From Imagination to Ink: Crafting Histories and Heroes in Thriller Fiction

Most thriller writers are suckers for a good story. I’m one of them. And if the story is true, many of us start playing the “what-if” game. What if I took a character and imagined it happened to her? What if I set the story in Chicago? What if I created a backstory that explained the current situation?

“What-if’ing” is often the first step I take to suss out a new story or novel. In fact, I’m pretty sure I started writing historical thrillers because I “what-if”ed an ordinary person living through a period of extraordinary turmoil. What if a group of hippies lived together during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention? That became Set The Night on Fire. What if a young American woman got caught in the 1979 Iranian Revolution? A Bitter Veil. What if two Vietnamese sisters had to cope with the Vietnam War? A Bend in the River.

However, I didn’t have to “what-if” the circumstances of my recent thriller, Max’s War. My late father-in-law, Fred Hellmann, was an immigrant from Germany. He was “off the boat” in 1939. He’d grown up in affluence in Regensburg, a city that, as far back as the Middle Ages, was a center for trade and commerce. Growing up, Fred had his own horse and carriage. His father bred racehorses and owned a bicycle and wheel shop. They lived in the best part of town with plenty of household help.

All of that changed when Hitler came to power—the Hellmanns were Jewish. From 1933 on, the Nazi government tightened the noose on all German Jews by issuing laws that slowly, inexorably restricted their education, their ability to make a living, their social lives, and their freedom. Goebbels piled on with propaganda that depicted Jews as odious creatures who couldn’t be trusted. In the early 1930s Jews were encouraged to leave Germany. Or else.

Fred’s family heeded the warning and moved to Holland, which at the time, was a neutral country. The Netherlands had a history of tolerance. Jews assimilated and inter-married. For a couple of years things after they moved, life was peaceful. The Hellmanns even imagined returning to Germany after Hitler was thrown out of power.

Except he never was. He’d made sure everyone knew he alone had brought Germany out of the depression. Clever propaganda imbued Germans with the notion that the Third Reich would—and should—conquer the whole of Europe. And he rearmed the military, blatantly breaking Treaties right and left.

With the looming invasion of Holland a certainty, Fred’s family made a heartbreaking decision. Fred would flee to America. His parents would remain in Holland. In 1939 Fred hid in a truck filled with coffins. He made it to the ship that brought him from Rotterdam to New York and eventually Philadelphia. For two years he took odd jobs as a delivery boy and studied English. He learned he was the sole survivor of his family. Sometime after Pearl Harbor he was drafted into the Army.

Because he was German and an immigrant, he was sent to Ontario, Canada, after Basic Training, where he was trained by the OSS to interrogate German POWs and to ferret out intel about German troop movements: where they were, where they were planning to go, and how well equipped they were.

Fred was sent back behind enemy lines at the end of 1943. He spent almost two years as an interrogator and a spy. In 1945 he was asked to remain with the OSS for another year. But he’d become engaged to a  lady in Philadelphia who said enough was enough. She couldn’t wait another year. So Fred came back to the States. He married Lucy, and their first son Mark was born in 1946. I married Mark in 1979.

While not as dramatic as the first part of his life, Fred’s post-war life was marked by what we now call PTSD.  As far as we knew, he never talked about the war… not to his two sons or his friends. Once in a while, an anecdote leaked out. The coffin story… how he came to have a German knife and Lugar… how he impersonated a Wehrmacht officer to elicit information from German POWs. How his best OSS buddy substituted for him during a mission and was killed. I’ve included a fictionalization of those events in Max’s War. And added to them.

Still, those are just scattered remembrances. We tried to get his Army records so we’d know exactly where he was trained and deployed, but they were destroyed in a fire at the St. Louis Army record center shortly after it opened.

As a thriller writer who’s fascinated with spy-craft, I’ve wanted to write about his exploits for years. When I heard about the Ritchie Boys and how they did exactly what Fred did during the war, I wondered whether he trained with them. Long story short: We have no proof one way or the other. But I have since learned that the OSS and Ritchie Boys were kissing cousins during the war. They often shared training and missions. More than a few soldiers floated between the two organizations. In fact, an OSS camp lay just a few miles from Camp Ritchie in rural Maryland. So it’s entirely possible.

The great thing about fiction is that we can create stories that raise issues of extraordinary conflict, morality, and good vs. evil. While Fred’s story will always have a few loose ends, Max’s doesn’t. The plot of Max’s War emerged organically from Fred’s story. Where I didn’t know the facts, the “what-if” exercise helped me fashion what I hope are plausible events. In that respect, it is both the easiest and most difficult novel I’ve ever written. I hope you will agree.

Order Max’s War here!