Thomas Mullen On Writing About Historical Conspiracy Theories in a Post-Truth Age

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You’re reading a mystery. You want to know whodunnit. You follow the detective—maybe it’s a cop or a PI, maybe it’s an amateur sleuth forced into circumstances to play that role—as they unearth clue after clue.

Eventually, they identify the villain. How? By marshalling evidence. Maybe there are fingerprints. A witness. DNA. A confession in the penultimate chapter. You as the reader finally arrive at that elusive thing, The Truth.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? All mysteries are, in a way, a search for truth. Hell, fiction in general is such a search—mysteries are just a tad more bold about it. We read to learn something about ourselves, the people around us, the human condition.

So what happens when no one can agree on truth?

For too long now, we’ve been living in an age of disinformation. Conspiracy theories, deep fakes, propaganda, bald-faced lies. Between the reality-distorting power of the internet and social media, and certain politicians’ willingness to say just about anything to win power, it’s never been harder to get people to agree on basic facts. People claim to have their own facts, alternative facts, their own evidence. Everyone has their rabbit hole, their echo chamber.

Everyone is a villain to someone else.

Because of all this, we’ve gotten used to the common refrain that we live in “unprecedented times.” But the thing about writing historical fiction is that you realize that pretty much nothing is unprecedented. All kinds of crazy stuff has happened in human history; it’s surprisingly hard for anything to happen today that hasn’t been foreshadowed at some other time in our history.

There are precedents everywhere. We trip over them like a detective trips over a body in the dark.

As rampant with lies as 2024 may be (and with an election on the horizon, it’s only going to get worse), and scary as it may be to see the pillars of our society shaken to their very foundations, things were equally scary in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Okay, I know that’s not exactly comforting—no one wants to live through another world war or another fascist dictatorship—but it puts our current troubles in perspective to remind ourselves that our grandparents lived through similar turmoil and found their way to the other side.

I’ve always wanted to write a World War II-era crime story, and I’ve always wanted to set something in Boston, the closest big city to where I grew up. Boston is the so-called “cradle of liberty” and an academic mecca where the search for truth is taken seriously indeed. My new novel, The Rumor Game, takes place in 1943 and follows a Boston reporter whose job is to write a weekly column that disproves harmful war rumors. Like the rumor that if women who had perms worked in a munitions plant, their heads would explode (an actual rumor at the time!). America was fighting in the Pacific, had already fought in North Africa, and was planning an invasion of Europe, and the home front was rife with rumors and gossip. Some of it was simply the result of fear, some of it was political posturing, and some was actual propaganda placed by Axis agents.

Like the one about the Army hiring abortion doctors because so many “loose women” were serving in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Or the one about Jews not enlisting for the draft. Or the one about Blacks secretly spying for the Japanese. It’s surprising, and at the same time not that surprising at all, the things people will say about each other during times of great stress. Especially about people who look different than them.

When my character finds that one of the rumors she’s trying to disprove ties into an FBI agent’s murder investigation, things get complicated. Two people who have great reason to distrust each other, and who disagree politically and live in their own rabbit holes, and who both have ulterior motives, will have to work together to find the truth. Or something close to the truth.

If they can even agree on what the truth actually is.

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