Scott's Note:
Terrence McCauley guest posts here today. Over the last several
years, Terrence has gone back and forth between writing books set in the
present and books set in the past, and I asked him to talk about this.
How does he approach jumping around through different time periods when
imagining and writing stories?
Let's see what he says.
I have enjoyed the good fortune of having publishers buy several
of my novels set in different time periods. My University Series (SYMPATHY FOR
THE DEVIL, A MURDER OF CROWS and A CONSPIRACY OF RAVENS from Polis Books) are
all cutting-edge thrillers set in the modern day. My Doherty novels (THE DEVIL
DOGS OF BELLEAU WOOD from Down and Out Books, SLOW BURN and THE FAIRFAX
INCIDENT from Polis Books) are set between 1918 and 1933. My upcoming westerns
(WHERE THE BULLETS FLY and DARK TERRITORY from Kensington) will be published in
September 2018 and 2019 respectively and are set in 1880s Montana.
Time also plays a huge role in my inspiration for each book.
Although I may enjoy writing about various eras, I’m very much a product of the
21st Century. I read most of my books on my iPad and write all
of my work on a MacBook. I’m also a news junkie, so the events of the day
always affect my current project, whether it’s James Hicks hunting down
terrorists or Charlie Doherty hunting Nazis in 1930s New York.
Our series of unfortunate current events were a major inspiration
for my latest novel, THE FAIRFAX INCIDENT. I’d like to be able to say that ugly
political and social discourse in our country today is a new phenomenon, but
that’s not the case.
After the Nazis gained power in Germany in 1933, people in this
country and elsewhere began to wonder if fascism might not be a viable
alternative here in the United States. The German American Bund began to rise.
At first, it was seen as an ambivalent fraternal organization where people of
German ancestry were encouraged to come together and celebrate their heritage
in the wake of the humiliating defeat in the Great War. Youth camps similar to
the Boy Scouts were set up around the country, including in Long Island and New
Jersey, to help German-American children be proud of who they were and what
their ancestors had achieved. They embraced their diversity from the rest of
the country.
Slowly, it became much more sinister than that, culminating in a
large, pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in 1938. That event led to more
scrutiny of such organizations and the movement dissipated in the days before
The Second World War. German-Americans and German immigrants alike stood with
their country instead of their culture.
Although that particular movement fortunately failed, it showed
that people can be manipulated into believing all sorts of things if the
message and the messenger is packaged in the right way in the right time. In
recent memory, we’ve seen other, less sinister political movements come and go
and morph into other causes. For example, those who were part of the ‘Save the
Whales’, ‘Global Warming’, ‘Acid Rain’, ‘Global Cooling’ movements have
migrated to the more general Environmental Justice movement. ‘The Tea Party’
movement, that held a political party hostage for several election cycles and
threatened to hold sway over the nation for a generation, has slipped into
obscurity and become fractured. What will ultimately follow in the wake of the
Tea Party remains to be seen, but the signs are already disturbing.
If I have learned anything by writing and researching several
different eras in American history, it’s that times and movements may change,
but people do not. Their motivations for joining movements remain the same.
Fear. A sense of belonging to something greater than themselves. A nostalgia
for a past that may or may not be misplaced. A dream of a better
future.
THE FAIRFAX INCIDENT is a novel about a dedicated group of people
who risked their lives to ensure that extremism never gained a foothold in this
country. My work may be fiction based on factual events, but our
country's resistance to extremism is not fiction. I hope that resistance will
continue to be the case in the future.
***
You can get THE FAIRFAX INCIDENT right here.
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