Lee Heide was trained in
Canada as a navigator and flew overseas with Ferry Command in
June, 1941. In England he was assigned to a Beaufort OTU and,
with an RAF crew, trained on torpedo 
operations.
Sent to the Middle East, the crew went by boat to Nigeria, their
aircraft crated in the hold, and then flew across the heart of
Africa, down the Nile River from Khartoum to Cairo, and thence
to Malta. Heide survived the blitz on Malta for a year with heavy
losses to his squadron. Converting to Beaufighters near Tunis,
he and his pilot were shot down and forced to ditch near Elba.
After five days afloat they landed on Elba, evaded German patrols
and escaped to Corsica. After a rest on Cyprus, Heide returned
to operations and was again shot down, this time to be interned
in Turkey. He was awarded the DFC by King George VI at Buckingham
Palace in 1945. Lee's latest novel is TERRORIST COVE.
"A keen observer, Heide spins a good tale..."
Canadian Military History Book Review Supplement, Autumn 2000
Pageonelit.com: Where did you grow up and
was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest
influences and why?
Lee Heide: I grew up in Vancouver. My mother
was a school teacher and I was an only child for seven years
until my brother was born. She concentrated on my reading and
writing and I started school in Grade Two. I have always been
a voracious reader and remember reading in bed with a flashlight
under the covers when I was supposed to be asleep. Over the years
(25 in the RCAF and 15 in high-tech industry) I wrote many articles
and stories. At age 59 I retired to devote full-time to writing.
Pageonelit.com: Why did you write TERRORIST
COVE? Tell us about this book --- How long did it take to
write? Was this book written before or after 9-11?
Lee Heide: I foresaw the events of 11 Sep
- not the W.T.C. of course but I knew that some terrorist act
was coming in the USA. 
So I started research in 1999
and the novel was mostly finished by 11 Sep.
Pageonelit.com: Where did the title TERRORIST
COVE come from?
Lee Heide: I wanted the word 'Terrorist'
in the title and their base in B.C. was in a cove on Van.
Island.
Pageonelit.com: Tell us about your WHISPERING
DEATH MY WARTIME ADVENTURES --- This is a nonfiction book
correct?
Lee Heide: I wrote W.D. for two reasons.
I wanted to leave a legacy for my children and to inform people
about a little-known part of W.W. II. Most people know that Rommel's
Africa Corps was at the gates of Egypt before being pushed back
and eventually defeated by Montgomery's Eighth Army. But they
do NOT know that the RAF torpedo bombers, operating from Malta,
sank 60% of his tankers from Italy leaving him so short of petrol
that he lost the war.
Pageonelit.com: What has been your feedback
from readers and book reviewers? What do they like about the
books?
Lee Heide: The feed-back from W.D. has been
very good, especially the illustrations. The book has 60 illustrations
- pictures,maps,letters,clippings, telegrams etc. You can imagine
their state after about 50 years - bent, discoloured, out of
focus. But 
Trafford use a wholly digital
technique. They were scanned by a digital camera, displayed on
a digital TV Monitor and adjusted for size, clarity. tone and
background until they were as good as, or even better, than the
originals. They were then set in digitized pages and printed
on a digital press. So the book could not have been published
in this form without Trafford's digital approach.
Pageonelit.com: Tell me about your publishing
experience -- The good, the bad and the ugly ...
Lee Heide: The first novel that I wrote
was so bad that I threw it away. So was the second. The third
was accepted by an agent in Toronto but she was unable to sell
it. The next four were published by a company in Toronto. Sales
of three of them were only fair but the fourth - a novel about
a hi-jacked Avro Arrow aircraft - was a sucess and is still in
print.
Pageonelit.com: Are you working on a follow
up? Or something totally different?
Lee Heide: I have almost completed a volume
of short stories that I hopoe will be published in 2002. A novel
about an oil rig in the Pacific Ocean near the Queen Charlotte
Islands in in gestation.
Pageonelit.com: Do you have any hobbies?
What are they? How do they enhance your writing.
Lee Heide: My hobbies are sports - golf
and curling - and I have a large garden, However, I still read
three or four books a week which helps the writing.
**A further word on Traffords digital press. There
is no production run - copies are printed as orders come in,
one or 30 or whatever. So there is no back-log of books and no
inventory. Also, changes and corrections are easy to make because
it is all in software. They claim to be the only publisher in
Canada using this technique.
