Title: APPOINTMENT IN PRAGUE: A MATTIE MCGARY + WINSTON CHURCHILL WORLD WAR II ADVENTURE
Author: Michael McMenamin & Kathleen McMenamin
Publisher: First Edition Design Publishing
Pages: 160
Genre: Historical Thriller
In the novella, Appointment in Prague, one woman, a British secret agent, sets out in May 1942 to single-handedly send to hell the most evil Nazi alive—SS General Reinhard Heydrich,
the head of the SD, the domestic and foreign counter-intelligence wing
of the SS; second in rank only to the head of the SS himself, Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler; and the architect of “The Final Solution” that will send millions of European Jews to their doom.
When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill authorizes the SOE—the ‘Special Operations Executive’— in October 1941 to assassinate Heydrich, he is unaware that the entire operation has been conceived and is being run by his Scottish goddaughter, the former Pulitzer Prize-winning Hearst photojournalist Mattie McGary. The SOE is Churchill’s own creation, one he informally describes as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and, at his suggestion, Mattie becomes one of its Deputy Directors.
Mattie has a history with Heydrich dating back to 1933 and a personal score to settle. In September 1941, when the man known variously as ‘The Blond Beast’ and ‘The Man With the Iron Heart’—that last coming from Adolf Hitler himself—is appointed Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, the remnants left of Czechoslovakia after the Germans had dismembered it in 1939, Mattie is determined—now that he is no longer safely within Germany’s borders—to have him killed. She recruits and trains several Czech partisans for the task and has them parachuted into Czechoslovakia in December 1941.
An increasingly impatient Mattie waits in London for word that her agents have killed the Blond Beast. By May 1942, Heydrich still lives and Mattie is furious. The mother of six-year-old twins, Mattie decides—without telling her godfather or her American husband, the #2 man in the London office of the OSS—to parachute into Czechoslovakia herself and “light a fire under their timid Czech bums”. Which she does, but her agents botch the job and Heydrich is only wounded in the attempt. The doctors sent from Berlin to care for him believe he will recover.
On the fly, Mattie conceives a new plan to kill Heydrich herself. With forged papers and other help from the highest-placed SOE asset in Nazi Germany—a former lover—Mattie determines to covertly enter Prague’s Bulovka Hospital and finish the job. After that, all she has to do is flee Prague into Germany and from there to neutral Switzerland. What Mattie doesn’t know is that Walter Schellenberg, Heydrich’s protégé and the head of Foreign Intelligence for the SD, is watching her every move.
When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill authorizes the SOE—the ‘Special Operations Executive’— in October 1941 to assassinate Heydrich, he is unaware that the entire operation has been conceived and is being run by his Scottish goddaughter, the former Pulitzer Prize-winning Hearst photojournalist Mattie McGary. The SOE is Churchill’s own creation, one he informally describes as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and, at his suggestion, Mattie becomes one of its Deputy Directors.
Mattie has a history with Heydrich dating back to 1933 and a personal score to settle. In September 1941, when the man known variously as ‘The Blond Beast’ and ‘The Man With the Iron Heart’—that last coming from Adolf Hitler himself—is appointed Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, the remnants left of Czechoslovakia after the Germans had dismembered it in 1939, Mattie is determined—now that he is no longer safely within Germany’s borders—to have him killed. She recruits and trains several Czech partisans for the task and has them parachuted into Czechoslovakia in December 1941.
An increasingly impatient Mattie waits in London for word that her agents have killed the Blond Beast. By May 1942, Heydrich still lives and Mattie is furious. The mother of six-year-old twins, Mattie decides—without telling her godfather or her American husband, the #2 man in the London office of the OSS—to parachute into Czechoslovakia herself and “light a fire under their timid Czech bums”. Which she does, but her agents botch the job and Heydrich is only wounded in the attempt. The doctors sent from Berlin to care for him believe he will recover.
On the fly, Mattie conceives a new plan to kill Heydrich herself. With forged papers and other help from the highest-placed SOE asset in Nazi Germany—a former lover—Mattie determines to covertly enter Prague’s Bulovka Hospital and finish the job. After that, all she has to do is flee Prague into Germany and from there to neutral Switzerland. What Mattie doesn’t know is that Walter Schellenberg, Heydrich’s protégé and the head of Foreign Intelligence for the SD, is watching her every move.
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Excerpt:
KEEPING SECRETS from her husband, Bourke Cockran, Jr., was
nothing new for Mattie McGary as she gently kissed her sleeping husband goodbye
before she left for her office where she had to prepare two pieces of
correspondence. One was an ‘eyes only’ letter to her godfather, Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, telling him everything about her new mission, one he never
would have approved had he known beforehand. The other was a letter to her
husband on the same subject where she most definitely would not tell him
‘everything’. The second letter would be much more difficult to write than the
first.
When she had been a Pulitzer Prize-winning
photojournalist for the Hearst organization in the 20s and 30s, she often had
promised confidentiality to her sources and kept their identities a secret even
from Cockran, both before and after he became her husband. He understood
because, as a lawyer, he never disclosed to her privileged and confidential
communications he received from his clients no matter how newsworthy and
interested she might be in that information.
Once her godfather, Winston Churchill, became Prime
Minister in May 1940 and, at his request, she joined the SOE—the ‘Special
Operations Executive’—Mattie’s entire professional life became a secret from
Cockran, courtesy of Great Britain’s Official Secrets Act. The SOE was
Churchill’s own creation which he informally, albeit accurately, described as
the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
A year later, in June 1941, at the behest of his
law partner, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, Cockran began work for a new United
States government agency that became the OSS—the ‘Office of Strategic
Services’—so that his entire professional life became a secret from her thanks
to the America’s Espionage Act of 1917.
Now, Cockran was the #2 man at the OSS station in
London and she was the Deputy Director of the SOE for Central Europe. It had
certainly complicated their marriage, Mattie thought as she softly closed the
door to their suite at the Savoy.
Inter-Services Research Bureau
64 Baker Street
London
Saturday, 2 May 1942
MATTIE STOOD up from her desk in her office at SOE
headquarters, the outside of which carried on a brass plate the innocuous name
of Inter-Services Research Bureau, and walked over to the sideboard. She made
herself a cup of tea and looked down on the traffic below on Baker Street where
it was raining and pedestrian umbrellas were out in full force.
A husband and wife being spies for different Allied
governments raised more than a few eyebrows in the SOE and the OSS, but each
spouse had their own high-ranking patrons, Mattie with her godfather as the
British Prime Minister and Cockran with his old law partner Donovan as head of
the OSS. Nevertheless, they never brought work home to their suite at the Savoy
and never discussed with each other what they did.
Mattie was in a dilemma today, however, because
they had made each other a promise that she was about to violate. For the sake
of their two six-year-old children, fraternal twins Nora and Eric, they had
promised not to volunteer for any dangerous assignments in the field. At
the time, it seemed like a safe promise as both were sufficiently high-ranking
in their respective organizations not to be sent into any countries occupied by
the Nazis.
That was all before Operation Anthropoid—the
assassination of SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘Butcher of Prague’—went off
the rails. No one else at SOE knew the reason why, but she did. The operation
was her idea from the outset. She had conceived it; she had personally trained
the three Czech SOE agents involved; and she was their handler now that they
were in the field. They had been in
Czechoslovakia for almost six months and nothing had happened. Others might disagree,
especially if they knew why she had pushed Operation Anthropoid so vigorously,
but she thought she was the only one with the necessary background to get the
show back on track.
That was why she was not flying to Stockholm
tomorrow for her bimonthly interview with the SOE’s most highly placed asset in
Nazi Germany—her former lover Kurt von Sturm, a high-ranking aide to the head
of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring. Instead,
she would be resurrecting from storage the leather flying outfit she had first
worn over ten years ago—a shearling–lined sheepskin flying jacket with matching
sheepskin trousers, boots and helmet—when she had flown across the country in
Cockran’s autogiro in her attempt to break Amelia Earhart’s coast-to coast
autogiro record. Then, that night, she would parachute into Occupied Europe to
kick-start an assassination plan that should have been completed six months
ago.
Travel outside Great Britain came with the job
descriptions for her and her husband. Typically, they told each other when they
left the country unless the destination itself was mission critical. Well, her
destination this time was most definitely mission critical and she would be
breaking her word to Cockran by doing so—she not only had volunteered for the
mission, she had created it. Still, she didn’t want to lie and telling him she
would be away for a month on assignment without adding that she would be out of
the country would almost be the same as a lie.
Finally, Mattie settled on the least deceptive
option. She would tell him the truth, just not all the truth. Isn’t that
what lawyers did all the time? She would tell him she was going to Switzerland
on assignment. Which she was, eventually, if she survived the most dangerous
part of the mission. She just wasn’t going there first. She went back to her
typewriter to finish her letter to the Prime Minister filling him in on her
mission and instructing him on what he was to tell her husband if she didn’t
make it back. She knew Winston wouldn’t like what she was doing any more than
her husband and indeed likely would have forbade her to do so had he known. But
her godfather had a war to run and he could not possibly keep track of every
SOE or MI-6 mission abroad. From her days working for Hearst, Mattie had always
believed begging for forgiveness afterwards was better than asking for
permission beforehand. After all, it
wouldn’t be a violation of the Official Secrets Act for the Prime Minister to
know what her husband could not.
Over nine years in the making, an old score was
about to be settled. Reinhard Heydrich was about to discover that, just as
Death once had an appointment in Samarra, Mattie McGary had an appointment in
Prague.
Thanks for this
interview, Michael. Can we begin by having you tell us about yourself from a
writer’s standpoint?
I write both fiction and non-fiction. I’m an editorial board
member of Finest Hour, the quarterly journal of the International Churchill
Society where, for 20 years, my column ‘Action This Day’ has chronicled
Churchill’s life 125, 100 and 75 years ago. I’m also a Contributing Editor for
the libertarian magazine REASON and I was previously a Contributing Editor for INQUIRY,
the now defunct bi-weekly magazine of the Cato Institute. My published work is listed below.
Non-Fiction
Milking the Public, Political Scandals of the Dairy Lobby
From LBJ to Jimmy Carter [Nelson Hall, 1980]
Becoming Winston Churchill, The Untold Story of Young
Winston and His American Mentor [Hardcover:
Greenwood, 2007; Trade Paperback:
Enigma, 2009]
Anthologies
Free Minds & Free Markets, Twenty Five Years of Reason
[Pacific Research Institute, 1993]
Choice: The Best of Reason [Benbella, 2003]
The Churchills in Ireland
1660-1965: Connections & Controversies [Irish Academic Press, 2012]
Fiction
The DeValera Deception, A Winston Churchill Thriller [Enigma,
2010]
The Parsifal Pursuit, A Winston Churchill Thriller [Enigma, 2011]
The Gemini Agenda, A Winston Churchill Thriller [Enigma, 2012]
The Berghof Betrayal, A Winston Churchill 1930s Thriller [First
Edition Design, 2016]
The Silver Mosaic, A Winston Churchill 1930s Thriller [First
Edition Design, 2017]
Appointment in Prague,
a Mattie McGary + Winston Churchill World War II Adventure [First Edition Design, 2018]
The Liebold Protocol, a Mattie McGary + Winston Churchill
1930s Adventure [First Edition Design, 2018]
When not writing,
what do you like to do for relaxation and/or fun?
Tennis, travel and reading.
Congratulations on
your new book! Can you give us the very first page of your book so that we can
get a glimpse inside?
1.
Appointment in Prague
The Savoy
London
Saturday,
2 May 1942
KEEPING SECRETS from
her husband, Bourke Cockran, Jr., was nothing new for Mattie McGary as
she gently kissed her sleeping husband goodbye before she left for her office
where she had to prepare two pieces of correspondence. One was an ‘eyes only’
letter to her godfather, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, telling him
everything about her new mission, one he never would have approved had he known
beforehand. The other was a letter to her husband on the same subject where she
most definitely would not tell him ‘everything’. The second letter would be
much more difficult to write than the first.
When she had been a Pulitzer
Prize-winning photojournalist for the Hearst organization in the 20s and 30s,
she often had promised confidentiality to her sources and kept their identities
a secret even from Cockran, both before and after he became her husband. He
understood because, as a lawyer, he never disclosed to her privileged and confidential
communications he received from his clients no matter how newsworthy and
interested she might be in that information.
Once her godfather, Winston
Churchill, became Prime Minister in May 1940 and, at his request, she joined the
SOE—the ‘Special Operations Executive’—Mattie’s entire professional life became
a secret from Cockran, courtesy of Great Britain’s Official Secrets Act. The SOE was Churchill’s own
creation which he informally, albeit accurately, described as the Ministry of
Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Would you say it’s
been a rocky road for you in regards to getting your book written and published
or pretty much smooth sailing? Can you
tell us about your journey?
Rocky? Not really. The rocky road was getting the first
novel published. Here’s that journey.
Enigma Books in New York bought in 2009 the trade paperback
rights to my biography of the young [age 20-45] Winston Churchill—Becoming
Winston Churchill, the Untold Story of Young Winston and His American Mentor—the
hardcover version of which had been published in the UK and the US in 2007 by a
division of Harcourt. Enigma specialized in non-fiction books on 20th
century European and US
history. I got to know Enigma’s editor quite well as I would come to New York
at my expense whenever he could arrange a venue for me to talk about my book
because all three of my children lived in the city and their mother and I could
visit and stay with them.
At that time, I had written with my son Patrick two
unpublished historical thrillers set in the 1930s featuring Winston Churchill
as a catalyst for our main characters—The DeValera Deception and The Parsifal
Pursuit—and we were in the middle of writing a third—The Gemini Agenda. Our
agents [different ones for each of the first two books] had secured for us
quite a few encouraging rejection letters from well-known New
York publishers praising our work, but alas no sale.
I noticed in the backlist for Enigma that, while almost all of its 50+ books
were non-fiction, it had also published 3 historical thrillers. I asked
Enigma’s editor if he would like to read our first two Churchill historical
thrillers. He did and, after he read them as well as a synopsis of the third
novel, we signed a three-book deal for them shortly thereafter and became
published—and literary award winning—novelists.
If you had to
summarize your book in one sentence, what would that be?
In
the novella, Appointment in Prague, one woman—a British secret agent—sets out
in May 1942 to single-handedly send to hell the most evil Nazi alive—SS General
Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the counter-intelligence wing of the SS and the
architect of ‘The Final Solution’ that will send millions of European Jews to
their doom.
What makes your book
stand out from the rest?
So far as I’m aware, it’s the only work of fiction focused
on the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by agents of the British Special
Operations Executive [SOE].
If your book was put
in the holiday section of the store, what holiday would that be and why?
Judgment Day. When the most evil Nazi gets what’s coming to
him.
Would you consider
turning your book into a series or has that already been done?
It’s already been done. While only a novella, rather than a
full-length novel, Appointment in Prague,
a Mattie McGary + Winston Churchill World War II Adventure, is the 6th
book to feature the intrepid globe-trotting Hearst photojournalist Mattie
McGary and her godfather, the British statesman Winston Churchill.
The first five novels in the series are The DeValera
Deception, The Parsifal Pursuit, The Gemini Agenda, The Berghof Betrayal and The
Silver Mosaic.
What’s 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.
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.
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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