Novel analysis reveals playful side of Alan Turing

Dillon said she believed the story was a direct fictionalisation of a sexual encounter in the 1950s which led to Turing’s arrest.

Turing was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 and forced by authorities to take hormones.

He took his own life in June 1954.

Turing was pardoned in 2013 and four years later, the government announced gay and bisexual men convicted of now-abolished sexual offences in England and Wales would also receive posthumous pardons under what was known as Turing’s Law.

“Turing died when he was only 41, and in those years running up to his death, he was trying to understand himself and his world,” Dillon added.

“Literature offered him a really powerful way of doing that.

“This was the moment when he really felt a release, a chance to be more creative and playful.”

Dillon also found that Turing copied the style of a gay novel, Hemlock And After, by fellow Bletchley Park veteran Angus Wilson.

She argued it was the novel Turing needed to read at a pivotal moment in his life, adding that it must have been a “powerful moment for Turing amid so much trauma”.

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