Attic Whispers from The Blue Mountains — Fact or Fiction? #4 [July 2026 Edition]

The elusive secret buried in the human DNA

Greetings from my attic in the Blue Mountains!

In the last newsletter, I asked you whether a Bunuba resistance fighter named Jandamarra was killed in the Kimberley in 1897, and whether his skull was held in England for 113 years before being repatriated to Australia.

Here is your answer:

Fact. Every detail of it. Jandamarra was a real man — a tracker, a fighter, a figure of extraordinary courage and complexity — and his story is one of the most remarkable in Australian history. He was killed at Tunnel Creek on 1 April 1897. His skull was removed and sent to England, where it remained for over a century. It was repatriated to the Bunuba people in 2010. The colonial authorities who could not defeat him in the field settled, in the end, for taking his head.

I did not invent Jandamarra. I could not have. No imagination is equal to what actually happened to him.

In The Disappearance of Anna Popov, Jandamarra appears as a presence — a man still working out his unfinished business from the other side of death. I described him that way because his story did not end at Tunnel Creek. It is still being told.

This is one of the reasons I keep writing historical fiction. The history keeps showing me things about human nature that I could not have invented.

Now. Before I tell you about Book #3, here is today’s statement. This one moves from the darkest chapter of the twentieth century into the laboratory — into the frontier of science where the next great battle over human life is already being fought.

Attic Whispers from The Blue Mountains — Fact or Fiction? #3 [July 2026 Edition]

    The lost girl and the hidden bracelet

Greetings from my attic in the Blue Mountains!

In the last newsletter, I asked you whether the Vatican operated a network that helped Nazi war criminals escape to South America and Australia after the war.

Here is your answer:

Fact. Every word of it.

The ratlines are one of the most thoroughly documented and least discussed chapters of the twentieth century. Senior Church officials were involved. False identities were provided. Men who had overseen mass murder lived out comfortable lives in Sydney, Buenos Aires, and dozens of other cities, their pasts buried under new names and new respectability. The historical record is unambiguous. The Swiss banks, the forged documents, the complicit institutions — all of it confirmed by decades of investigative journalism, declassified intelligence files, and the painstaking work of Holocaust researchers.

I did not invent any of it for The Empress Holds the Key. I simply followed the trail where it led.

That is the thing about this series. The history keeps turning out to be worse than the fiction.

Now. Before I tell you about Book #2, here is today’s statement. This one comes from the Australian outback — from a chapter of history that most Australians have never been taught.

In the 1890s, a young Bunuba man named Jandamarra led a guerrilla resistance campaign against colonial settlement in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. He was a tracker for the police, then turned against them, freeing Aboriginal prisoners and fighting a three-year campaign across the Napier Range that the colonial authorities could not suppress. He was eventually killed at Tunnel Creek in 1897. His skull was removed from his body, sent to England, and held there for decades before being repatriated to Australia in many years later.

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.

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.