Why I Wrote... Our Man On The Hill
- cepmurphywrites
- 3 days ago
- 12 min read
By Matthew Kresal.
“Where do your ideas come from?”
That’s almost an inevitable question one receives after a stranger finds out you’re a published author. One that is almost always in the wake of, “What do you write?” It’s an understandable question and one that I’m sure in my younger (and unpublished) days I asked myself. Since being published, I’ve come to realize that like a magician revealing a trick, there’s a risk that answering takes some of the magic out of proceedings. Or, worse, leaves an author wondering if they accidentally committed plagiarism somewhere along the way.
Our Man on the Hill came out of a convergence of circumstances in 2017. The Cold War had been a source of historical interest for me, born out of growing up in an area built up by the Space Race and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. Something that had, in my tweens and teens, given rise to my interest in espionage fact and fiction. Just one of the “many and varying interests” (as my author bio describes them) that wanders in and out of my life as time’s gone on.
In 2017, it came back in a major way, lighting a creative fuse I didn’t yet know existed. By chance on Facebook, I fell into the orbit of the Spybrary podcast founded and hosted by Shane Whaley. A community grew up around it, including an active Facebook group that led to my discovering new authors I’d never heard of such as Ted Allbeury and discovering a number of non-fiction titles. It also gave me an itch, as someone who had only recently had his first works of short fiction published, to want to write something in the genre. The itch was there but, for the moment, I was content to want to read more. Something which led me to the public library branch in downtown Huntsville near where I lived and to start scanning the shelves.
I was already aware of The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, a book published at the tail end of the 1990s during a brief period when the Soviet-era Cold War archives had been opened. It and the authors had been featured in documentaries I’d seen on the History Channel in the late 1990s and early 2000s (back when it actually featured history programming). I would swear that I searched for the book in the library before but hadn’t found it. On that summer day, however, it was suddenly there on the shelf.
Of course, I checked it out. I knew the basics of its account of the golden age of Soviet espionage in the 1930s and early 1940s from the documentaries but not the fuller stories or details. There is a lot you can do in 400 pages that you can’t do in 43-50 minutes. It was astonishing to read, enough so that I wrote a review of the book. Among the accounts presented was that of Samuel Dickstein, a New York Congressman who served on the precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the 1930s. Irony of ironies as between 1937 and 1940, Dickstein was a paid agent of the Soviets! Unlike many of the others documented in the book who spied out for reasons of ideology, Dickstein did it for a cool $1,250 a month (that’s in 1930s dollars, mind you), to the point his Soviet handlers gave him the code name “Crook.”
It was also in that chapter that Weinstein and Vassiliev wrote of a plan put forth by soon to be executed NKVD operative Gaik Ovakimyan that, rather than depend on the likes of “Crook,” Soviet intelligence should recruit future elected officials to work for their cause. Something which they hadn’t pursued, of course, but the wheels were turning. Especially after realizing that McCarthy had arrived on the scene in 1950 too late, too loud, and too ill-informed to actually do much good.
If Spybrary had lit the fuse, The Haunted Wood was the powder keg. The spark that finally lit it? Somewhere in my reading (but not, as a quick skim through The Haunted Wood suggests from Weinstein and Vassiliev), I came across a quote from a frustrated President Harry Truman at a March 1950 news conference where he was asked about the rising star of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Truman’s response:
“I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy.”
“Asset” in the intelligence world being a synonym for agent, informant, spy.
The creative explosion had happened. The idea, however, seemed absurd. Surely someone else must have done it already? A quick search online didn’t turn up anything, though I would discover well after the heavy lifting on the eventual novel was done that there was an essay in What Ifs of American History on a similar theme but in a far different direction. The Manchurian Candidate had a similar idea but hadn’t done it with McCarthy himself (readers of the novel may spot a nod and wink toward that piece of Cold War paranoia at one point). With hindsight, the fact that I had also been commissioned by Obverse Books to write a book on the 1990s series Dark Skies, where Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman had created an alternate history built around UFO lore being the reason behind numerous real world events of the 1960s with the tagline “history as we know it is a lie”, likely had helped to put me in the right mindset to look at McCarthy’s career from a different angle.
Even so, I wasn’t convinced I could or should write it. I might not have if my best friend and creative influence Emily Shaffer hadn’t intervened. Hearing about the idea from me as we hung out and I offered one of my crash courses on Cold War history, she wasn’t so convinced it sounded crazy. She wouldn’t be alone in the long run, but she was the first and loudest voice. Not to mention a sounding board and cheerleader in the months that followed.
At the time, I hadn’t written a full novel length manuscript I was happy with. Short stories had been my preferred venue and, showing my doubts about the idea, I wasn’t convinced it had the legs for a novel. I started writing, picking as my starting point something I’d read about in The Haunted Wood: Elizabeth Bentley going to the FBI as World War II drew to a close and exposing what she knew about Soviet espionage in the United States. Something which would give me time to read up on McCarthy, which is why readers might note how much early chapters focus on the Soviet side of things.
Once again, I was back at the public library. Two books in particular caught my eye, Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy by Tom Wicker and The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy by Thomas C. Reeves. Wicker’s book was comparatively short but immensely readable and informative, the author having reported on McCarthy’s senate career and actually met the senator late in his life, and I read it cover to cover. Reeves book was significantly larger and drier, though I read large portions of it finding detail. Between them, I found the absurdities that began to make my crazy idea seem less so: a communist union backing McCarthy’s senate race, McCarthy deciding at the last minute to change what he would be speaking about from housing to communists in the State Department in 1950, the heated 1952 conversation between the senator and future president Dwight D. Eisenhower where the candidate went from preparing to denounce McCarthy for attacking his mentor General George Marshall to deleting all mentions of it in a speech during a joint rally.
In a different world it might have made an entertaining conspiracy theory (and one writing pal suggested later I should have written it as a non-fiction book), but I had enough piece to put a plot together. The Haunted Wood and learning how McCarthy cultivated journalists made his handler being a faux journalist that I would name Ralph Walker an obvious choice. For something I was convinced originally had no legs, it was suddenly not only walking but running, anchored by an understanding of McCarthy as a reckless man who, coming up as he did from almost nothing, would have been admirable in other circumstances had he not caused havoc and ruined lives trying to make a name for himself.
Which was good because I had to come to the realization that Joe McCarthy: KGB (as the working title was) wasn’t going to be a short story. Having written what would become the second through fourth chapters of the novel, I realized that I’d accidentally started writing a novel. In trying to write it outside of NaNoWriMo’s mad rush of 1,667 words a day, I had gotten stuck in trying to type it at my laptop day in and day out. It was Spybrary that inadvertently offered an answer as the group’s attention was largely focused on the forthcoming John le Carre novel A Legacy of Spies with countless articles shared on le Carre’s writing process. Finding out he would write out his novels in long hand, as well as my habit of doing daily Morning Pages inspired by Julia Cameron, gave me an idea. Something I told myself I would do long enough to get me writing again, maybe at a page a day or so. I’d be done with the first draft by the start of November and I’d figure out something else to write for NaNoWriMo.
By the end of October 2017 rolled around, I was not done with the first draft. What I had was a full notebook where I’d written the first third of the novel by and large. Sometimes at the rate of a paragraph a day, other times whole and multiple pages, with the odd off day here and there. It was something that had proven to be surprisingly encouraging, watching my progress in such a tactile way as the bookmark moved further and further back. That NaNoWriMo was around the corner and it wasn’t finished wasn’t a problem, though. On the contrary, it now offered me the chance to spend a month getting in the other 50,000 words to finish the novel.
Though NaNoWriMo later did itself in with a stance on AI that alienated its core membership (including myself) among other issues, in 2017 it was still creatively encouraging and welcoming. My past experiences with it had taught me first that I could write a book in a month (or something of that length) but also how not to try writing historical fiction when my 2016 attempt to do a novel about William Walker got lost in tangents of research. There was an active local community around it with write-ins at the downtown library branch every Monday evening and chances to meet up with fellow writers in person. As it had during the summer, it felt like a series of creative circumstances had once more come together as I spent day after day (and more often than not late nights and early mornings) putting McCarthy’s words and actions through my espionage lens. I ended the month with 63,755 words written across 30 days, an impressive total.
Yet, it still wasn’t finished. History had given me McCarthy’s downfall but, even when I had written a vague outline of where the plot would go, how to get there eluded me. Feeling that the premise alone had me far enough out on a limb, I didn’t want to stray too far from real history; so too did my influences and desire was for something more grounded than fantastical. But how to bring about McCarthy’s downfall in a world where he worked for the Soviets?
Spybrary yet again offered answers. Like so many with an interest in the facts of Cold War espionage, I had been aware of the longtime head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. Through the Facebook group, I learned that journalist Jefferson Morley had a new book on him, The Ghost, set to come out in the autumn. Reading it was a revelation beyond even what I already knew of the tall, lanky man anglophile with a paranoid mind had been friends with Kim Philby in the 1940s and early 1950s before he was discovered to be spying for the Soviets. That his pal and drinking buddy was a Soviet spy was something that arguably drove Angleton to spend more than a decade seeking out a suspected Soviet mole at the heart of the agency, an action which, along with having his fingers (if not whole fists) in various operational pies, led to his eventually being run out of his Langley office in the mid-1970s.
A gift, in other words, for a writer. Especially when I was reminded of the fact, one I’d first come across in David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard, that McCarthy had for a time in 1953 put the CIA in his red hunting sights, leading to the CIA bugging his office and putting informers among his staff. Though I couldn’t prove Angleton had been a part of that, it made sense within my fictional context. After a short break in December, I turned back to handwritten pages to get me going again. With mere pages to spare within a notebook, in mid-February I wrote the closing of the novel. It felt like a nice sense of accomplishment, knowing I had finally reached the end of a first draft, and excitedly calling Emily up at nearly two in the morning to share the news (thankfully she was awake at the time or I’d have felt bad afterwards!).
Which is when I discovered the pain of having handwritten two-thirds of a novel: I was now on my own to type it as I lacked the cliched typist spouse (which le Carre was also guilty of having). It was a process that took me over a month, but doing so allowed me to edit as I went, though there were surprisingly few significant changes. A flashback sequence involving Walker being trained in the Soviet Union before coming to America was cut in its entirety, a diversion I’d needed during a bit of a funk that kept me going but didn’t offer anything worthwhile in the wider narrative. I’d also missed that one of the characters, a journalist Walker meets, was named after a Doctor Who fanzine editor of mine which stayed all the way through to publication!
The biggest change was with the opening chapter as editing had made me realize how late into proceedings McCarthy came onto the stage. I had my ending and its particular twist already written, so setting it up there at the beginning and laying out what was to come made sense. It also allowed me to start it off not with a quiet conversation from a historical nugget but with the proverbial bang of McCarthy’s guilt.
By the middle of 2018, I was feeling pretty good about what had become (at the suggestion of a co-worker) Our Man on the Hill, though it wasn’t published until 2021. Why? Self-doubt in a way, a sense that maybe I had no right to be proud of it. I also wasn’t sure about my depiction of Washington, D.C. which led to my thinking that I ought to revisit the city, something that time and money didn’t allow at the time, but which became a convenient excuse. Though another reason also weighed heavily in that I hadn’t told very many people what it was I had been working on but a common reaction I had in late 2017 and into 2018 was, “Oh, you’re really writing about Trump though?” It certainly hadn’t been a conscious thought as, outside of their demagoguery and often baseless claims, the 1950s Wisconsin junior senator and the New Yorker had very little in common. The reaction was common enough, however, that I sat on the manuscript while I wrote and edited my Dark Skies book for Obverse’s Silver Archive.
2020, as it did for so many people, changed everything. Furloughed for four and a half months from day job, I eventually started writing a few weeks in and discovering new outlets even as other writers seemed to struggle. Our Man on the Hill still sat on the hard drive, offering a siren’s call. After discovering Sea Lion Press, it seemed a natural fit until I discovered Agent Lavender with a similar premise. I hesitated submitting for a bit until deciding that the distance offered by two decades, an ocean, and my ignorance of that novel led to my taking the risk.
I still remember when I read the reply on a slow work day. I opened it with some trepidation, never knowing what the answer would be. Seeing the positive reaction quite literally made me jump in the air to have a “punch the air” moment. Thankfully with no one watching as it led to my twisting my right foot when I hit the ground, but the pain didn’t dull my excitement and anticipation as the novel headed toward release the following spring.
How do I feel about Our Man on the Hill after all this time? My experiences and growth (if it isn’t too pretentious to call it that) shows me the things I could have changed. I could have leaned further into the alternate history aspect, perhaps pushing McCarthy’s career toward being vice president or even into the White House. At the time, the premise alone made me feel like I’d gone far enough out there, but it’s tempting to consider what further damage McCarthy and his Soviet handlers might have caused. Perhaps one day I could do what Michael Dobbs did in the wake of the 1990 BBC television adaptation of House of Cards to re-write my ending to craft a sequel or two.
Above all, I hope there’s a good little thriller there and enough to make people think. I hope that my younger self, typing the opening words at a public library branch in 2017 or twisting his foot in 2020, would be happy with that. Nor am I done with Mr. Angleton yet but that is for another day.
Our Man On The Hill is available on Amazon and Smashwords now.