Featured Interview With Martin Roy Hill
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in Redondo Beach, a small community south of Los Angeles. With the exception of military service, I’ve been a Southern California resident all my life. I now reside in San Diego along with my wife, son, and our three feline overseers.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I’ve been an avid reader as long as I can remember. My favorite part of grade school was when the Bookmobile would come around and I would check out Hardy Boys mysteries and other books.
I became determined to become a writer in high school when I started writing for the school newspaper. After a stint in the service, I earned a college degree in journalism and spent more than 20 years working for newspapers and magazines, covering crime, the military, business, politics, and investigative reporting. In the 1990s I started selling short stories to publications like Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.
After another stint of duty with the U.S. Coast Guard following the 9/11 attacks, I left journalism and went to work as an analyst in combat casualty care for the U.S. Navy. Because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our op tempo was so high I didn’t write fiction for 10 years.
Finally, my first novel, The Killing Depths, was published in 2012. My eleventh book, Codename: Parsifal, a WWII thriller, was published last September.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Early in my writing career, I was heavily influenced by the Lost Generation writers like Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, and John Dos Passos. But I also read a lot of sci-fi authors like H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, as well as thriller writers like Jack Higgins and Alistair MacLean. Contemporary authors I read include David Morrell, Stephen King, Robert Masello, and Nelson DeMille.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
I always wanted to write WWII thriller in the vein of Jack Higgins and Alistair MacLean, you know like Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed or MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare.
Codename: Parsifal is a WWII thriller about three commando teams — American, German, and Russian — racing to recover the lost Spear of Destiny, the legendary spear that purportedly was stabbed into the side of Christ as he hung on the cross. Legend claims whoever possesses the spear will become a great conqueror. But if they lose it, they will lose everything—including their lives. Shortly before WWII, Adolf Hitler stole the spear from a museum in Vienna, Austria. Toward the end of the war, the spear disappeared. That’s all factual history.
In Codename: Parsifal General George Patton orders an American OSS team to find the spear and recover it. Unknown to the Americans, both the Russians and the Germans have also sent commando teams to retrieve it. Patton, SS leader Himmler, and Russian dictator Stalin all want the spear for their own ambitious reasons. And while the story is fictional, it was inspired by the real life search for the spear and other stolen relics at the end of the war.
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Martin Roy Hill’s Website