Chris Hucker

Chris has had a variety of professions and occupations. At 16, he joined the Metropolitan Police Cadets, was attached to a murder squad for six months before becoming a fully-fledged police officer. After eight years in the force at Chelsea Police Station, Chris left to take a law degree at Leicester University, then train as a solicitor. There was a period between leaving the police and taking up a place at university, where he worked as an assistant to the Company Secretary of British Aircraft Corporation, Guided Weapons Division. Once trained as a solicitor, he found that office work did not suit him, and so he went into the contract security industry, reaching the senior executive level. A brief period was spent as a freelance security trainer and advisor before he veered off at a tangent into the world of computer graphics, where he founded a successful slide presentation and imaging company in central London. This was in the days of 35mm slides and before everyone had PowerPoint on their laptops.

12 years later, and for reasons too complicated to explain, Chris decided to go into the ministry. His training included a three-year Theology degree at Oxford University before accepting an internship at a church in America for a year. Chris was ordained into the United Church of Christ, USA, after the internship and served churches in Illinois and Wisconsin for 16 years. During that time, he earned a Doctorate at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey.

Chris has been told that he has led a full and varied life and that he should take it easy in retirement. That has so far not happened. He returned to the UK to retire eight years ago and has settled into a rural existence living in a converted hop barn in Herefordshire. He researches topics for talks at community groups such as Probus and u3a meetings. He has a solid tried and tested portfolio of mainly military subjects that include HMS Victory, The Special Operations Executive, The Nazi Occupation of Denmark and Danish Resistance, Operation Jericho (the Raid on Amien Prison), Operation Carthage (the bombing of the Gestapo HQ in Copenhagen, Denmark), and Cahokia, Illinois: Its history since the Settlers and what came before with its Mounds.

In the early days of walking the beat in Chelsea as a police officer, Chris attended the sudden death of a woman found in the bath. There was nothing suspicious about the death, but the identity of the deceased was not immediately apparent. A search of the flat not only led to the discovery of her passport but also to an unusual medal. It was not a recognisable medal, and it was of no interest in the subsequent coroner's inquest. However, the incident and the medal stuck in Chris’s memory and have led to the plot of Holga’s Elephant. A young man finds himself working on his first case as an investigative journalist to unravel the secrecy over the identity of a dead woman. The trail leads the reporter to discover that the woman was a Danish Resistance leader during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. However, she was believed to have died in a Nazi prison in Germany in 1944. How could she have died in 1944 when she was found dead in the bath at a Chelsea flat in 1971? The story weaves SOE and SIS into the plot that revolves around the escape of Danish Jews to Sweden and includes a suggestion of why the RAF bombed the Gestapo HQ in Copenhagen just months before the end of the War.

Chris has been married to Sue for over 50 years, and together, they have two children and five grandchildren.