Chicago on the Meuse
They kept quiet. We won’t.For whatever would come after HLD I wanted a different direction. No sci-fi, no horror. Something rooted in the real world, preferably in history. And then I landed on Oss.
There is a lot there. The Bende van Oss is one of the darkest chapters in Dutch criminal history. “Chicago on the Meuse” was what they called the town at the time. Between 1932 and 1939, murders, armed robberies and knife fights piled up, followed by a marechaussee crackdown, a string of trials, and eventually the Oss Affair of 1939. In fiction, almost nothing has been done with it since the 2011 film of the same name.
So first I went into the archives. What exactly happened. Who was involved. Who blocked what, who kept silent. I laid out the years 1932 through 1939 event by event. The murder of Van der Pas on the Berghemseweg. The knife fights at the Oss fair. The arrival of Sergeant Mintjes and his marechaussee brigade. The robbery-murder in Oijen. The trials in Den Bosch. The honourings, and eventually the fall of the brigade itself.
Once that timeline was in place, one thing became immediately clear: this had to be fiction. Too many silent men, too many gaps in the source material, too many figures who would never speak out loud about what they had seen. History gives us the skeleton. The story has to be the flesh.
Unlike HLD, this time I follow a single protagonist. A young man, fictional, but positioned in such a way that he can become entangled in what happens around him in many different ways. The world is fixed. His path is not.
More on exactly how, in a later devlog.