Blog Archives
Jack & Will
D.E. Ring’s Jack & Will, the fourth volume in The Scandalous Memoirs of General John Torrance, is a historical espionage novel set amid the European partition of East Africa. Narrated by the older Jack Torrance as a record of his intelligence work in the 1880s, the novel begins with his escape from the fallen city of Khartoum and follows him into Zanzibar, the German and British competition for influence, and the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Its extensive cast includes diplomats, monarchs, soldiers, merchants, missionaries, and spies, many drawn from history. Jack moves among them as an observer, interpreter, servant, and occasional strategist, giving the political contest an immediate human perspective.
The memoir form suits Jack’s candid, dryly humorous voice. He’s perceptive about vanity and institutional failure, but his self-awareness prevents his judgments from becoming merely cynical. Ring combines political conversation with scenes of physical danger, from a cyclone in the Indian Ocean to the concluding operation at Pangani. The dialogue is especially effective at revealing how governments and commercial interests convert ambition into policy. Historical exposition is substantial, and the middle portion sometimes advances through long conversations, but those exchanges establish the competing motives behind the action and make the eventual violence feel consequential.
At the book’s center is the moral cost of imperial expansion. Treaties are written in languages local rulers can’t read, commerce provides the rationale for occupation, and public narratives turn failure into heroism. Ring also gives meaningful attention to Africans who understand the political transformation around them, including Pera Dandji, Tippu Tib, Nuru, and Hasani. Tippu Tib’s observation, “Our world is over. We play this game for ourselves alone,” captures the novel’s sense of people adapting to decisions imposed from elsewhere. Jack’s friendship with the German intelligence officer Wilfried Tapken adds another dimension: they remain loyal to their countries while recognizing that facts, restraint, and personal trust can matter more than national posturing.
The title gathers several relationships around Jack, particularly those involving Prince Wilhelm, Wilfried Tapken, and William Stairs. Each man represents a different response to power and experience. Stairs provides the most affecting thread, returning from the jungle hardened, bereaved, and estranged from the hopeful young cadet Jack once knew. Jack’s description of his own moral compass, “The ten-year-old Jack. The best I ever was,” gives their reunion its emotional weight. Jack & Will is an intelligent, humane historical adventure whose wit, political detail, and reflective first-person voice support a serious examination of loyalty, identity, and the stories nations tell about conquest.
Pages: 293 | ASIN : B0H6KHFPBN
The Firehand File
The Firehand File, by Bob Van Laerhoven, is a historical noir thriller set largely in the feverish Berlin of 1921, where political extremism, organized crime, artistic rebellion, poverty, drugs, and old wartime wounds keep colliding. At its center is Chaim Orlosow, a Jewish police inspector whose investigation of the grotesque Skinner murders gradually crosses paths with a much more dangerous secret: a psychiatric file built from supposed diary entries belonging to the young Adolf Hitler. Around Orlosow, Van Laerhoven assembles an unusually large cast, including French spy Claire Lesaumier, living under the name Elise Kraiser, psychiatrist Heinz Baumgart, Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen, two endangered Jewish children, and historical figures such as Rudolf Hess, Magnus Hirschfeld, Albert Einstein, and Soghomon Tehlirian. The result is part murder investigation, part espionage story, part portrait of a society discovering how quickly ugly ideas can move from private obsession into public life.
What gives the novel its particular personality is the way Van Laerhoven tells it. The chapters are short and restless, shifting rapidly between characters and interrupting the main narrative with diaries, letters, newspaper pieces, psychiatric commentary, and Paul van Ostaijen’s deliberately unruly “Drunk Poet” passages. Berlin feels less like a backdrop than a nervous system that everybody shares. Its cafés, cabarets, streets, political rallies, brothels, police offices, and drug culture constantly feed the characters’ fears and appetites. The book can be graphic about sex, murder, antisemitism, child exploitation, and addiction, but that extremity belongs to the world it’s constructing. Even the dark humor has a purpose. People joke, perform, philosophize, get drunk, and make art while something much more sinister is assembling around them. That combination of intellectual conversation, vulgarity, menace, and absurdity gives the novel a strange, energetic pulse.
The strongest idea running through the book is that stories have consequences. Characters rewrite their own memories, turn trauma into explanations, turn explanations into beliefs, and eventually turn beliefs into permission for violence. Claire can’t settle on a single version of her childhood. Paul turns other people’s suffering into literature. Baumgart treats psychological speculation as political opportunity. The Firehand material itself becomes dangerous because different people want to decide what story it tells about Hitler. Orlosow eventually arrives at the thought that people make their worlds real through stories, which neatly gathers together much of what the novel has been doing for hundreds of pages. The final sections underline that idea especially well: one copy of the file is destroyed almost casually, another survives into 1941 and is treated as questionable intelligence, while history continues on its terrible course.
I’d recommend The Firehand File to readers who enjoy historical crime fiction with a literary streak, especially anyone fascinated by Weimar Germany, early Nazism, European avant-garde culture, political espionage, or psychologically complicated characters. Readers who like novels built from several voices and intersecting lives will have plenty to dig into here, and those comfortable with explicit violence, sexuality, addiction, and disturbing subject matter will be best suited to its darker passages. For me, Orlosow is the character who gives the book its emotional weight. His decision to stop merely observing the ugliness around him and risk himself for Isaiah, Mara, and Claire turns the closing movement toward something unexpectedly humane. When they reach South Africa, his answer to the question of whether they’ll be happy is simple: they won’t wait for happiness; they’ll work for it. After everything the novel has shown about people constructing destructive versions of reality, that choice feels like its most meaningful answer.
Pages: 481 | ASIN : B0GGXYZVRD
The People of Schwarzenfeld
The Sower of Black Field follows an American priest in Nazi Germany as he defies oppression to protect his parish and wrestles with the moral challenges of faith in a time of unimaginable darkness. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
In 2004 (about 20 years ago), I discovered that Fr. Viktor Koch, C.P., my paternal great-granduncle, witnessed the rise and fall of Nazi Germany behind enemy lines. He was credited for saving Schwarzenfeld from Patton’s Third Army. This story was not passed down through the generations. In fact, Fr. Viktor visited the US only once after WWII, and he never revealed any of his wartime experiences to his family. We learned his story through a series of fateful coincidences.
To piece together fragments of Fr. Viktor’s story, I traveled to Schwarzenfeld in 2005 and spoke with eyewitnesses who remembered him. Some were the very people he saved. Once I realized the profound impact he had on the local population—both as an American and a Passionist—I knew this novel had to immerse readers in the experiences of German characters enduring oppression and hardship under their own government. In the narrative, they’ll witness how Fr. Viktor’s ministry and counsel insulated his followers from the predatory ideology of National Socialism. Only then is it clear why he risked everything to defend the people of Schwarzenfeld from his fellow Americans under the most harrowing circumstances.
How did you approach balancing historical accuracy with the fictional narrative?
Aside from being a novelist, I’m also an academic and an independent historian. From the start, I knew I was dealing with historical factors that were highly unlikely in the broader context of WWII history. I don’t think many novelists write peer-reviewed journal papers and present at history conferences to support their novels, but I do—and for good reason. This story contained so many controversial aspects that historians were bound to scrutinize it for perceived historical inaccuracies.
The facts themselves were extraordinary enough to make an emotive storyline. I injected fiction only to streamline the narrative (inventing characters who reenacted real-life stories and gave the novel a cohesive flow), fill holes where the facts were forever lost to history, and apply fictitious names to people who historically played a negative role. I was dealing with sensitive history on the German side, and it’s not my intention to impugn anyone or point out whose father did what in the war.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
While researching and writing this story, I gained a nuanced perspective on what life was like for the Germans in Schwarzenfeld—and for anyone unfortunate enough to live under an authoritarian regime. Think of the five freedoms granted to American citizens in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: press, petition, assembly, speech, and religion. Can you imagine living in a time and place where you had none of those? Even the smallest act of dissent or resistance could have devastating consequences. I wanted American readers to experience that oppression through the thoughts and senses of a character born on free soil, just as they are. In the process, I hope they will gain an appreciation for the courage of the Schwarzenfelders as they attempt to live a life of conscience and faith.
Clearly, faith was another vital theme in the story. The theology of Fr. Viktor’s order—the Passionists—served as my guiding light throughout the writing process. The Passionists believe that suffering is the great and terrible equalizer of humanity. In their words, “Christ is present in all who suffer.” This is a profound message—one that calls on us to perceive the divine in every living person, regardless of nation, race, or creed, and challenges us to see beyond divisions created by culture and society. In times of war and oppression, suffering is never far from one’s mind. Perhaps this is why his followers found solace and strength in his message.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing about faith in such a harrowing historical context?
When I began writing this story, I grappled with many of the questions that frequently arise when we contemplate the horrors of Nazi Germany. If there is a God, how can He permit such horrors? Why does He do nothing to intervene? In the novel, Fr. Viktor accepts that his presence in Schwarzenfeld is tantamount to a miracle—a higher power wanted an American there to prevent his fellow countrymen from committing an atrocity. If that is true, how could God intervene to save one small village in such an extraordinary way while millions perished in concentration camps?
As a writer, I’m aware that saints, theologians, and people of faith have contemplated questions like these for decades—even centuries. I don’t claim to be a theologian (and I’m certainly not a saint!) However, I did attempt to offer answers. I pored over Fr. Viktor’s historical letters in detail, trying to glean his insights on faith, good, evil, free will, and God’s will—and I did my best to integrate them into his dialogue. Regardless of whether readers accept the perspectives presented in the novel, I figured they would respect the work if I tackled these thorny questions head-on, and let the characters ponder and debate them. Based on reader comments and editorial reviews, many people turn the last page with plenty of food for thought.
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Winner of 6 Major Awards for Religious and Historical Fiction!
Category Winner – 2025 Independent Press Awards
Gold Medal – 2024 Readers’ Favorite Awards
Category Winner – 2024 American Writing Awards
Moral Courage in the Shadow of the Third Reich.
In a Bavarian village gripped by Nazi tyranny, an American priest’s faith will be tested like never before.
Father Viktor Koch has spent the war quietly ministering to his parish, keeping their faith alive under the watchful eyes of Nazi authorities. But as Germany crumbles in 1945, a shocking discovery thrusts the village into a moral crisis.
A mass grave of concentration camp victims lies on the village’s border. When American liberators demand justice, the commander gives the villagers an impossible choice: unearth and bury the dead within 24 hours—or face mass execution.
With time running out, Father Viktor must summon extraordinary courage to protect his people. But can he convince the Americans of the villagers’ humanity, or will the legacy of Nazi atrocities condemn them all?
