A former regional press reporter who tried and failed to stand-up what would have been the scoop of the century has written a novel about it instead.

Geoffrey Seed worked on the Lincolnshire Free Press, the Peterborough Evening Telegraph and the Express and Star, Wolverhampton, before embarking on a career in national newspapers and TV.

Years ago, over supper with a retired diplomat, he heard the story of a Holocaust survivor who had hunted down several old Nazis in the 1950s and ‘arranged’ what appeared to be suicides or accidental deaths.

Although he tracked down the diplomat’s original source and interviewed him, he was unable to persuade him to go on the record, and no independent corroboration of the story could be found.

Now Geoffrey has published a new novel, A Place of Strangers, based loosely on the retired diplomat’s tantalising tip-off.

As he himself admits: “Those that can, write the copy….those that can’t, write a novel about it.

“I did, of course, interview the diplomat’s original source. If what he’d admitted to the diplomat was true, this frail but flint-hard man had got away with murder.

“He wasn’t about to roll over for me. However, when we talked about one particular ‘suicide,’ his remarks took on slightly more detail and were delivered with such quiet intensity it was tempting to think he might actually have been present when it took place.”

However Geoffrey said the source then clammed-up, saying ‘You’ll not draw me inch by inch into telling you anything I couldn’t have made up’.

“There was never the remotest chance of him going on camera for me or being quoted in a newspaper piece,” he added.

“Some acts of revenge were carried out by Jewish survivors immediately after the war and I made a small contribution to a documentary about this. But frustratingly, I’d not had the wit to dig out what might have been an even more telling piece of secret history and those who allegedly knew about it have since gone to their graves.

“So I’ve compromised – top-spun my research, stitched it into other bits of whimsy from a journeyman’s life and called it literary fiction. But, no…I will not be naming any of the real people I met along the way.”