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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Did you like Historical Fiction growing up?
I liked a lot of genres generally, but fiction set in the past always attracted me e.g., Eric Ambler’s spy novels; C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series; Sax Rhoemer’s Fu Manchu books, etc.
What is the first historical fiction you wrote?
The DeValera Deception was both our first novel written and published. An earlier—and much longer—iteration of The DeValera Deception titled The Last Apostle was submitted by our agent to quite a few publishers without success. Same basic plot, characters, etc. except DeValera is much shorter.
What is your favorite part of writing?
I love it when readers understand the story and our characters the same way we do. The comments below from reviews of our 5th Churchill Thriller, The Silver Mosaic, illustrate this.
From an Amazon review: “One of the best thrillers I’ve read in a long time. It’s detailed, nuanced and beautifully written. Historical fact and fiction were so seamlessly woven together that I wasn’t sure which was which!”
[Exactly! That’s why we always include an ‘Historical Note’ at the end of every book so that readers can sort fact from fiction.]
From an Amazon review: “I’ve read and enjoyed all of the books in this series and I vote this one as the most exciting yet, full of twists and turns and I really cared about what happened to the characters. It was a most believable page-turner right to the very end. I can’t wait for their next book.”
[Until our next book The Liebold Protocol is published in late October 2018, readers will find a preview of six chapters of that book at the end of our short novella, "Appointment in Prague," where our ultimate evil character from earlier books, Reinhard Heydrich, finally gets what’s coming to him in 1942 Prague.]
And my favorite one, this from a Goodreads review about our main female character: “Mattie McGary is what every woman wants to be: strong-willed, the ability to take care of herself, and who doesn’t take crap from anyone.”
[Exactly! Mattie is a Scottish version of the Irish-American actress Maureen O’Hara in the classic film The Quiet Man and any other film in which she co-stars with John Wayne, right down to her red hair and fiery temper.]
Is there an author in the genre you admire?
There are so many I both read and admire that I can’t single one out. In no particular order, they are:
Ken Follett’s historical thrillers, Alan Furst’s 1930s spy novels, W.E.B. Griffin’s OSS novels, George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, Clive Cussler’s Isaac Bell novels, Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd novels, Michael Dobbs’ WW II Churchill novels Susan MacNeil’s Maggie Hope novels; Rebecca Cantrell’s Hannah Vogel novels, David Downing’s John Russell novels, James Benn’s Billy Boyle novels, Stephen Hunter’s Earl Swagger novels, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Enigma and Munich, Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels, Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs novels, Robert Goddard’s WW I novels, Kerry Greenwood’s Miss Fisher mysteries, Rhys Bowen’s Her Royal Spyness novels, Joseph Kanon’s post-WW II novels.
What is up next for you?The Liebold Protocol, a Mattie McGary + Winston Churchill 1930s Adventure will be published in October 2018. It is set mainly in Nazi Germany in the days leading up to the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on 30 June 1934 where the SS murdered most of Hitler’s political enemies. It was written with my daughter Kathleen McMenamin who thinks she knows more about fiction than her brother and me because she has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from NYU and we don’t. We (modestly) point out that we have literary awards and she doesn’t, but—to be fair—she and her MBA sister have written a critically acclaimed book, Organize Your Way: Simple Strategies for Every Personality [Sterling, 2017], where they give organizational advice based on personality types. They have more TV appearances to talk about their book than we do, but that’s a low bar.
My daughter Kathleen and I are currently at work on The Prussian Memorandum, another Mattie + Winston adventure that will be published in 2019. It is set in America, England and Nazi Germany in 1934 and tells the true story about the legislative process in Germany that led to the 1935 Nuremberg laws making German Jews second-class citizens and forbidding their marriage to Aryans. The Nazis used American state legislation and case law re racial miscegenation and second-class citizenship in the U.S.—what the Germans called ‘The Prussian Memorandum’—as models to do the same to Germany’s Jews. Neither the Americans nor the Nazis want this made public. Any journalist—like Mattie McGary—who attempts to do so will be placed in peril.
Do you have anything else to add?
Sure. Here are the best ways to connect with us or find out more about our work:
Email: wsc_mcmenamin13@yahoo.com
Amazon Author’s Page: http://amazon.com/author/mcmenaminbooks
The following two links have some really good stuff, but they are not current. It’s more fun to write books than to update the links. Volunteers to do so will be gratefully accepted.
Website: http://winstonchurchillthrillers.com
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