|
|
        |
||
THE REASONStudying for finals during my last semester in college involved a trip to the library. As I was wont to do at this time in my life, I procrastinated, and noticing a stack of Time Magazines from 1944 on a nearby re-shelving cart, I began to flip through one. Little did I know that the story I found inside would affect my life for over the next thirty years. The article detailed the actions of a group of German Navy POWs who had tunneled out of a POW camp near Phoenix, AZ. Being a history buff, my interest was piqued. German POWs in the US? German Navy POWs in Phoenix, Arizona? Navy prisoners in the middle of the desert? How did that happen and who knew Arizona could be so interesting? Prior to reading that article, I had no idea that German POWs were held in the U.S. during WWII and that some travelled quite a ways to get there. Several of the officers who led the escape had been aboard the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, had served in U-Boats, been captured, and then sent to a POW Camp in the U.S. The mystique factor alone was worth the effort of researching the topic further. Thirty years of research, writing, and rumination have led me to where I am today. From the first drafts written in the early 1980’s, I knew that I wanted to construct a setting that both fascinated and fulfilled the audience in its own right. One flushed out by an adventure that I wanted to read and a story I wanted to tell. From that fateful day in the library until now, this story has fascinated me and I regularly have said to myself, “this would make a great novel.” Ironically, despite the action and drama experienced by the German Navy in the war, this subject has rarely been explored by novelists. An Honorable German is only the fourth novel ever written with the German Navy in either of the World Wars as a backdrop and the only one originally written in English. I hope that you enjoy reading it and find that I constructed the narrative with great care so that it moves very quickly, never gets bogged down, and tells you just enough to keep the story in context. This is historical action/adventure naval fiction—it’s not a textbook. Readers tell me all the time they never even noticed the history, which I take as a great compliment because you’re not supposed to notice it. |
|
||||||
 Copyright © 2009–2011, Charles McCain. Questions/Comments contact info@charlesmccain.com. |
|||||||
Charles McCain is a lifelong student of 20th Century military and maritime history. He grew up in South Carolina and is a graduate of Tulane University. His first novel, An Honorable German, a World War Two naval epic told from the point of a German U-boat commander, was published in 2009. Prior to becoming a full time writer, Mr. McCain spent twenty-three years in the financial services industry. Having survived a bout with cancer, Mr. McCain is now at work on a second novel. He lives in Washington, DC.
