What does it mean, exactly, when The New Yorker calls your debut novel “The Torqued Man” one of their Best Books of 2022? And CrimeReads anoints that book as the year’s Best Historical Fiction?

“I discovered,” upbeat author Peter Mann said in a phone interview, “that it helped get ‘World Pacific,’ my second book, published.”

Both books are set in the late 1930s as Nazi Germany launches a world war. Both fictions are inspired by real people.

“That’s right. Like in ‘The Torqued Man,’ the kernel of historical basis was a real Irish Republican who found himself in Nazi Germany in World War II.

“I found a similar kind of historical nugget that’s the springboard for my imagination here in Richard Halliburton, a celebrity travel adventure writer in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

“In 1939 he has this crazy idea to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco and arrive in time for the Treasure Island World’s Fair. And of course the real Halliburton vanishes in the middle of the Pacific.

“When I read that, some little light went off in my head and I thought, There’s an opening for fiction! What happened if my Halliburton character – called Dicky Halifax – didn’t drown? What kind of fun, what kind of trouble could I get him into?

“I knew that he would somehow return to San Francisco in a disguised identity. Then I got this idea for these two other characters: This Austrian emigre painter Hildegard Rauch and the British Nazi spy hunter Simon Faulk.

“These characters” – also based on historical figures – “will be in San Francisco and somehow they’ll be dealing with the ripples of Halifax’s apparent disappearance. How it all tied together, I had no idea, but that was the thrill and the challenge of finding out.”

At 44 the Kansas City-born author is too young to have any connections to the period. He lives in San Francisco and teaches history and literature at Stanford.

“Why am I so interested in World War Two? Gosh, I mean, I’ve been interested ever since I was a kid. So it’s hard for me to really articulate it as an adult now – I’ve just been drawn to it ever since.

“I think so much about the late 20th century and continuing to today, it was all formed in the wake of that. I mean, the very ideologies that we’re battling now here and abroad, are formed in the World War.

“So, there’s just something in terms of its relevance, politically and culturally. But also, there’s just so many stories in terms of moral compromise and complicity and collaboration. With thrilling adventure and horrific acts of destruction! That’s always the landscape I was drawn to.”

“World Pacific” is on shelves Aug. 19