Breathe, Fen. Just…breathe.

“And now, please welcome to the stage the Mistress of Magic and Queen of Illusion, escapologist extraordinaire…Madame Vos!”

At the eruption of applause, I open my eyes, and without hesitation, I step into the spotlight.

Author’s Note

The premise of this novel came to me over a simmering stretch of several years—and a sudden flash. Seeking inspiration for a new book, I pulled out an old file of interesting articles and photos I’d tucked away. Among them was a black-and-white photograph that once again stopped me cold. I’d saved it years earlier, taken from the very same webpage, in fact, where I’d discovered a shocking picture of children being offered for sale, inspiring my novel Sold on a Monday—and this photo was just as haunting. More so, actually.

What I’d initially interpreted as a snapshot of children peacefully sleeping was, instead, a documentation of young victims of the 1913 tragedy in Calumet, Michigan, commonly known as the Italian Hall Disaster. At a Christmas Eve party organized for striking miners and their families, seventy-three people—the vast majority of them children—died in a stairwell stampede resulting from a false cry of “fire.” The mere notion remains equally infuriating and heartbreaking. My realization that so few people outside that region seem to have ever heard of this today fueled me with a desire to share the story. Yet I couldn’t help but worry that centering a novel on an event so devastating would be far too sad to write, much less for others to read. Thus, reluctantly I plodded on through my folder.

That was when I paused to reread a Deadspin article from 2015. “How Monopoly Helped Win World War II” by Mary Pilon described how game boards had been used to smuggle escape aids to Allied prisoners of war. Reportedly, should the game ever need to reup its wartime role, the British government kept this tactic classified for many decades thereafter. I was captivated by these lesser-known facts, but save for a POW story (which I’d written about in a previous book), I couldn’t imagine a related premise unique enough to warrant an entire novel.

Still, out of curiosity, I did an online search about the topic. An extensive Eurogamer article by Christian Donlan titled “Inside Monopoly’s Secret War against the Third Reich” promptly introduced me to Christopher Clayton Hutton (a.k.a. “Clutty”), the man responsible for tricking out Monopoly games and designing countless other escape-and-evasion “toys” for MI9. (I’d venture to guess I wasn’t alone in my surprise, despite it being perfectly logical, that many numbered sections exist beyond the widely famed MI5 and MI6.) The covert agency managed to help an estimated thirty-five thousand Allied airmen and soldiers return to friendly lines, though its achievements were long kept classified under the Official Secrets Act.