I have a confession to make.

I don’t know what kind of books I write.

I don’t have a clue.

I thought I did.

But I don’t.

It appears that we have become locked into a publishing universe that is built on genre fiction, and it the genres are changing just about every time the leaves on the trees either grow, turn green, fall off, or become red and gold.

I thought I wrote thrillers.

And mysteries.

That’s what I tried to do.

That’s what I like to read.

My bookshelves and my mind are filled with the fiction of Robert Ludlum, James Lee Burke, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald, Lee Child, Jack Higgins, Ken Follett, and the boys.

But here’s the problem.

I am fascinated with the 1930s and 1940s. I have written two thrillers and am serializing a third in a series set during World War II: Secrets of the Dead, Conspiracy of Lies, and Night Side of Dark.

It was a glorious era.

It was a mysterious era.

So many rumors running rampant.

So many mysteries lurking in the background.

Too much intrigue to know the difference between fact and fiction, truth and contradiction.

It was the dawn of intelligence agencies whose operatives worked in the shadows and behind enemy lines and where danger lurked around every corner and behind every door. The agents of the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and Germany had their only little private wars going.

Besides, the era had the greatest villain of all.

He was a madman.

He engineered a Holocaust.

He wore a mustache, made fierce, fiery speeches, and was known to the world as Adolph Hitler.

And, of course, Russia had its own madman, Joseph Stalin.

He was our friend then.

He was our own personal bad guy.

Stalin became our enemy as soon as the flames of atomic horror rose in a mushroom cloud above the cities of Japan.

We had what he desperately wanted.

We had The Bomb.

Stalin began building one of his own.

And a war turned Cold.

Want to write a thriller?

You can’t find a better era.

That’s what I thought.

But now I’ve found that I haven’t written any thrillers at all.

It was a grand era all right.

It was the wrong era.

Now everyone wants to call my novels historical fiction.

How could they be historical?

They happened in my lifetime.

I was only a small child during World War II, but my father worked in a military plant that built bombs, and I heard him and my mother talking in hushed tones at night about men I didn’t know killing men I didn’t know in places I never heard of.

I was fascinated with what was going on.

I still am.

But it’s historical or so they say, and they’re probably right.

I could write about the present, and maybe I will. To me, however, there may be mysteries in a world that relies on computers and the digital speed of the Internet and cell phones, but there is little intrigue.

There is little suspense.

Suspense is when the good guy is cornered in an alley on a dark street in Berlin with Gestapo agents trailing right behind, and he can’t find a telephone to warn someone that the German storm troopers will attack at dawn.

Where is a phone that works?

How can he find it?

Will he die before he gets there?

And he knows he can’t escape to freedom until he finds that damn phone.

Now that’s suspense.

If he whips out a cell phone and makes that call, it’s ho-hum and time to spread a little more peanut butter on my bread since I know for sure everything is going to work out fine. Make the call. Look up the GPS coordinates on his hand-held computer. And Hitch a ride on the helicopter that’s coming in under the cover of darkness.

It may be a really good story.

It’s not the story I want to tell.

I want an operative who lives or dies on his own daring, wits, and ingenuity.

I don’t want his fate decided by email or Twitter.

So I guess I’ll keep writing historical fiction.

And I guess I’ll keep calling the books thrillers.

Why change now?

A great writer, J. E. Fishman, recently penned a piece for Caleb and Linda Pirtle, and his advice for authors was this: “Write what turns you on.”

He’s right.

I do.

And so the battle rages on.

Please click the book cover images to read more about Caleb Pirtle III and his books.