The Key to Rebecca

The Key to Rebecca is a novel by the British author Ken Follett. Published in 1980 by Pan Books (ISBN 0792715381), it was a best-seller that achieved popularity in the United Kingdom and worldwide. The code mentioned in the title is an intended throwback from Follett to Daphne du Maurier's famed suspense novel Rebecca.

Creation, basis and development

While undertaking research for his best-selling novel Eye of the Needle, Follett had discovered the true story of the Nazi spy Johannes Eppler (also known as John W. Eppler or John Eppler) and his involvement in Operation Salaam, a non-fiction account of which was published in 1959. This was to form the basis of Follett's The Key to Rebecca, Eppler being the inspiration behind the character Alex Wolff, and he spent a year writing it, more than the time he took to write his previous novels Eye of the Needle and Triple. This true story was also later to form the basis behind Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning 1992 novel The English Patient and the 1996 Academy Award-winning film of the same name starring Ralph Fiennes. Len Deighton's novel City of Gold is also laid against much of the same background.

Many plot elements in the novel are based on actual historical details.

The real-life Eppler, like Follett's fictional Alex Wolff, had grown up in Egypt after his mother had remarried to a wealthy Egyptian, and thus had a mixed German and Arab cultural heritage, greatly facilitating his ability to penetrate British-ruled Egypt. Like Follett's spy, Eppler was based at a houseboat on the river Nile, got help from a nationalist-inclined belly dancer (Hekmet Fahmy) in his espionage work, and used a system of codes based on Daphne du Maurier's book Rebecca – which provided the title of Follett's book.