Dear Reader,
If, like us, you think the 1930s were the most fascinating decade in the
20th Century and you like historical thrillers with lots of action,
suspense and romance, we believe you’ll love our latest novel The Liebold
Protocol, a Mattie McGary + Winston Churchill 1930s Adventure set in 1934
against the backdrop of ‘The Night of the Long Knives’ in Nazi Germany where
Hitler had over 200 of his political enemies, inside and outside the Nazi
Party, murdered.
For that matter, we also believe you’ll love the five earlier books in
the series featuring Winston Churchill’s adventure-seeking Scottish
goddaughter, the Hearst photojournaslist Mattie McGary: The DeValera
Deception set in 1929-1930, The Parsifal Pursuit set in 1931, The
Gemini Agenda set in 1932, The Berghof Betrayal and The Silver
Mosaic set in 1933. Together, the books were a Three-Time Grand Prize
Winner Fiction by the Next Generation Indie Book Awards as well as a Three-Time
Thriller/Suspense Book of the Year and Two-Time Historical Book of the Year by ForeWord
Reviews.
I’ve been asked more than once why we use so many real persons as
characters in our Mattie McGary + Winston Churchill historical thrillers, so
here are five thoughts on that subject for the five actual historical persons
who have appeared in three or more of our novels—Winston Churchill, William
Randolph Hearst, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goring and Reinhard Heydrich.
(1) It’s easier using real people rather than creating fictional
characters. Every fictional character a novelist creates, major or minor,
has a backstory that the writer must know even if it never appears in the novel
itself. Creating a backstory takes time. Using a real person eliminates that
task as the character comes with a readymade backstory complete with friends
and enemies, likes and dislikes, physical descriptions, etc.
(2) Real people add verisimilitude to an historical novel. But
you have to make sure the real people stay in character. You’ve got to know the
real person’s backstory and this means reading at lot about that person,
preferably a biography or two if they’re available.
Getting those persons wrong or a detail about their lives wrong can
quickly destroy that willing suspension of disbelief every reader brings to a
novel. That means, for example, that you can’t have a tee-totaling, non-smoking
vegetarian like Hitler eating meat, drinking alcohol or smoking a cigar.
Likewise, you can’t have Churchill drinking Scotch without water. His whisky
was always diluted with large quantities of water or soda.
(3) Real people make for more plausible villains. Why create a
fictional Nazi bad guy when you have so many real people to choose from?
Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Heydrich are all there for the taking. This also
allows you to have something other than a black and white portrayal. Hermann
Goring, for example, kept lion cubs as pets, feeding them with a baby bottle.
We use that scene in Mattie’s interview of Goring in The Silver Mosaic.
Hitler was unfailingly polite to his secretaries and, unlike Churchill, never
swore at them. Likewise, Hitler’s anti-Semitism was well known, but he was a
master politician who tailored his message to his audience. When Mattie interviews
him in The Parsifal Pursuit, The Berghof Betrayal, and The Liebold
Protocol, he successfully evades Mattie’s attempts to elicit anti-Semitic
comments. The only problem using a real historical person as a villain,
however, is you can’t kill him at the end of the book if it’s not his time.
(4) Real historical people make more plausible supporting characters.
If Mattie McGary is going to work for a newspaper, it’s better to have her boss
be a fascinating guy like William Randolph Hearst rather than a two-dimensional
Perry White of The Daily Planet. Similarly, why invent fictional
political enemies for Churchill who bug his telephones when you have Neville
Chamberlain who actually did order wiretaps on the telephones of Churchill and
other anti-Nazi British political figures in the late 1930s?
(5) Casting as a character a historical person who is not a villain per
se, but whom you don’t especially like, lets you display their less
attractive traits. This is fun. We began this in the first novel, The
DeValera Deception, where we portray Eamon DeValera as the cowardly,
self-serving politician he really was. Also, see Neville Chamberlain above re
wiretapping his political enemies in The Silver Mosaic and The
Liebold Protocol. President Herbert Hoover was a target as well because he
was an anti-Catholic bigot and we gave him ample opportunity to display that in
The DeValera Deception. His successor Franklin D. Roosevelt was both an
anti-Semite and an anti-Catholic bigot who once actually said in 1942 to a
Catholic member of his Administration “This is a Protestant country, and you
Catholics and Jews are here on our sufferance. It is up to you to go along with
anything I want at this time.” We figured that wasn’t the first time he had
said something like that so we had FDR use that line in 1933 in The Silver
Mosaic. Finally, while he is never an actual character, we rarely pass up
an opportunity for one of our fictional characters to refer to the
Southern-born Woodrow Wilson as the racist he was. Unlike Herbert Hoover
or FDR who expressed their bigotry privately, Wilson did so publicly. His two
Republican predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, had
abolished segregated rest rooms and drinking fountains in the District of
Çolumbia as well as the White House itself. The Democrat Wilson re-segregated
restrooms both in the District as well as for the black servants in the White
House itself.
So, as we said at the outset, you think the 1930s were the most
fascinating decade in the 20th Century and you like historical
thrillers with lots of action, suspense and romance, we believe you’ll love our
latest novel The Liebold Protocol, a Mattie McGary + Winston Churchill 1930s
Adventure.
Love,
Michael & Kathleen
Michael McMenamin is the co-author with his son Patrick of the award winning 1930s era historical novels featuring Winston Churchill and his fictional Scottish goddaughter, the adventure-seeking Hearst photojournalist Mattie McGary. The first five novels in the series—The DeValera Deception, The Parsifal Pursuit, The Gemini Agenda, The Berghof Betrayal and The Silver Mosaic—received a total of 15 literary awards. He is currently at work with his daughter Kathleen McMenamin on the sixth Winston and Mattie historical adventure, The Liebold Protocol.
Michael is the author of the critically acclaimed Becoming Winston Churchill, The Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor [Hardcover, Greenwood 2007; Paperback, Enigma 2009] and the co-author of Milking the Public, Political Scandals of the Dairy Lobby from LBJ to Jimmy Carter [Nelson Hall, 1980]. He is an editorial board member of Finest Hour, the quarterly journal of the International Churchill Society and a contributing editor for the libertarian magazine Reason. His work also has appeared in The Churchills in Ireland, 1660-1965, Corrections and Controversies [Irish Academic Press, 2012] as well as two Reason anthologies, Free Minds & Free Markets, Twenty Five Years of Reason [Pacific Research Institute, 1993] and Choice, the Best of Reason [BenBella Books, 2004]. A full-time writer, he was formerly a first amendment and media defense lawyer and a U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agent.
Kathleen, the other half of the father-daughter writing team, has been editing her father’s writing for longer than she cares to remember. She is the co-author with her sister Kelly of the critically acclaimed Organize Your Way: Simple Strategies for Every Personality [Sterling, 2017]. The two sisters are professional organizers, personality-type experts and the founders of PixiesDidIt, a home and life organization business. Kathleen is an honors graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. The novella Appointment in Prague is her second joint writing project with her father. Their first was “Bringing Home the First Amendment”, a review in the August 1984 Reason magazine of Nat Hentoff’s The Day They Came to Arrest the Book. While a teen-ager, she and her father would often take runs together, creating plots for adventure stories as they ran.
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About the Book:
Title: THE LIEBOLD PROTOCOL: a Mattie McGary + Winston Churchill World War 2
Adventure
Author: Michael
& Kathleen McMenamin
Publisher: First Edition Design Publishing
Pages: 389
Genre: Historical Thriller
BOOK BLURB:
Winston Churchill’s Scottish goddaughter, Mattie McGary, the
adventure-seeking Hearst photojournalist, reluctantly returns to Nazi Germany
in the summer of 1934 and once again finds herself in deadly peril in a
gangster state where widespread kidnappings and ransoms are sanctioned by the
new government.
Mattie turns down an early request
by her boss Hearst to go to Germany to report on how Hitler will deal with the
SA Brown Shirts of Ernst Rohm who want a true socialist ‘second revolution’ to
follow Hitler’s stunning first revolution in 1933. Having been away from Germany for over a year, her reputation as “Hitler’s favorite
foreign journalist” is fading and she wants to keep it that way.
Instead, at Churchill’s suggestion, she persuades Hearst to
let her investigate one of the best-kept secrets of
the Great War—that in 1915, facilitated by a sinister German-American working
for Henry Ford, British and Imperial German officials essentially committed
treason by agreeing Britain would sell raw rubber to Germany in exchange for it
selling precision optical equipment to Britain.
Why? To keep the war going and the profits flowing. After Mattie interviews Ford’s
German-American go-between, however, agents of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch
are sent by Churchill’s political opponents in the British government to rough
her up and warn her she will be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act
unless she backs off the story.
Left no choice, Mattie sets out
for Germany to investigate the story from the German side and
interview the German nobleman who negotiated the optics for rubber deal. There,
Mattie lands right in the middle of what Hearst originally wanted her to
investigate—Adolf Hitler believes one revolution is enough—and she learns that
Hitler has ordered the SS to assassinate all the senior leadership of Ernst
Rohm’s SA Brown Shirts as well as other political enemies on Saturday 30 June,
an event soon known to History as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’.
Mattie must flee Germany to save her life. Not only does the German-American
working for Henry Ford want her story on the optics for rubber treason killed,
he wants her dead along with it. Worse, Mattie’s nemesis, the ‘Blond Beast’ of
the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, is in charge of Hitler’s purge and he’s secretly put
her name on his list…
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