For Diana Preston, it was the most

dangerous moment of all her travels. There they were caught in a fierce

Antarctic gale that was sending 70-ft waves crashing over the bows of their small

vessel. The waves would freeze almost instantly, causing the ship to almost keel over and send the life-rafts crashing overboard. “I thought about a paragraph in the paper at home about this ship that had been lost and that if we hadn’t gone in for writing, we would have been safe at home in England,” she says.

They survived their Antarctic gale and finally made it to the White Continent on a third

attempt. That was, unfortunately, long after they had finished their book on Captain Robert Scott and his ill-fated expedition to the Continent, but it was a trip they felt duty-bound to make. “We eventually landed by helicopter outside Scott and Shackleton’s huts. And we saw it in conditions which the original explorers couldn’t have imagined — like a warm day in the Mediterranean,” recalls Diana with a wry smile.

The Prestons — Diana and her husband

Michael — who flees at the sight of interviewers and refuses to come down for a photo shoot —are the writing team that has putting out five books on the Moghuls under the impressive-sounding name, Alex Rutherford. They are

currently still finishing the fifth book.

The couple has an unerring eye for a cracking good yarn and in the last 15 years they’ve travelled to the edges of the earth in search of tales of

derring-do and larger-than-life adventure. They’ve braved storms and icebergs and they’ve climbed Mt Kilimanjaro and journeyed to the Ferghana Valley in Kyrgyzstan to study the land from where Babur, the founder of the Moghul Empire, started out as a minor chieftain of a postage stamp-sized kingdom.

In the last few weeks they’ve been retracing their steps to Burhanpur in Madhya Pradesh, the launch pad for many Moghul campaigns, and to study the contours of the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur. The reason is they’ve just signed up to add an extra volume to their Moghul quintet. Says Diana: “The question I’ve had from readers above all others is why aren’t you going to write about Aurangzeb? Why are you stopping with the death of Shah Jahan?”

You could say the Prestons swapped a life of

sedate predictability for one of swashbuckling modern-day adventure. They both chucked up safe civil service jobs for a perilous existence as writers living by their wits and their pens. And they’ve turned their attention to an incredible range of subjects from Scott of the Antarctic to the sinking of the Lusitania in World War I and even the Boxer Rebellion which shook China at the turn of the 20th century.

They kicked off their writing career by retelling the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie, one of the great misguided but romantic figures of British history.

Diana’s mother’s family had been supporters of the Prince and they had a stack of family letters about the ill-fated Pretender to the Hanoverian throne.

From there, it went on to Scott of the Antarctic and with him they got lucky, Diana says, when the book was favourably reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement and that caught the attention of a US publisher. From that point, the couple has never looked back.

India was one of the first distant

destinations they travelled to back in the late ’70s and it was a country that has always been a favourite with

Michael. Says Diana: “It was the first far-flung place we came to after our marriage. Michael had read all about

it when he was growing up in the north of England. It seemed to him such a richly textured place.” Diana reckons they’ve come to India 15 times and spent nearly two years of their lives here.

So, perhaps it was hardly surprising when they turned their attention to the Taj Mahal and the great love story behind it. The result was A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal. And from there it was a short jump to the magnificent Moghuls themselves —but there was one big difference this time. After nine non-fiction books, the Prestons were ready to make the leap to fiction.

So far, they’ve been

turning out a book a year but that’s likely to slow down now they’re reaching the reign of Aurangzeb which is slightly more uncharted territory. Diana figures they will need at least 18 to 24 months just for research. She says: “It’s a big, big story and he lives a long time into the early 18th century.”

How do two people sit down together and write one book after another? For the Prestons, there are no fixed rules about who does what. They both read all the material and make changes to the manuscript. Says Diana: “Mike does a lot of the main battle scenes. I do quite a lot of the scenes with the dialogue. But we’re flexible.”

Adds Diana: “There’s a kind of synergy in it. We’ve been married a very long time and we know each other very well. When I write something I know what he’s going to say.”

What’s next for the Prestons? For now, they aren’t looking beyond the sixth book of what should have been a quintet. But it’s a safe bet that, in the coming years, their appetite for adventure could take them to any corner of the globe. u