Kirk Wolfinger's Third Chapter

Chapter 3: Books!  

Dangerous Shores and The Killing Sea

If one’s life can be defined by chapters, I always thought mine would be written in 2: an acting /theatre career of about 8 years and filmmaking career spanning 40!  With a couple hundred hours of films and stories I figured there must be a few that would make for a good read.  I’m a firm believer in the adage ‘less is more’ when it comes to making television or film, but rarely do we finish a project when I have not thought ‘There is more good stuff in that story, we just don’t have time for it’. In addition to having a trove of good stories only partially told, I’ve always been good at making connections between people, stories and opportunities. The bestseller Shadow Divers was brilliantly written by Rob Kurson following the broadcast of our PBS /NOVA film Hitler’s Lost Sub which initiated the book. Not long ago I met Rick Richter, a partner at Aevitas Creative Management and an excellent literary agent, at a party and he asked if I had any stories that would make a good book. He had just signed Sara Vladic, who penned the NY Times bestseller Indianapolis, and they were looking for her next book project. We had just finished a three-part series for Smithsonian /Paramount about the Eagle 56, sunk just a few miles off the Maine coast at the end of the WW2. She liked it, and before long, I had signed on with her as a story consultant. That book, all about the activities surrounding German U -boats and spies active off of the US East coast during WW2, is due out in March of 2026 from Harper Collins: Dangerous Shores.  In the meantime, we produced an 8-part series called Lost Ships of WW2 for which I brought together a team of experts which included my old friend and former Submarine Commander Bill Toti and the WW2 historian Seth Paridon. After the filming, those two started a superb Podcast called The Unauthorized History of the War in the Pacific which, 4 years on, has become one of the most successful WW2 podcasts out there with over 14 million downloads! Talking to Rick about generating a new story and consulting with these two experts, Bill and Seth pointed to their most successful podcast to date detailing the true story and myth-busting facts surrounding the Battle of Guadalcanal. With a few months of research and writing by Seth and Bill, we recently made a deal with St. Martin’s Press /Macmillan to write The Killing Sea. Seth and Bill will do the heavy lifting of writing the book while my job will be to work as a story consultant providing research and images from our Petrel Archive and lending my 1000-foot observation as the story begins to take shape. I love the topics, and I love that we can tell a more complete story than television would allow. Call it ‘re-inventing’ or ‘re-imagining’ I like to think of it as ‘recycling’! Stories don’t get old, we just find new ways to tell them!