Attic Whispers from The Blue Mountains — Fact or Fiction? #2 [June 2026 Edition]
The photograph that started it all …
Greetings from my attic in the Blue Mountains, my friends!
In the last newsletter, I asked you whether a legendary pearl was lost in a poker game in a Broome hotel in 1969.
Here is your answer.
Fiction. I invented it — but I invented it so carefully, so grounded in the real history of the Kimberley pearl diving industry, that I almost convinced my editor it was true. That is the game I play with every book. The history is so rich, so strange, so full of stories that never made it into the official record, that the line between what happened and what could have happened becomes very thin indeed.
That is exactly where fiction lives.
Now. Before I tell you about Book #1, here is today’s statement. This one comes from the darkest chapter of the twentieth century — and it has never stopped disturbing me.
After World War II, the Vatican operated a network known as “ratlines” that helped Nazi war criminals obtain false identities and escape to South America and Australia. Hundreds of SS officers disappeared this way — some with the knowledge and assistance of senior Church officials. Many lived out their lives in complete comfort, in respectable communities, never charged with anything, never identified. The historical record confirms this. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is documented fact.
Fact or fiction?
The answer is coming in the next newsletter.
But first, let me tell you how The Empress Holds the Key begins.
A bushfire tears through the Blue Mountains. In the wreckage of a burned cottage, a photograph is found.
An SS officer. A large dog. A tortured boy nailed to a tree.
The cottage belongs to one of Australia’s wealthiest and most powerful men. A man with a knighthood. A philanthropic foundation. A reputation built over six decades of public life. A man whose name appears on hospital wings and university chairs and the guest lists of prime ministers.
Jack Rogan is a journalist. He finds the photograph. That is where everything begins.
What follows is a story about the weight of the past — about how far powerful people will go to keep their secrets buried, and about what happens when someone refuses to look away. Jack’s investigation takes him from Sydney to London, from Zurich to the Vatican, from a war crimes tribunal to one of the most spectacular settings I have ever written: a live performance of Verdi’s Aida at the Luxor Temple, on the banks of the Nile, with an audience of thousands and a countdown that has already started.
I will not tell you what Jack finds at the end of that trail. But I will tell you this. When I began researching this book, I kept running into history so dark and so thoroughly documented that I had to put the source material down and walk away. The Swiss banks. The dental gold. The class actions brought by Holocaust survivors and their families decades after the war ended. The meticulous, bureaucratic machinery of theft and murder — and the equally meticulous machinery that helped the people responsible simply disappear afterwards.
None of it invented. All of it real.
I spent months with that material before I wrote a single word of fiction. Because I believe that if you are going to ask readers to follow you into that darkness, you owe them the truth underneath the story. You owe them accuracy. You owe them respect for what actually happened.
That is the contract I make with every Jack Rogan book.
There is a moment early in The Empress Holds the Key where Jack looks at the photograph and understands — not intellectually, but in his bones — that what he is holding is not just evidence of a crime. It is evidence of a life built on one. A life that has been protected, celebrated, and rewarded for sixty years.
He could walk away. Any reasonable person would.
Jack Rogan is not a reasonable person. That is why we love him.
The answer to today’s question is waiting in the next newsletter.
Gabriel
P.S. The Empress Holds the Key is where the series proper begins. If you have already read The Kimberley Secret and you know who Jack is and where he comes from, you are ready. If you are jumping in here for the first time, you will not be lost — but I promise you will want to go back.
Get The Empress Holds the Key here: https://geni.us/TheEmpressHoldstheKey
Or start from the Beginning with — The Kimberley Secret. You can get it here now: https://geni.us/kimberleysecret
STAY SAFE, STAY CHEERFUL, and please STAY IN TOUCH.
Sincerely,
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- The Empress Holds the Key
- The Disappearance of Anna Popov
- The Hidden Genes of Professor K
- Professor K: The Final Quest
- The Curious Case of the Missing Head
- The Lost Symphony
- The Death Mask Murders
- The Stolen Altarpiece
