Keith Raffel: August 2010 Archives

Recently, I sat down with the father and son writing team of Michael and Patrick McMenamin to talk about their debut novel, The De Valera Deception.

How did you come up with the idea of The De Valera Deception?

MICHAEL: I'm a Winston Churchill biographer and scholar, and I've always had an interest in Irish history as well. Patrick is a Phi Beta Kappa history major who specialized in 19th and 20th century European history, so we both have an interest in the period where our thrillers occur. For years, I had talked about writing a thriller series set in Churchill's "Wilderness Years" from 1929 to 1939. I wanted the first book, set in 1929,  to revolve around two historical facts: Churchill's three-month holiday that summer in North America  while at the same time the Graf Zeppelin was making its historical round the world airship flight  sponsored by the Hearst media empire.

PATRICK: The rest we sort of pieced together over family dinners whenever we visited each other. (I think it's fair to say we became a bit of a nuisance at the dinner table for the rest of the family.) We were both familiar with Weimar Germany's secret military alliance with the USSR during the 1920s which enabled Germany to evade the Versailles Treaty's limits on arms. This is years before Hitler assumed power. Germany  developed in Russia the most modern weapons systems in Europe--planes, tanks, artillery, poison gas--and the Allies were none the wiser. The goal of the alliance was to invade Poland and divide it between them. That's all historical fact.