When its comes to modern stories involving spies and espionage during World War II, there are a few annoyances that audiences have no choice but to expect and accept: a diverse, ahistorical cast of characters; amoral, superficial protagonists who are superlatively competent and devoid of any human attachments; paper-thin antagonists who are irredeemably evil; and a colorless, generic setting expunged of cultural differences, conflicting ideologies, or any authentic details.
Overall, these tropes have come to render the whole genre inauthentic, boring and predictable. Who wants to watch or read another story about a guy (or strong woman) fighting rogue Nazis in some anonymous town in Europe?
What makes this all especially tragic is that it never had to be this way. There was, and still is, a treasure trove of storylines to pull from World War II… H.W. Crocker III, a well-known conservative Catholic historian, novelist, and publisher, has just done so with Kruger’s Korps, a World War II spy thriller that aims to make the genre and literary fiction in general great again.