What does it mean, exactly, when The New Yorker calls your debut novel “The Torqued Man” one of their Best Books of 2022? And CrimeReads anoints that book as the year’s Best Historical Fiction?

“I discovered,” upbeat author Peter Mann said in a phone interview, “that it helped get ‘World Pacific,’ my second book, published.”

Both books are set in the late 1930s as Nazi Germany launches a world war. Both fictions are inspired by real people.

“That’s right. Like in ‘The Torqued Man,’ the kernel of historical basis was a real Irish Republican who found himself in Nazi Germany in World War II.

“I found a similar kind of historical nugget that’s the springboard for my imagination here in Richard Halliburton, a celebrity travel adventure writer in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

“In 1939 he has this cra

See Full Page