Interview with 'The Liebold Protocol' Michael McMenamin

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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What’s inside the mind of a historical thriller author?

For me it’s Winston Churchill, the 1930s and the rise of Nazi Germany because that’s the backdrop for our novels

What is so great about being an author?

I like to write and I like telling stories about things I know a lot about like Churchill, the 1930s, Hitler and the other Nazis.

When do you hate it?

I don’t.

What is a regular writing day like for you?

1500 words is a regular day. Hopefully 2-3 hours in the morning and another 2-3 in the afternoon

How do you handle negative reviews? So long as they’re in a minority compared to other reviews, I usually ignore them. If there is something constructive in them, I try and learn from it. I once erroneously made a reference to the Guinness Book of World Records in 1933 when, as a reviewer pointed out, it didn’t begin until the 1950s. Saved me from making the same mistake twice.

How do you handle positive reviews?

It makes me happy when a reader appreciates one of our stories in the way we intended.

What is the usual response when you tell a new acquaintance that you’re an author?

“Oh, really? What do you write?” I tell them both fiction and non-fiction, but that I primarily write historical thrillers set in the 1930s featuring Winston Churchill and his adventure-seeking fictional goddaughter. Then I hand them my business card that has the cover of one of our books on one side and a list of all my fiction and nonfiction on the other. I encourage them to visit my Amazon Author’s Page.

What do you do on those days you don’t feel like writing? Do you force it or take a break?

Those days are few and far between.  If I’m not writing, it’s usually because I have too many other things on my plate that day.

I rarely have what they call ‘writer’s block’. That’s because I make a general outline for my main characters patterned on Joseph Campbell’s 12 Stages of the Hero’s Journey so I pretty much know where I’m going even if I don’t have all the twists and turns down yet. There are typically 4-5 chapters for each stage that I will outline in more detail before I begin actual writing. When I finish writing all the chapters in one stage, then I’ll outline the chapters in the next stage. Plus, I like to stop writing for the day in a middle of a chapter so it’s easier to start up the next day.

Coming up with a basic concept for a book can be difficult, but I’m writing a series with continuing characters so they can help me as well especially since our heroine is a photojournalist. So we just have to find a new story for her. We can do this because we all have a journalistic background. My son Patrick, who wrote the first five books with me is a journalist has worked for ABC and Fox; my daughter Katie who wrote The Liebold Protocol with me and is working with me on our next novel The Prussian Memorandum once worked in news for a FOX station; and I was a media defense lawyer for many years representing journalists in law suits.

Any writing quirks?

Unlike the late William F. Buckley, Jr. whose fiction I admired, I believe short words are better than long ones.

What would you do if people around you didn’t take your writing seriously or see it as a hobby?

Ignore them. Or maybe find new people to have around me.

Some authors seem to have a love-hate relationship to writing. Can you relate?

Nope

Do you think success as an author must be linked to money?

Only if you define it that way.

That said, I think writers should be paid for writing. I’ve been a contributing editor for over 25 years for the libertarian magazine Reason and Finest Hour, the quarterly journal of the International Churchill Society and their checks haven’t bounced yet. Ditto the royalty checks for my six novels, one novella, five audiobooks and two non-fiction books.

It’s true I made more money as a lawyer, but that’s why I can write full time now.

What has writing taught you?

Words matter. Take care with them.

As Churchill said in 1908 at the Author’s Club in London: “What a noble medium the English language is. It is not possible to write a page without experiencing positive pleasure at the richness and variety, the flexibility and the profoundness of our mother tongue.”

Or as Churchill said on the same occasion: “I feel devoutly thankful to have been born fond of writing.”

Me too.

Leave us with some words of wisdom.

Buy low; sell high?

Seriously, I’m a Churchill biographer so here’s more from the great man and, BTW, this is the accurate version of what he said to the boys at Harrow School on 29 October 1941 unlike most of the versions on the internet:

“Never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

About The Liebold Protocol:

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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