So, of all the books I have written or co-written, Two Storm Wood might have surprised me the least.

When I was at school, I had two large posters on my wall depicting scenes from the First World War. How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel? That is why I have avoided using any names that might seem artificial. But in Two Storm Wood, authenticity is crucial. In some kinds of story, that does not matter. For me, names that have been chosen to say something relevant about a character only serve to remind me that I am reading a fiction, and that the character is not real. I generally use first names that carry no special connotations, and surnames that are reasonably simple but distinctive from each other. I try not to be too clever with the names of my characters. Helpfully, this puts readers and characters on the same page, as it were. As such, it constantly focuses the readers’ attention on the question of what happened there, and why. This terrible crime, and the events leading up to it, form the dark heart of the story – a vortex into which the characters are inexorably drawn. In the story, Two Storm Wood is where the aftermath of a horrifying atrocity is discovered deep underground. (Yes, there is a real place called Two Storm Wood, but it is not in France!) I actually came across the name in a different place altogether. This, of course, gives the author a lot of leeway, which I have exploited. Because the Western Front ended up playing host to 20,000 miles of trenches, dugouts, tunnels and fortifications, it became necessary for navigational purposes for the army to give them names, most of which had nothing to do with the underlying topography, let alone the local language. Two Storm Wood is the name given to a strongpoint on one of the battlefields of the Somme during the First World War.

My Q&A with the author: How much work does your title do to take readers into the story? Gray was inspired to write his thriller Two Storm Wood when the pull of his grandfather's legacy felt too strong to ignore. Years after his death, Gray came across a cache of trench maps and military documents that his grandfather had kept, and in which he had recorded the events that befell his unit. Gray's grandfather was a captain in the Lancashire Fusiliers and fought through the First World War from start to finish, losing his closest friends along the way. He has tutored in crime writing at City University in London and serves as a director at an award-winning documentary film company, specialising in science and history. Philip Gray studied modern history at Cambridge University, and went on to work as a journalist in Madrid, Rome and Lisbon.

Two storm wood philip gray