Secret history

Secret histories of the real world

Fictional secret histories

Secret history thrillers

• Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett: a German spy in 1944 nearly succeeds in foiling D-Day;
• The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth: an assassin nearly succeeds in killing Charles De Gaulle, president of France, in 1963.

• The Key to Rebecca: a German spy in Cairo nearly succeeds in letting Erwin Rommel win at El Alamein.
• The Man from St. Petersburg: a Russian anarchist in 1914 Britain nearly succeeds, by assassinating a key envoy of the Tsar, in averting the First World War.

• Enigma by Robert Harris: an embittered code-breaker nearly betrays to Nazi Germany the vital and closely guarded secret that the Allies are able to read its secret messages.
• The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins: German commandos nearly succeed in kidnapping British Prime Minister Winston Churchill out of wartime England.
• The Romanov Succession by Brian Garfield: taking advantage of the 1941 Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, Russian exiles attempt to assassinate Soviet premier Joseph Stalin and restore the monarchy.
• The Night Letter by Paul Spike: In 1940, Nazi agents nearly succeed in blackmailing U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt into not running for a third term.
• The Ninth Man by John Lee: a few years later, a Nazi agent penetrates the White House and nearly succeeds in assassinating Roosevelt.
• Stalag Texas, also by John Lee: escaped German prisoners nearly succeed in destroying the American nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos.
• An Exchange of Eagles by Owen Sela: In 1940, senior officers of the German Abwehr and the American Military Intelligence make a secret deal to simultaneously assassinate Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt with the assumption that they would be replaced by Hermann Göring and Henry A. Wallace - who would make peace and prevent World War II from further escalating.
• In the 2006 historical detective novel, The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin, a power-mad Ottoman general in 1836 nearly succeeds in overthrowing Sultan Mehmet II and proclaiming a republic almost 90 years in advance of Atatürk.
• In the thriller The Redbreast by Jo Nesbø, a former World War II Norwegian collaborator with the Nazi occupation nearly succeeds in assassinating the Norwegian Crown Prince.

• The Leader and the Damned by Colin Forbes: Adolf Hitler was assassinated in 1943 but his death was kept secret and the man who led Nazi Germany in the last two years of the war was a double. This book also provides a detailed view on the role of Martin Bormann in the Nazi leadership and of his eventual fate, completely at odds with the official historical record.
• XPD by Len Deighton: Winston Churchill was far more of an appeaser than official history records, and in June 1940 he had a secret meeting with Hitler to discuss peace on the basis of recognizing the German domination of Europe; decades later, the documents recording this shameful secret are the subject of an intensive and deadly power struggle.
• The mystery series by Elliott Roosevelt in which his mother, Eleanor Roosevelt, is the detective – placing murder mysteries in the Franklin D. Roosevelt White House and other actual locations and involving many historical persons in the fictional events depicted. In one book of the series, Murder at the Chateau, Eleanor Roosevelt is involved not only in a murder mystery but also in a high-level secret conference in Occupied France, which nearly ends with a diplomatic deal to end World War II in 1941.
• The Berkut by Joseph Heywood. Adolf Hitler did not really commit suicide in 1945, it was a double who died together with Eva Braun. The real Hitler tried to escape from Berlin, was captured by Soviet commandos after the long chase making most of the book, and was secretly kept under horrible and degrading conditions in the Kremlin basement until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, when he was secretly executed.
• Many of the "Blackford Oakes" spy novels, by conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., which are secret-history thrillers claiming that historical events considered to have been setbacks for the United States were actually brilliant strategic coups by the CIA which were merely allowed to look like defeats for security purposes, or at least were the product of the US's moral superiority. For instance, in Who's on First, Oakes deliberately chooses not to stop the Soviet Union from launching Sputnik ahead of the otherwise-superior US satellite program, in order to protect the life of a Soviet contact ; in Marco Polo, if You Can, Oakes is the real-life U2 pilot Gary Powers, and allows himself to be captured while flying over the Soviet Union in order to create a cover story for a secret US intelligence operation.
• The plot of Clive Cussler's Night Probe! is based on the assumption that on the eve of World War I in 1914, a secret treaty was signed between the British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, with the cooperation of King George V, and US President Woodrow Wilson – to sell Canada to the United States for the sum of one billion dollars. The treaty was aborted at the time and reference to it erased from all official records – to resurface explosively in 1989.
• When published in 1903, Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands was mainly a cautionary tale about the then real possibility of war between Britain and Germany. But the very belated 1998 sequel The Shadow in the Sands by Sam Llewellyn transformed it into a full-fledged secret history. It asserts that in 1902-1903 Imperial Germany prepared a meticulous plan for a large-scale invasion of England, supervised by Kaiser Wilhelm II who took personal part in some of the preparations. The German invasion was foiled at the very last moment by a small band of courageous Britons who infiltrated Germany and carried out a series of daring acts of arson and sabotage, undertaken with the risk of being hanged out of hand if caught, and succeeding against all odds in derailing Kaiser Wilhelm's carefully prepared invasion plan - so that a quarter of a million German soldiers who were poised to board the invasion fleet just returned to barracks. In the aftermath the German and British governments tacitly agreed to pretend none of this ever happened. The Germans wanted to keep it secret, because it failed; the British - because the authorities in Britain had ignored all warnings and did nothing to avert the invasion, and those who did avert it were private British citizens acting on their own without any government sanction or support. Thus, the whole affair remained secret history, even when Britain and Germany did go to war eleven years later.
• An interesting example of a science-fiction secret history novel can be found in the BBC Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventures novel Imperial Moon, which sees the Fifth Doctor and his companions Vislor Turlough and Kamelion learn about a secret trip to the Moon by the British Imperial Spacefleet in 1878. On first hearing of the expedition, the Doctor notes that Victorian science could have built a structurally sound spaceship capable of going to the Moon, with the only thing beyond them being a conventional propulsion system; the events of the novel reveal that information about how to create the ships' engines was secretly provided by an alien race trapped on the Moon who sought to escape to Earth. At the novel's conclusion, after the alien race decimates the spaceport where the ships returned to Earth before being defeated by the Doctor and his companions, the Doctor arranges for Queen Victoria to cancel the space program as he recognises that Victorian Britain is not psychologically ready to travel in space, with all records of the expedition being destroyed apart from the expedition leader's diary, which he entrusts to the Doctor for safe keeping.
• Another example of a science-fiction secret history is The Proteus Operation by James P. Hogan. Its plot tells the most closely guarded secret of World War II: in 1939 there arrived in New York City a group of time-travelers from a future timeline in which the Nazis won the war and took over most of the world. The arrivals secretly contacted Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and provided invaluable information about how the Germans won in their history – which enabled the Allies to do better this time and win the war. This time-travel secret was only known to Roosevelt and Churchill, to a few of their close advisers such as Harry Hopkins, and to a few scientists such as Albert Einstein. After the victory in 1945, all who knew it were sworn to secrecy – and strictly kept it until their deaths – and all records destroyed, this secret considered too explosive to be ever told.

  Fictional "secret" versions of historical events

• Alexandre Dumas' last major work, The Knight of Sainte-Hermine asserts that it was the novel's protagonist who killed the British Admiral Horatio Nelson and that the true circumstances of Nelson's death were kept secret for reasons which form part of the book's plot.
• Dumas' earlier and more well-known work, The Three Musketeers, provides a detailed and entirely fictional account of the background to the 1628 assassination of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham by the junior officer John Felton. At the time and up to the present, Felton's act was considered as part of the turbulent 17th Century English politics. As depicted by Dumas, however, the assassination of Buckingham was the result of a convoluted plot hatched by the French Cardinal Richelieu, while Felton himself was unaware of being manipulated by Richelieu's female agent.
• Elizabeth Bear's "Promethean Age" series constitutes a massive secret history of Elizabethan England, with considerable fantasy elements. Among other things the series asserts that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was a secret illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I; that Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen's spymaster, did not die in 1590 as history records but lived in secret for another five years; that playwrights Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were all secret agents of the Queen and underwent dangerous missions in her service, in addition to their theatrical activities; that the plays of all three had profound secret political and magical meanings; that Shakespeare and Marlowe were lovers, and homoerotic elements in Shakespeare's Sonnets were dedicated to Marlowe; that Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene was not a fictional work but was based on a true Kingdom of Faerie, whose Queen had a secret pact of mutual help with the English Queen Elizabeth; that Christopher Marlowe was not assassinated in 1593 as history records but was taken into Faerie where he became the lover of the witch Morgan le Fay; and that Shakespeare had also visited Faerie and personally met with Puck and other supposedly legendary characters depicted in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
• The first series of Blackadder, in which Henry VII of England comes to power in a completely different way and removes the reign of "Richard IV" from the history books. Note that in recorded history England had only three kings named Richard.
• The Assassin's Creed video game franchise is built around a conspiracy-laden story involving a "New World Order" organization that originated with the Knights Templar. According to the game's fiction, many historical figures were secretly Templars, manipulating history and those around them in a quest for power. They were opposed by the Assassins, another secret order that considered themselves defenders of humanity's free will. It is implied, and confirmed in Assassin's Creed II, that certain powerful artifacts that the Templars sought in their quest for power were remnants of a secret "First Civilization", the basis for most real-world religion and mythology. The true history of the world has long been lost and/or intentionally obscured, possibly by the Templars.
• The background of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series of contemporary fantasy detective thrillers includes the assertion that Isaac Newton, in addition to his well-known scientific achievements, was also a powerful wizard who codified the basic principles of magic. Unlike Newton's writings on other subjects, his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis was never made known to the general public. However, copies of Newton's book, as of other books on magic, were kept at a secret section of the Bodleian Library in the University of Oxford, and it remained the basic text for practitioners of magic into the twenty-first century. The same series also assumes that, in addition to the various weapons deployed, World War II had also been fought by magical means, with Nazi Germany, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union each raising its own secret corps of warrior-wizards. Specifically, official World War II histories omit all mention of a major battle fought on January 1945 at Ettersberg, Germany – where thousands of British wizards gave their lives in the effort to destroy a secret magical facility, from where Nazi wizards were seeking to unleash vampires and other nasty magical surprises upon the world. Scattered in the series are minor other tidbits of secret history: The practice of magic flourished among the court ladies of Caroline of Ansbach; during the War of 1812 British wizards trained Tecumseh's medicine men in up to date Newtonian magic, for which American wizards kept a grudge even centuries later; Maynard Keynes, though not practicing magic himself, was associated with the British wizards and helped them locate various magical manuscripts; in 2009, American wizards trying a magical operation as part of the Iraq War suffered a major fiasco at Falluja which was covered up but got their contract with the US Army terminated.
• Bill Walsh's Tales from the Black Chamber assumes that President Calvin Coolidge secretly established a government agency called "The Black Chamber", its mission being to fight demons, vampires, werewolves, and any other supernatural beings who threaten the United States or the world in general. Foundation of this agency closely coincided with Coolidge appointing J. Edgar Hoover to head what would become the FBI, but the creation and existence of the Black Chamber was and is kept completely secret, even a century later. But it does exist in our present time, and its hands are full .
• Umberto Eco's novel Baudolino suggests that Emperor Frederick I, who died while on the Second Crusade, had not drowned in a river, as history records. Rather, he had died mysteriously at night while hosted at the castle of a sinister Armenian noble. According to the book, the only people who knew the truth had an excellent reason to hide it - since they had been in charge of guarding the Emperor, and if the truth became known they might have been executed out of hand for failing in their task.
• Gore Vidal's novel Creation, purporting to disclose many facts on Greek-Persian Wars that were not known to Herodotus, asserts that the Persian King Darius planned a major military campaign in India, with the aim of annexing the entire Gangetic Plain to the Persian Empire. But the Greeks, entangling the Persians in a major war on their other flank and proving a tougher opponent than the Persians counted on, caused that Indian campaign to be aborted. Thus, according to Vidal, the Greeks unknowingly exerted great influence on India's history and - since this was the Buddha's lifetime - also on the character of Buddhism, a major world religion.
• The same Vidal book also asserts that the Greek philosopher Democritus had a far-traveling great-uncle who had visited both India and China, spoke their languages fluently and had met and conversed with their important sages such as the Buddha and Mahavira in India as well as Lao Tsu, and Confucius in China. The uncle was especially impressed by Confucius, became his disciple for several years and was among the inner circle of close disciples who heard the basic tenets of Confucianism set out for the first time by the Master himself. In his old age, the great-uncle lived in Athens and dictated his autobiography - including detailed accounts of his conversations with the Eastern Sages - to the young Democritus, destined to himself become a major, highly influential philosopher. This would imply that, through that conduit, the Eastern Sages had much more of a direct influence on Greek Philosophy than modern scholars realize.
• The books of Steve Berry often have secret history elements which are critical to their plots. For example, The Jefferson Key, part of Berry's Cotton Malone series, is based on the assumption that all four assassinations of a US President were in fact organized by a secret "Commonwealth" of pirates, founded during the American Revolution, which still exists into the 21st Century and wields considerable power behind the scenes, and whose lucrative activities were in one way or another disrupted by each of these four Presidents. The pirates had, in each case, located a person who had a reason to hate the President and manipulated him into unknowingly carrying out their design. Other Presidents, like Woodrow Wilson during WWI and Franklin Roosevelt in WWII, knew of this Commonwealth, recognized its secret role and made secret use of it - and thus avoided being assassinated. The book's plot hinges on a page torn from the Congressional Record, confirming that Congress in the early years of the US did give this Commonwealth "a perpetual authorization" to act as privateers. Once the current President's agent has located and destroyed this document, ensuring that this piece of secret history will remain forever secret, the President is free to act decisively and break up the pirate Commonwealth. Other Steve Berry books feature such pieces of secret history as treasure hidden by Napoleon Bonaparte, secret survivals of the Knights Templar and the fate of the books of the Alexandrine Library.
• Many of Tim Powers's novels are secret histories. For example, his 1987 novel On Stranger Tides had a different interpretation of pirate Blackbeard's death at Ocracoke Inlet. After finding the Fountain of Youth, Blackbeard planned to go in battle and knew it would lead to his death, which he wanted to be a widely known event. After Blackbeard's death, his head was severed and hung on the bowsprit, in which the pirate's blood fell into the sea, thereby letting the effects of the Fountain work. Blackbeard's soul would gain a new body, where he would assume a new identity as "Edmund Morcilla" until he was killed again, for once and all, by the book's protagonist, Jack Shandy. Powers's 2001 novel Declare presents a secret history of the Cold War, with the US and the UK jousting with the Soviet Union over the control of powerful supernatural forces.

Secret histories of fictional worlds

Examples

• When Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Final Problem he fully intended to kill off Sherlock Holmes and write no further books and stories about him. Faced with massive pressure and protests by the famous detective's fans, he finally gave in. "The Adventure of the Empty House" revealed that Holmes did not die after all, and recounted a secret history of three years in which Holmes had been wandering the world while everybody – including even his close friend Dr. Watson – believed him to be dead. What differentiates this case from many other retcons and reboots is the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not need to alter the initial stories in any way, since he had never given any substantial evidence that Sherlock Holmes died, in the first place: the "death" of the Great Detective was only a mistake on the part of the police and Dr Watson who misread the signs on the place of his apparent death.
• The Doctor Who serial Remembrance of the Daleks also alludes to hidden fictional history, establishing that during the events of the serial An Unearthly Child, the First Doctor had in his possession a super-weapon, the Hand of Omega stolen from his own people, the Time Lords. The story also implies that he knew of the Daleks before he "first" met them.
• Another example in Doctor Who is the War Doctor, whose existence had been covered up by previous Doctors and was retroactively inserted into continuity by showrunner Steven Moffat to create a "mayfly" Doctor for "The Day of the Doctor".
• DC Comics' Crisis on Infinite Earths made years of "established" events and characters from the DC Universe "un-happen". In the revised continuity only a few privileged characters remember the old continuity, making it "secret".
• Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton universe heavily influenced Alan Moore's subsequent League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Both these universes tie together many disparate fictional creations in a variety of surprising ways.
• Warren Ellis's comic book series Planetary offers a secret history look at the origin of comic book and literary type superheroes.
• Philip José Farmer's The Other Log of Phileas Fogg reinterprets Jules Verne's famous tale with the assumption that in fact Fogg was the immortal foster child of a race of hominid aliens known as the Eridani, and that his travel around the world was part of a secret mission on their behalf.
• Brandon Sanderson's novella recounts the story of the first Mistborn trilogy from the perspective of a certain character working from behind the scenes to affect the outcome of the aforementioned trilogy, providing explanations for certain events that occur.

  Time travel secret histories