Up Close & Personal with 'The Prussian Memorandum' Michael McMenamin #upcloseandpersonal
Up Close & Personal is one of The Writer’s Life newest features. Here we feature authors who don't mind spilling the beans and telling what it's really like to write, get published and sell that book. Today's guest is Michael McMenamin, co-author of the 1930s historical adventure, The Prussian Memorandum. You can visit Michael's website at www.winstonchurchillthrillers.com.
On Writing…
How did I become a writer? Someone asked me. The editor of the monthly libertarian magazine Reason [whose motto is Free Minds & Free Markets] solicited an article on the dairy lobby’s political lobbying of the federal government to keep milk prices artificially high. I replied and the resulting article, ‘Milk, Money & Monopoly’ was the cover story in the March 1976 issue of Reason. That in turn evolved into my first book in 1980, Milking the Public: Political Scandals of the Dairy Lobby from LBJ to Jimmy Carter and my subsequent testimony before the U.S. Senate Agricultural Committee in 1981.
After that, I became a Contributing Editor for Reason, Inquiry and Finest Hour, the quarterly journal of the International Churchill Society. Over the past 40 years, I’ve had over 500 articles published on politics, economics, free trade, free speech, foreign policy and many aspects of Churchill’s long public life in those publications as well as the Nation, The Wall Street Journal, and various other newspapers across the country.
As to how I’ve advanced as a writer, I didn’t have another book published until 2007 in both Great Britain and the United States, Becoming Winston Churchill, the Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor. It was published in 2009 as a trade paperback by Enigma Books in New York who went on to publish my first three historical adventures set in the 1930s featuring Churchill and his intrepid [fictional] Scottish goddaughter, the Hearst photojournalist Mattie McGary.
Now, I only write fiction, eight books in all, about the 1930s adventures of Mattie and Winston, the most recent being The Prussian Memorandum.
On Being Published…
Well, being published for the first time was over 40 years ago, but I vaguely recall being impressed that my first article was a cover story. I have a much more vivid memory of what it was like when Becoming Winston Churchill was published because, prior to publication, my co-author and I had sent reading copies to Churchill’s official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert and the Director of the Churchill Archives at Cambridge University, Allen Packwood, for their comments. To say I was pleased by their subsequent comments is an understatement.
Gilbert: “Fascinating: a tour de force that brings light and life to one of the great early influences on Winston Churchill.”
Packwood: “A magnificent achievement and an illuminating study of a largely forgotten relationship.”
In the recent 2019 Churchill biography by Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking With Destiny, I am referred to as a “fellow Churchill historian” and the “biographer” of Churchill’s American mentor. Becoming Winston Churchill
Is cited four times.
Since that book, I have only written fiction featuring Churchill—five books with my son Patrick and the last three with my daughter Kathleen. Why? Easy. The famous Hollywood director Billy Wilder [‘Some Like It Hot’] once said “You’re as good as the best thing you’ve ever done.” Well, by far and away, Becoming Winston Churchill is the best thing I’ve ever done and I really don’t believe I could ever do better. Time to retire from the non-fiction world.
What does it mean to be a published author? You don’t have time to be bored. After your current book is published, you begin work on your next book. That’s what Churchill did and published 56 books in his lifetime, including, at an early age, a political thriller where the hero seduces the villain’s beautiful wife.
And speaking of our current book, The Prussian Memorandum, it is actually relevant to our current racial protests. In 1934, 30 of the 48 American states had laws prohibiting marriage and sexual relations between whites and a wide variety of other races. At one point earlier in our history, it was 37 states with such laws. As shown by James Q. Whitman in his 2017 book Hitler’s American Model, The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, the Nazis used these racist American laws as a model for their own laws against German Jews that, among other things, prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Aryans and Jews. This hits close to home for me as I have two Jewish grandchildren and three Chinese-American grandchildren.
The Prussian Memorandum of the book’s title is an actual historical document containing the legal research into American laws that the Nazis used for their anti-Jewish laws. So…what if the Nazis commissioned sympathetic anti-Semitic elements of the U.S, government [like the notoriously anti-Semitic Military Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army] to conduct this legal research? And…what if Churchill learns of this and persuades his fictional journalist goddaughter to investigate? And, further…what if both U.S. agents and Nazi agents are determined to stop Mattie and keep her from exposing this shameful secret?
Well, you get the picture.
On Publishing Industry…
Being a critically acclaimed rather than a best-selling writer, I like the changes and I like Amazon. Essentially, even if a book is out of print, you can almost always find it at a used bookseller on Amazon or ABE books. That includes the 40-year-old Milking the Public. I also like Amazon because of Audible and its ACX where I’ve been able to hire narrators and create audiobooks for the first five of the Mattie + Winston adventures as well as Becoming Winston Churchill.
The publisher of our first three novels was Enigma Books, but it closed its doors when its owner died. We’re now with First Edition Design, a hybrid POD publisher and we’re happy there.
On Marketing…
We’re not very good at it. We’ve done virtual book tours and press releases for the last five books, but not much more. We really don’t keep our Facebook page or our website current, but we do keep our Amazon authors page current.
On Goals and Dreams…
Goal? To keep writing. We’re only at 1934 in the Mattie + Winston 1930s adventures and the next two books will take us into 1935—how the Nazis used American and British aircraft engines to rearm the Luftwaffe in one book and the use of poison gas by the Italians in their invasion of Ethiopia in the one after that. Maybe we’ll use the Nazi Olympics as a backdrop in 1936 for the 3rd book, but we’ve not thought ahead that far.
Advice: If you’re new to fiction as I was, the Dramatica Pro software is an excellent instructor and guide and I highly recommend it. I used it to outline and draft our first two novels and it’s useful in teaching you the importance of characters and their interactions. The examples it gives from popular books and movies are very good. I still use its guide for chapter and scene outlines.
I’ve primarily used since then The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd edition by Christopher Vogler. It’s based on the 12 stages of a hero’s journey from Joseph Campbell. Once you learn the 12 stages, you’ll never be surprised again by how popular books or movies end.
How did I become a writer? Someone asked me. The editor of the monthly libertarian magazine Reason [whose motto is Free Minds & Free Markets] solicited an article on the dairy lobby’s political lobbying of the federal government to keep milk prices artificially high. I replied and the resulting article, ‘Milk, Money & Monopoly’ was the cover story in the March 1976 issue of Reason. That in turn evolved into my first book in 1980, Milking the Public: Political Scandals of the Dairy Lobby from LBJ to Jimmy Carter and my subsequent testimony before the U.S. Senate Agricultural Committee in 1981.
After that, I became a Contributing Editor for Reason, Inquiry and Finest Hour, the quarterly journal of the International Churchill Society. Over the past 40 years, I’ve had over 500 articles published on politics, economics, free trade, free speech, foreign policy and many aspects of Churchill’s long public life in those publications as well as the Nation, The Wall Street Journal, and various other newspapers across the country.
As to how I’ve advanced as a writer, I didn’t have another book published until 2007 in both Great Britain and the United States, Becoming Winston Churchill, the Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor. It was published in 2009 as a trade paperback by Enigma Books in New York who went on to publish my first three historical adventures set in the 1930s featuring Churchill and his intrepid [fictional] Scottish goddaughter, the Hearst photojournalist Mattie McGary.
Now, I only write fiction, eight books in all, about the 1930s adventures of Mattie and Winston, the most recent being The Prussian Memorandum.
On Being Published…
Well, being published for the first time was over 40 years ago, but I vaguely recall being impressed that my first article was a cover story. I have a much more vivid memory of what it was like when Becoming Winston Churchill was published because, prior to publication, my co-author and I had sent reading copies to Churchill’s official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert and the Director of the Churchill Archives at Cambridge University, Allen Packwood, for their comments. To say I was pleased by their subsequent comments is an understatement.
Gilbert: “Fascinating: a tour de force that brings light and life to one of the great early influences on Winston Churchill.”
Packwood: “A magnificent achievement and an illuminating study of a largely forgotten relationship.”
In the recent 2019 Churchill biography by Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking With Destiny, I am referred to as a “fellow Churchill historian” and the “biographer” of Churchill’s American mentor. Becoming Winston Churchill
Is cited four times.
Since that book, I have only written fiction featuring Churchill—five books with my son Patrick and the last three with my daughter Kathleen. Why? Easy. The famous Hollywood director Billy Wilder [‘Some Like It Hot’] once said “You’re as good as the best thing you’ve ever done.” Well, by far and away, Becoming Winston Churchill is the best thing I’ve ever done and I really don’t believe I could ever do better. Time to retire from the non-fiction world.
What does it mean to be a published author? You don’t have time to be bored. After your current book is published, you begin work on your next book. That’s what Churchill did and published 56 books in his lifetime, including, at an early age, a political thriller where the hero seduces the villain’s beautiful wife.
And speaking of our current book, The Prussian Memorandum, it is actually relevant to our current racial protests. In 1934, 30 of the 48 American states had laws prohibiting marriage and sexual relations between whites and a wide variety of other races. At one point earlier in our history, it was 37 states with such laws. As shown by James Q. Whitman in his 2017 book Hitler’s American Model, The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, the Nazis used these racist American laws as a model for their own laws against German Jews that, among other things, prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Aryans and Jews. This hits close to home for me as I have two Jewish grandchildren and three Chinese-American grandchildren.
The Prussian Memorandum of the book’s title is an actual historical document containing the legal research into American laws that the Nazis used for their anti-Jewish laws. So…what if the Nazis commissioned sympathetic anti-Semitic elements of the U.S, government [like the notoriously anti-Semitic Military Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army] to conduct this legal research? And…what if Churchill learns of this and persuades his fictional journalist goddaughter to investigate? And, further…what if both U.S. agents and Nazi agents are determined to stop Mattie and keep her from exposing this shameful secret?
Well, you get the picture.
On Publishing Industry…
Being a critically acclaimed rather than a best-selling writer, I like the changes and I like Amazon. Essentially, even if a book is out of print, you can almost always find it at a used bookseller on Amazon or ABE books. That includes the 40-year-old Milking the Public. I also like Amazon because of Audible and its ACX where I’ve been able to hire narrators and create audiobooks for the first five of the Mattie + Winston adventures as well as Becoming Winston Churchill.
The publisher of our first three novels was Enigma Books, but it closed its doors when its owner died. We’re now with First Edition Design, a hybrid POD publisher and we’re happy there.
On Marketing…
We’re not very good at it. We’ve done virtual book tours and press releases for the last five books, but not much more. We really don’t keep our Facebook page or our website current, but we do keep our Amazon authors page current.
On Goals and Dreams…
Goal? To keep writing. We’re only at 1934 in the Mattie + Winston 1930s adventures and the next two books will take us into 1935—how the Nazis used American and British aircraft engines to rearm the Luftwaffe in one book and the use of poison gas by the Italians in their invasion of Ethiopia in the one after that. Maybe we’ll use the Nazi Olympics as a backdrop in 1936 for the 3rd book, but we’ve not thought ahead that far.
Advice: If you’re new to fiction as I was, the Dramatica Pro software is an excellent instructor and guide and I highly recommend it. I used it to outline and draft our first two novels and it’s useful in teaching you the importance of characters and their interactions. The examples it gives from popular books and movies are very good. I still use its guide for chapter and scene outlines.
I’ve primarily used since then The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd edition by Christopher Vogler. It’s based on the 12 stages of a hero’s journey from Joseph Campbell. Once you learn the 12 stages, you’ll never be surprised again by how popular books or movies end.
About the Book
Winston Churchill’s adventure-seeking goddaughter, the intrepid Hearst journalist Mattie McGary, sets out in 1934 to expose a major political scandal—a conspiracy between the US Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) and Hitler’s Praetorian, the SS, to help the Nazis persecute German Jews.
Churchill alerts Mattie to what he learns from a confidential German source: that the Nazis are working on a new law to strip Jews of their citizenship and forbid them to marry or have sex with Aryans. The year before, Heinrich Himmler’s SS secretly engaged the MID to research racist laws in thirty American states that prohibit sex and marriage between whites and other races. Known as “The Prussian Memorandum”—an actual historic document—radical SS anti-Semites plan to use these racist American laws as a model for their treatment of the Jews
Aided by a courageous German lawyer, Hanna Raeder, Mattie’s efforts to document the conspiracy take her from Churchill’s country home in England to the corridors of power in Berlin and, along with Churchill, to the canals of Amsterdam where his German source is to provide them with conclusive proof of the conspiracy. Pursued by both agents of Himmler’s Gestapo and American MID agents determined to stop them at all costs, Mattie and Hanna race to expose the shameful secret of The Prussian Memorandum.
In a chilling climax, Mattie and Hanna are arrested and taken to a Gestapo-run concentration camp where they are charged with crimes against the state—Hanna for treason, Mattie for espionage— and scheduled for show trials the next day before The People’s Court. If convicted, the penalty is death by beheading.
Literary Awards and Praise for Mattie McGary’s Adventures with Winston Churchill
Three-Time Grand Prize Winner Fiction, Next Generation Indie Book Awards
Three-Time Thriller/Suspense Book of the Year, ForeWord Reviews
Two-Time Historical Fiction Book of the Year, ForeWord Reviews
Appointment in Prague
“A thrilling historical novel with a no-nonsense heroine is what you’ll find… Wow! This is an action-packed, intense story that brings the reader right into the world of WW II espionage. Well-developed characters, a tough heroine, and great attention to detail.” [The Book Connection review]
“Mattie McGary was easily my favorite character and I loved how the authors made her into a strong female character with a very real personality. So many times strong female characters end up feeling almost unrealistic and that was not the case with Mattie.” [Books for Books review]
The Berghof Betrayal
“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.” [Goodreads 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. “[Amazon review]
The Silver Mosaic
“This is a well-written historical novel that stays true to the time period and keeps its historic facts accurate. I really liked how the authors immersed me in the time period right from the first page.” [Amazon review].
“Historical fiction that excels. I immediately became involved with both the characters and plot, which took on a life of their own. I have read much shorter books that seemed far longer than The Silver Mosaic.” [Goodreads review].
The Gemini Agenda
“A thick and rich tale that is impossible to put down, So many twists and turns and the ending is gripping…This book holds its own with the best historical fiction.” [Goodreads review]
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