what his fans can look forward to in the future.

Jen: Hi, James. Thank you for joining us at Fresh Fiction. The historical details in THE LOST TREASURE OF THE TEMPLARS, and all your novels for that matter, are always crucial to the plot and the telling of the story. Events of the past still shape and determine the actions of people today. What is the importance of history to you and why does it fascinate you?

James: I studied history – mediaeval history, in fact – at school (quite a while ago!), and I've always had a keen interest in this period in particular, though all history fascinates me. I've always believed that you cannot properly understand any country or city unless you know where it came from, how it developed and the kind of people who lived there in the past. Ultimately, cities and countries are just landscapes interspersed by collections of buildings: it's the citizens, numbered among both the living and the dead, who provide the spark of life and give a location its enduring character.

History is important. The writer F W Holiday said that the future is the past coming in through a new door, and that's absolutely true. There is little that is truly new in human relations and conduct, and you can find parallels between the events of today and an enormous number of historical examples, parallels that would hopefully allow the mistakes of the past to be avoided in the present. The down side of that expectation is that it's also true that the one thing human beings learn from history is that human beings never learn from history!

Jen: Ancient orders and secret societies make for thrilling stories, and the Knights Templar are surrounded by secrets and mystery. Can you tell us an interesting fact you learned that didn’t make it into the book or maybe give us a hint at what secrets may still be revealed in the second book of this new trilogy?

James: The second book explores the following in some detail.

It's almost certain that the 'secret' orders issued by Philip the Fair of France for the Templars to be arrested en masse in 1307 were actually known about by the Order well in advance. The most compelling evidence for this is that, despite the huge size and enormous assets of the Templars – they were far more wealthy than most European nations at the time – when the French troops seized their commanderies throughout France they found almost no treasure and only a skeleton staff in the Templar buildings.

The obvious implication is that, with no way of resisting the French troops – the Templars were based in locations within France, surrounded by enemy forces, so their buildings could never have withstood prolonged sieges – the Order had done its best to protect both its assets and its members.

That obviously begs the question: where did the knights and their treasure end up? There's probably more than one answer to this. Certainly it's likely that they would have used their large fleet of ships to transport their wealth to countries likely to welcome them, which would have included Britain and Portugal, and there's a persistent rumour that whatever lies hidden at the bottom of the Money Pit on Oak Island in Nova Scotia is actually the bulk of the Templar hoard.

All the excavations so far conducted at this location have failed to recover anything, and there seems no prospect of this situation changing in the near future, so whether or not there's any truth in this story may never be proven. What is certain is that whoever constructed this hiding place possessed a very high degree of engineering ability – it's a long way from just being a deep hole in the ground – and the Templars certainly had this level of skill, as an inspection of any of their surviving buildings would prove.

However, a rather more believable location for the fate of at least some of the Templar treasure is a lot closer to their original homeland of France.

An interesting event occurred near what is now the St Gotthard Pass in Switzerland in November 1315. A large, professionally-trained and well- equipped Habsburg Austrian army was not just defeated but completely routed by a rag- tag collection of farmers and peasants who were out-numbered about ten to one. Their surprising victory was due to superior military tactics and utter ruthlessness, and was allegedly coordinated by a handful of white knights – meaning knights who were independent and owed allegiance to no lord or ruler – who had tutored and instructed the peasant army.

The identity of these knights has never been confirmed but the date, only eight years after the mass arrests of the Templars, is obviously significant. If members of the Knights Templar were looking for a new home, the lawless cantons of the fledgling Switzerland – a country that technically still does not exist as a nation even today, being simply a confederation of separate cantons – would probably have been a good choice.

The Templars could have exchanged their military prowess and ability – and they were without question the best-trained and equipped troops in the world in those days – for the right to settle in the area. This arrangement would have benefitted both parties, the ill-equipped local troops acquiring a highly professional fighting force to assist and defend them, while the Templars would have been out of reach of any retribution from the French.

So is there any evidence that this is what happened? Yes, unquestionably. First, the flag of Switzerland bears more than a casual relationship to the croix pattée, one of the most enduring of the Templar symbols. That, however, could simply be explained away as coincidence.

Much more difficult to explain is the fact that, within a very short time indeed, the untutored and uneducated peasants who occupied the high pastures of Switzerland introduced a unified banking system that grew to dominate Europe, as it still does, in fact. This banking system was essentially indistinguishable from that operated across Europe and the Mediterranean by the Knights Templar, the system they had developed over the previous two centuries. There is no obvious way that a society with a subsistence agricultural economy could have changed its fortunes so dramatically in such a short time without both expert help and financial muscle. And quite literally the only people that could have provided this kind of help, because nobody else in Europe possessed the required level of wealth, experience and knowledge, were the Templars.

Jen: Robin and David make an extraordinary team, and for being new acquaintances at the beginning of the story, they’re attuned to each other almost immediately. It’s not only attraction, but a partnership that helps them survive. Do you think this instant connection comes from their extraordinary circumstances or would Robin and David have found each other eventually?

James: I'd like to think that if they had met, they would have got on well together, but because they moved in very different circles, without the triggering event at the beginning of this book it's unlikely they would ever have encountered each other. Oddly enough, in real life, unusual events (though perhaps not quite so unusual as the event described in this book!) do have a habit of throwing people together and can result in long-term relationships. We met a couple who are now very good friends in a lift in a department store in Andorra and exchanged nothing more than a friendly greeting. Everything else in our relationship grew from that single sentence. And I met my wife as a direct result of a letter published by a third party in a magazine on the other side of the world.

It's also the case that adversity tends to make people reveal their true colours very quickly, and in this book the problems and dangers the two of them face more or less ensure that they will establish a relationship of some sort. As it turns out, these two individuals are complementary in their characters and abilities, and the circumstances in which they find themselves very quickly develop their trust and confidence in each other. They make a good team, and they will develop further in the following two books.

Jen: What book is currently on your nightstand?

James: The current book is a hardback copy of IN SEARCH OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR by Simon Brighton. This a very brief history of the Knights Templar, but more importantly a detailed survey of all the sites in the United Kingdom associated with the Order. I'm reading this because I have a real interest in the Templars and read a lot about them, but more importantly because I have two more books to write about the Order, and I'm looking for suitable locations to set certain scenes, especially in the third book, which will end somewhere in Great Britain.

My normal reading matter – and I usually end up reading several books concurrently – tends to comprise both non-fiction works related to whatever I'm working on at the time, and novels in the same broad genres as the stuff I write, which normally means thrillers. So in addition to the Templar book, I'm also reading GONE TOMORROW by Lee Child and THE OVERLOOK by Michael Connelly, as well as reading THE SEVEN STARS by Simon Leighton-Porter on my Kindle.

Jen: THE LOST TREASURE OF THE TEMPLARS is only the beginning for Robin and David. Are you working on the next book in this series or will we get to see more of Chris Bronson in the future?

James: Yes, this novel is the first book of a trilogy, and I'm currently writing the second novel, working title The Archive of the Damned. This which will pick up the story where THE LOST TREASURE OF THE TEMPLARS left off, and the final book, The Brotherhood of the Skull, will complete the trilogy.

So far, I haven't given very much thought to Robin Jessop and David Mallory extending their adventurous relationship beyond these three books, but that's something I'll certainly be looking at a bit later.

Interestingly, Chris Bronson and Angela Lewis will be appearing again in print, because as well as writing these three books for Signet in the USA I've also written an entirely new novel about the Templars for Transworld in the UK. This will be entitled THE TEMPLAR HERESY, and will probably be published towards the end of 2015 or early next year. Although the subject matter is broadly the same, this book has an entirely different plot to the trilogy and offers a different slant on the Knights Templar, and in particular on one specific aspect of their belief system. This novel, like all the others featuring these two protagonists, is a complete story in itself.

Jen: Thank you so much for sharing your stories and you passion for history with us!

About James Becker

James Becker spent over twenty years in the Royal Navy's Fleet Air arm and served during Falklands War . Throughout his career he has been involved in covert operations in many of the world's hotspots; places like Yemen, Northern Ireland and Russia. He is an accomplished combat pistol shot and has an abiding interest in ancient and medieval history.

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About THE LOST TREASURE OF THE TEMPLARS

The national bestselling author of The Lost Testament returns in a thrilling new novel that uncovers the powerful secrets of the Knight Templar — and a conspiracy too shocking to believe.

In a quiet English seaside town, antiquarian bookseller Robin Jessop has acquired an odd medieval volume. What appears to be a book isn’t a book at all, but a cleverly disguised safe, in which she finds a single rolled parchment, written in code.

For encryption expert David Mallory, the text is impenetrable. Until an invaluable clue opens the door to a mystery, and a conspiracy, stretching back seven centuries, when the most powerful man in Europe declared war on the most powerful clan, the Knights Templar.

Now, Jessop and Mallory find themselves on a global hunt for an unsurpassed treasure and this much closer to the keys to secrets that could change history, topple an empire, and bury them both alive. Because they’re not only the hunters. They’re also the hunted.