A HATHERLEIGH man's memoirs, which were turned into a book five years after his death, is to go on sale in America.
'A Willingness to Die' is about the life of Battle of Britain pilot Brian Kingcome and has sold extremely well in Hatherleigh since its publication .
Gloucestershire-based Tempus Publishing are set to launch the book in America where works of this nature are very popular.
Mr Kingcome died in 1994 before completing his story but it was his wife's ambition to see the project through and get it published.
'I nagged him into writing his memoirs,' she said. 'He was one of the few Battle of Britain pilots still alive and I felt it was really important that his story was published.'
A friend of the couple, who had contacts in the publishing industry, gave Mrs Kingcome the name of the editor of Tempus Publishing Ltd, Peter Ford, and after two years of working together on the book, it was finally released last year.
'We incorporated a few anecdotes from various people and added an introduction, but 98 per cent of the book was written by my husband,' said Mrs Kingcome.
'He wrote in a non-chronological order and we had to make a beginning and an end.'
As Acting Commanding Officer of No.92 Squadron, Mr Kingcome, a Devonian, led his men on over 60 operations achieving the highest success rate of any squadron in the heroic weeks of the Battle of Britain.
At the age of 25 he became one of the youngest group captains in the Royal Air Force.
Mrs Kingcome said there would have been much more in the book had her husband lived to write about his other ventures after he was invalided from the RAF in the 1950s.
He dabbled in the film industry mixing with the likes of David Niven and Gregory Peck and was a partner in a chauffeur-driven car hire business before setting up Kingcome Sofas, which is still in existence today at Newton Abbot.
Mrs Kingcome said she would like to think her husband would have been very pleased with the book.
'In the back of his mind Kingcome was writing his memoirs for his family but I have taken it on from there,' she said.
'Two shops in Hatherleigh are on their third batch of books and I have received fan mail from people who think it is really well written.'
She believed it would do well in America because Americans were fascinated with anything to do with the Second World War.
'It is not a gung ho type of book but a very nice memoir from a very nice, gentle, graceful man with an amazing dry wit.'
'A Willingness to Die' can be purchased from Greenhills Newsagents and Salar Gallery in Hatherleigh.