As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate disclosure.
Historical person
1894–1918
Gavrilo Princip was a Bosnian Serb member of Young Bosnia who opposed Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina. With other conspirators he received weapons and assistance through Serbian nationalist contacts and travelled to Sarajevo in preparation for the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s visit.
After an earlier attack on the motorcade failed, Princip encountered the Archduke’s car after it stopped near him and fired the shots that killed Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. Too young for execution under Austro-Hungarian law, he received a twenty-year prison sentence and died of tuberculosis in 1918.
In Alan Bardos’ The Assassins, Swift’s debts, affair with Lady Elizabeth Smyth and instinct for self-preservation make him an unreliable operative, but his access to the group places him close to Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović and the other men whose plans converge on the Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo with his wife Sophie.
Series
The Johnny Swift Thrillers follow a reckless fictional British diplomat, soldier and intelligence operative through the political and military crises of the First World War. The Assassins places him among the Sarajevo conspirators before the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; The Dardanelles Conspiracy sends him to Constantinople and…
All books in this series
