Attic Whispers from The Blue Mountains — Fact or Fiction? #1 [June 2026 Edition]

Attic Whispers from The Blue Mountains — Fact or Fiction? #1 [June 2026 Edition]

Before Jack Rogan became Jack Rogan

Greetings from my attic in the Blue Mountains!

I have a confession to make.

I have been keeping something from you.

Not deliberately. Not out of any desire to withhold. But because I have been so deep inside the writing — the research, the drafting, the endless revision that every book demands — that I have not stopped long enough to share the thing that drives all of it. The thing that gets me out of bed at five in the morning and keeps me at my desk long after the light has gone from the valley below. 

So today I want to tell you about it. And then I want to invite you into something I have never done before.

Here it is.

Every Jack Rogan book is built on a foundation of real history. Not loosely inspired by. Not vaguely reminiscent of. Built on. The historical facts in these novels are documented, verified, and preserved in archives, court records, academic journals, and the memories of people who were there. I research obsessively. I visit the locations. I read the primary sources. I sit with historians, scientists, and survivors until I understand not just what happened, but why it still matters today. And then I ask the question that history always leaves open: what if the story behind the story is even bigger than anyone knows? 

That question is where every Jack Rogan book begins.

Nine books. Five novellas. More than five thousand pages of story set across four continents, six centuries, and more historical rabbit holes than I care to count. The Romanov execution. The Panchen Lama abduction. The Vatican ratlines. The Ghent Altarpiece theft. The Muramasa curse. The Treblinka postal network. The Kimberley resistance fighter whose skull spent several decades in England before coming home. The junk DNA that may not be junk at all. 

Every one of those things is real.

And I have never properly shown you the seam between what I invented and what I found. 

Until now.

Starting today, I am doing something I have never done before. Over the coming weeks, I am going to take you behind each book and each novella in the Jack Rogan Mysteries — one at a time, in the order I recommend you read them, from The Kimberley Secret all the way through to the brand-new Book #9 releasing later this year. 

For each title, I will give you one statement. Sometimes it will be a historical fact so extraordinary that it reads like pure invention. Sometimes it will be something I created that feels so grounded in historical logic that it could easily be true. Your job is to decide which is which. 

Then, in the following newsletter, I will reveal the answer. And I will pull back the curtain on the real history beneath the story — the research that shaped it, the places I visited, the documents I read, the moments when the truth turned out to be stranger, darker, and more astonishing than anything I could have imagined. 

Think of it as a guided tour through the engine room of the series. The part readers never usually see.

Some of you have read every book. Some of you are just starting. Some of you have been meaning to begin for years and have not yet found the right moment. This is for all of you. Each instalment will stand alone. Each one will give you something real — a piece of history, a window into the research, a reason to look at the world a little differently.

And if it does its job properly, it will also make you want to read the book. 

That is my hope, anyway.

So. Let us begin. Not with Book #1 — but with the story that comes before it. The story I had to write before anything else made sense. 

I have deliberately placed The Kimberley Secret first in the reading sequence. It introduces Jack Rogan at a moment of profound personal discovery — a moment that shapes everything that follows. Start here. The series will make more sense for it.