Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Taking Paris & Writing Bestsellers with Martin Dugard

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

In this episode, Sharon is joined by Martin Dugard, a fellow history buff and the bestselling author of “Taking Paris” and “Killing Lincoln.” Martin and Sharon discuss why history is anything but boring and talk about Martin’s latest book “Taking Paris.” Martin shares mind-blowing facts and never-before-heard information about the 1940 Nazi invasion of Paris; you are sure to have some brain-tingling moments! As well, Sharon and Martin discuss their love of history and learning, and Martin explains how he ended up in a Zambian prison while conducting research for one of his books. For more information on this episode including all resources and links discussed go to https://www.sharonmcmahon.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey friends, so glad you could join me. I have a new friend to introduce you to. His name is Martin Dugard and he has written approximately 1 billion books. Not quite, but he is very famous for his Killing series. I am sure you have seen them. Like Killing Lincoln, he co-writes them with Bill O'Reilly. 18 million people have purchased his Killing series, which is basically about the death or attempted assassinations of various historic figures. So he has a new book out that I wanted to talk to him about called Taking Paris, which is about World War II. I know you're interested in World War II because it's fascinating.

So let's dive into this conversation about Taking Paris with my new friend, Martin Tugard. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Martin, thank you so much for joining me. What a delight to speak with you today. Well, thanks for having me on. It's fantastic to be invited. I was excited to read your new book, Taking Paris. First of all, Americans are fascinated with World War II, right?

I mean, kind of obsessed with it. It's a thing. There's no such thing as a foolproof subject for a book, but writing about World War II is a pretty good way to find an audience. What makes us so fascinated by it far more than other wars? Well, you know, there's a theory that if a war can be good, that it was the last good war, because, you know, it really was good versus evil. And evil had triumphed so incredibly well so early, like when the Germans had spread, you know, just all across

Europe and just took the continent by storm. And they seemed unstoppable. And somebody had to step in and put a halt to it. And that's when the good guys come in, you know, Britain, England, America, at some point the French with the free French. It was easy to distinguish. These are the forces of good. These are the bad guys. Whereas a lot of other wars, a lot of other time periods, that concept is so much more nebulous. Yeah, we don't fight wars like this anymore. The whole idea of tanks rolling across a nation, like, you know, when the Germans went from one side of France to the other in May 1940, tanks and infantry, everybody's wearing uniforms. You can distinguish who's what. Now, you know, now we're fighting guerrilla forces more often. You don't know who the enemy is

because they slip back into the population as soon as the battle's over. So true. You are a prolific author, by the way, and you have written so many bestsellers. We'll talk more about that in a minute, but how did you land on this concept? I mean, you really probably could call your agent and be like, hello, my next book will be X. Please find me a publisher. You could probably write about anything at this point. You've written all of the killing books, like Killing Lincoln, Killing Reagan. You've written so many popular books. You could probably write your own ticket and don't try to pretend that's not true. So what was it about this story where you were like, this is what I need to write next? Because this is a massive undertaking.

First of all, I'm kind of on a mission to make people love history the way I love history. And I just think history is fascinating. But I think all too often, history is written in a very slow, boring, academic way. It's the reason people didn't like history class in high school, because it's always presented as something dull. You should feel the passion. So I decided I wanted to write a book that was very fast paced. It felt like a like a James Patterson thriller. Lots of detail, lots of you are there, cinematic qualities, short chapters, so people get the successful feeling that comes when you finish a chapter. The last thing I want people to say is this is a boring book. And I wanted to write some really good, exciting history. And I've been doing that

with the Killing Series, but I wanted to take it over into something more sprawling, like warfare, because you have so many things going on. And I originally was going to write about Rome. My wife and I were visiting Italy, and I thought this is a great place to set a book because we had the Anzio landings, and we took Rome in 1944. As I was setting up that story, I realized that the whole story had to circle all the way back to the German invasion in May 1940, and not just include Rome a few years later, but also include Paris. And then the focus completely shifted from Rome to Paris. And then I started doing the research, and I found all these great characters. You know, amazingly, I thought it was a bunch of dudes the whole time, but a lot of women involved, which was really cool. You know, women in the resistance, an American spy named Virginia Hall, who had one leg and who evaded the Nazis.

So you had all these really rich characters and I was able to build them into the narrative. And then that's when I went to my agent and said, hey, this is what I've got. Here is what I have come up with now. What you just said was one of the takeaways I had when I was reading your book. I'm like, this book moves along. The chapters are short. You achieved your mission of I am going to craft a narrative that the reader wants to move through. So I think people will appreciate that about Taking Paris, that it moves along and it reads like a novel. Oh, thanks. I mean, that was the intent. It should feel like the book version of a Netflix miniseries. Like every chapter, there's a narrative thread for every character.

And you're just reading this little miniseries. And by the end of it, you should feel like you know everything there is to know about that subject. I want to take you right all the way from soup to nuts. Tell me more about your research process, because people are always very curious. I'm sure you get asked that all the time. How do you go about researching a book like this? Usually the first thing I do is buy a plane ticket. Usually the first thing I do is buy a plane ticket. So I want to go to the places, but I couldn't do that with COVID. So I was literally going to go to Paris on March 24th, 2020.

Oh my goodness. And then it all went up. You know, my wife comes along with me. And next thing you know, the good news is I covered the Tour de France as a journalist for 10 years back in the, you know, 1999 to 2009. So I still had tons of research material from notebooks about the many cities I've been to. So I could describe them fairly well. And then just for the visuals in the book, Google Earth, Google Maps. It's a really weird way to research a book.

But, you know, you want to know what things look like. If I'm going to describe it, I've got to see it. And then the usual stuff, like going through YouTube videos of Churchill speeches and various archives, especially newspaper archives, because you go to the New York Times or the Times of London, and you look at the newspaper archives, they had reporters that were there witnessing the events and describing it in detail. And then you take their description and then you kind of pivot and look at somebody else's description of the same event. And then you do the on the ground research and you combine all those things. You put them on the page and then it's always too much.

Then you start taking out the stuff that is not really necessary. It can be a lengthy process. I mean, I like to write a thousand words a day. really necessary. It can be a lengthy process. I mean, I like to write a thousand words a day. Sometimes with this book, because I was trying to be so tight in particular, you know, I might get 200 words a day and that's, that's like two good paragraphs, but it's all worth it if it reads well. I have enjoyed reading more about your process for some of the other books that you've written where you were like, well, I guess I'm swimming with sharks or I guess I'm going to travel to a very, very distant land to research my book. Tell us more about some of the adventures you've gone on in researching books. Obviously,

your adventures were hampered by COVID with this book. But tell us about the adventures you've been on writing other books. One of the blessings of my profession is that I can build a book around the places that I want to travel to. And it's like, for instance, with my book Into Africa, I wasn't necessarily interested in Stanley and Livingston at first, but I had never seen a lion in the wild. And I really wanted to see a lion in the wild. And I wanted to be able to write off that trip. So the way you do it is a book about Africa. On that trip, I was trying to recreate Stanley and Livingston's journey. And I was with two buddies and we managed to get arrested and thrown into a local prison. And we were held for three days. I literally thought we weren't going to get out.

We had no communication with the outside world. Little things like that. The Swimming with the Sharks thing was, I was researching a book about Captain Cook, and I went to the place that he actually was murdered on the island of Hawaii. And I thought it would kind of take a look at the seabed just to kind of see what the footing was like, because he wasn't wearing tennis shoes.

He wasn't wearing flip-flops. He was wearing hard-soled shoes. And back then, shoes didn't even have a left foot or a right foot. It was just, you know, one shoe free. So anyway, I want to see what it was like to walk on that surface. As I began swimming out, all of a sudden, I realized that the water that was three feet deep, 50 yards out, turned into 3,000 feet deep. It's like swimming off the edge of a cliff. Yeah, I'm swimming around out there. And I thought this was the coolest thing ever that I remember was somebody has said that that's where the tiger sharks breed. And a lone man floating around on the surface with the sunlight, you know, backlighting him is going to be food. So I need to I do think you need to backtrack. However, like sharks, that's fine. We can see those in Hawaii.

You need to backtrack and tell us more about the prison experience. How and why? I'll keep it really brief because it's a little bit of a horrific story. So we were on the border of Zambia and Tanzania. And border towns are kind of crazy. And the people were gathering in the middle of the street. And as we were going down the street, you know, the crowds would just part as our land cruiser would go through.

Well, we went to this one area where the crowd parted, but there was a girl on one side of the street, a little child, like three or four years old. And her mother was on the other side. And the mother was beckoning the girl to come across, even as the car was approaching. And our driver, who was the Swahili man named Chawa, actually sped up and he hit the girl. And she flew through the air. And then we were in this thing, like we're saying, stop the car. We're going to go help this person. And as we stopped the car to go help this girl to see

what had happened, the mob just descended upon us, you know, knives and sticks and person. And as we stopped the car to go help this girl to see what happened, the mob just descended upon us, you know, knives and sticks and clubs. And so we ran back into the car. We literally drove five hours deep into the brush. It was, we were out there. Our goal was to get to a town, find a phone and fix it. And what happened was just as we're coming to the next town, there was a roadblock, there were soldiers with automatic weapons waiting for us. They got in the car. So I'm literally sitting in the backseat with my buddy. And there's a soldier on either side of us with an AK-47, you know, pointed right at our heads. And it was pretty hairy. And then it turns out when our driver was talking to the soldiers, he told the soldiers that I had been the driver at the time that I was driving at the time of the accident.

So they just arrested us all. It took us a few days to get it sorted out. The girl was fine. She lived. And it turns out they weren't trying to arrest us because of the girl. They're trying to arrest us because of some kind of hit and run accident. So that's one of those moments where you say, I'm kind of over the adventure. Let's get out of here. Let's go back and regroup. So that was touch and go.

That does not sound like a great adventure, in my opinion. It's not the kind of adventure you get if you do a cruise. Let's put it that way. I would love for you to share more about what happens in Taking Paris. Because, yes, Americans are fascinated by World War II. Yes, we know Hitler was the bad guy. Yes, we know about FDR. Yes, we know about Winston Churchill. You know, like, yeah, that's kind of what we know about. Give us all the juicy details. No, you know, here's the thing is, I don't have an outline for my books. I kind of,

I just start at the start of the story and let the story take me places. And the one character who kind of really comes out of it is Charles de Gaulle. And we kind of think of him as this pompid Parisian guy. And he was actually pretty bold. He believed in France and he, when the rest of the government fell and the army capitulated, he went to England to work with Churchill. And between the two of them, they effectively saved France. And then you just go through all the different people at Gondwals. Churchill put commandos in the form of spies in Virginia Hall. She was one of them. And into France. And then de Gaulle worked with the Americans as they went through

Northern Africa and kind of bided our time as we made our way towards D-Day. And it was just one of those things where I got to know the resistance, like a woman named Germaine Tillion, who was in charge of a group called Musée de Délon. She was literally a museum employee by day and a resistance spy by night, ultimately betrayed by a Catholic priest who he had, you know, in the confessional, someone is supposed to be able to go confess their sins and it's a complete secret. The priest can't tell anybody. The people of the resistance would go to confession to confess the fact that

they were part of the resistance and he would go tell the Nazis and they would round all these people up. So she was captured like that. And then you just get all these stories. There was a, you know, like the French Alamo in the desert. They were basically told by the Nazis, don't surrender or we're going to destroy you. And they not only held on until they had done their job, then they snuck out in the dead of night.

Everybody got away. Just like little nuggets like that, little dramatic episodes, which really just kind of lifted the story up off the page for me. One of the things that I was struck by when I was reading this was about the evacuation of Paris, where the Parisians realized like the Germans are coming and we've got to get out of here. And 90,000 children separated from their parents, many of whom never saw their parents again, like the elderly and the sick left behind in Paris while the able-bodied left. Tell everybody more about that story. Well, usually when we think about Paris being evacuated,

Paris to us is abstract concept. So let's make it more relevant. Let's say that the Germans are approaching New York City and the people of New York City for weeks have believed that there was no possible way that the Germans would ever be able to take the city. And then when they're like two days away, all of a sudden everybody says, hey, they're coming. We need to get out of here. So imagine New York City, everybody evacuating. You know, you kill your pets because you don't want your pet to go hungry. You leave the old people behind. You get all your belongings.

You can't really use a car because the roads are jammed. You're pushing your stuff along in a cart. Your kids are walking along and they're crying because they're hungry and thirsty. So that's what happened in Paris. Your kids are walking along and they're crying because they're hungry and thirsty. So that's what happened in Paris. And we're not talking about 1,000 people or 10,000 people or even 100,000 people. We're talking about 3 or 4 million people trying to get out of Paris as the Nazis were coming in. And the weird thing about it is they fled the city very successfully.

But when they got into the countryside, they realized that the Nazis were there too. So they all had to turn around and go back home. That's when they fled because they knew evil was coming. They go back home to live under evil for the next four years. And that means starvation. It means no heating oil. It means, you know, if you're a collaborator being shot by a German firing squad, all these things slowly descended upon Parisians over the four years of occupation.

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You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. I think a lot of people forget that Paris lived under Nazi occupation for a number of years. We think about it just as being like battles, battles, battles, and like, oh, wow, eventually the allies won. This is how this is the summary that I think a lot of Americans have in their mind. Right. Battles, battles, battles. Oh, the Allies won.

It's like kind of that simple. But they, I think, forget that they literally lived under Nazi occupation. Millions of French soldiers were taken prisoner by the Nazis. We lack the historical perspective right now, because like you said, always we think it was like, oh, D-Day, and then the war's over. Yes. It worked. I mean, the fall of Paris was such a big deal back then that the movie Casablanca was filmed, and I mentioned in the book, literally the whole love story revolves around the fall of Paris and what that did to the concept of romance and enlightenment and, you know, kind of the extinguishing of free thinking. And so that was a whole worldwide concept. Everybody mourned, everybody, even in America, you know, which we

weren't world travelers at the time. We didn't have airplane travel that would just take us in 12 hours to Europe. Everybody mourned it. That's why we have a movie like House of Blanket. And that whole four-year period of occupation was one of the things where everybody kind of held their breath around the world. Like, we hope Paris is going to be okay. We hope that when the Nazis leave, they don't destroy everything like they did in so many other cities like Rotterdam, in Warsaw, in Sevastopol. other cities like Rotterdam, in Warsaw, in Sevastopol. And so that's why the liberation of Paris was such a big deal, because when we finally came in, opened up the city, got the Nazis out, it was such a euphoric moment. Everybody assumed that the war was going to end like in a

week. Of course, it didn't. It went on for almost another year. One of the things that struck me, too, when I was reading your book was you talked about how the Nazis did not just plan to take Paris. They planned to destroy it. Oh, yeah. Like just bomb it into oblivion, destroy the Eiffel Tower, destroy the Arc de Triomphe. Anything that made Paris noteworthy, they planned to destroy on purpose. And you talked about how Parisians loved Paris so much that they would rather give it to the Germans than see it be destroyed. Tell us more about ultimately why Paris wasn't destroyed.

Well, it's a great question. So like you say, in 1940, when the Germans marched in, you know, the soldiers fled, the government fled, and they declared it an open city. They would rather see the Nazis occupy an undestroyed and fully intact Paris, because it's not just a city. You know, Paris is a symbol of all that is open and good. And it was just this great symbol of wonder. And so they let the Germans just come in and take control of the city. Four years later, as the Germans knew that their time was limited, they wired every bridge across the Seine. I think there are 23 to explode. They're all supposed to be detonated. Every facility that had fuel oil, every electrical plant, everything was completely set up to be destroyed. The Eiffel Tower was

mined. Hitler reportedly kept calling General von Schultz, the German commander of the city, saying, is Paris burning? In other words, have you leveled the city yet? Just like we did in Warsaw. Get with it. Get with it. Get with it. Hurry it up. Yeah. You know, to tell you the truth, I don't know why von Choltitz didn't do that. All he had to do was blow the stuff up and he could flee the city. And he didn't. He chose not to do that. And I still, to this day, there's a lot of conjecture about it, but we're richer for it. Because if you look at a lot of the European cities that were destroyed in World War II, either were bombed or the scene of great fighting, the post-World War II architecture was that boxy. Yeah. Brutalism.

Yeah. It looked horrible. And so, and you walk around Paris now, and actually when I'm going to be there in a week. I can't wait. My first post-COVID Paris trip, it's timeless. It's just a wonderful, wonderful city. I can't imagine that all being destroyed. April 4th, 1943, being a quietly remarkable day for World War II. We think about D-Day. We, of course, think about Pearl Harbor Day. We think about the day that we dropped bombs on Japan. But tell us more about why April 4th, 1943 was a quietly remarkable day. First of all, did you like that chapter? I did. I spent about three weeks

polishing that chapter. It was just because I just wanted to get it just right. It was the day that we accidentally bombed Paris. The Allies bombed Paris. It's one of those things where we were trying to just hit a single plant, a citron plant that was making vehicles for the Germans. And instead, some of the bombs went astray and a lot of people lost their lives. And the point I wanted to make in that is that, like you said, we remember Pearl Harbor. We remember this December 7th. You know, we remember D-Day was June 6th. But for the people who lost someone on that day

and the people who themselves died that day, that's the most memorable day of the war. I pointed out that's the day that maybe somebody will remember it because they told someone that they loved them for the first time or someone got married or something like that. But it is a quietly remarkable day, but it's also remarkable for its tragedy, despite our good intentions. One of the other things that, you know, the more I study World War II, and of course,

you could literally study it for your entire life and not learn all the things. One of the feelings that I have, and I want to hear from you if you have the same feeling, is that the lead up to the Allies taking France, it just seemed to take forever. Like I wanted it to be faster. You know what I mean? Like the planning. I mean, obviously they were trying to not just win one battle. They were aimed at trying to win the war. And there was a lot of strategy and I'm not going to pretend that I know a lot about military strategy, but it was just like, it is taking us years to get in here

and get this job done. Why, why did it take so long? I want it to be now. I want it to be like, let's fix it. Yeah. Your enthusiasm is infectious, I have to say. That was something I learned. I always kind of thought that, hey, the USA come to the rescue. Britain's all over. Yes. Make it happen.

Well, I mean, for starters, at the beginning of the war, in the pecking order of the world's great armies, we were 17th. We were just one rung below Romania. We didn't have a standing army between wars. We didn't have the munitions. We didn't have the men. We didn't have the trained soldiers. And I'm not just talking about soldiers, but people who have been physically equipped to go onto a battlefield. And so working with President Roosevelt, Churchill kept pushing Roosevelt to do an invasion, but Roosevelt

kept backing it off, you know, moving it back a year, moving, you know, we've got this plan, we're going to ignore that plan. I honestly think that if Stalin in the East, the Russian, our Russian ally, hadn't pushed us to finally open up the second front by invading France, I think we might have waited even another year. It's just like that. And we finally went in, we had such a huge army. We had so many new tanks, we had the most up-to-date equipment. By then we'd gone from the 17th to, you know, the best army in the world. But it took forever. And imagine you're a citizen of Paris. And every day you, you know, you take your radio, your forbidden radio out of his hiding place, and you listen to the BBC from

London, you're waiting for that signal that yes, the invasion is coming. Yes, we're going to be liberated. And for four long years, his life gets worse and worse and worse. And people are going to prison, they're starving. And when they're starving and when they finally show up they finally show up paris just erupted in this great celebration champagne yeah yes i mean this is one of the things that i love about learning history is people ask me this all the time like is this the worst it has ever been in the whole history of time. Like they look at what's happening now and they feel like the sense of the sense of doom, the sense of dread. We're so politically divided. We have COVID. We have Afghanistan. Like we have so many things that make people feel like the weight of the world is heavy.

Studying history, some of it is shocking. Some of it is like, I can't believe that happened. But it also gives me a tremendous amount of hope because it is like, did we live under Nazi occupation for four years? No. Is it currently as bad as the people of Paris experienced for four years with blackouts and starvation and we had to kill our pets and where did the kids go I don't know and had to leave grandma back like no it's not as bad now as it was then do you ever have those feelings where you're like dang that was bad 9-11 9-11 was shocking for me. I still remember what I was doing. I was actually starting a book. I took a break. I walked in. The Today Show was on,

and they were showing this little plane that had just flown. People thought it was a Cessna. To me, that was, as someone who knows his history pretty well, that was a shocking moment. But I'll tell you what, writing a book about the occupation of Paris during COVID, there's still food in those grocery stores. Your house is still heated. And it's not going to be forever. And can you imagine if COVID had gone on for the real shutdown early days COVID? Imagine that going on for four years. Right.

Exactly. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah. That's nuts. That is really nuts. Obviously many people today were not alive during World War II in the United States, but even the rationing that was occurring in the United States. And I also think about like the blackouts in London and Paris where people were forced to live in darkness. We again, feel like, oh my gosh, we're like Nazi Germany over here in the United States. And my immediate reaction is like, no, no, no. Like that is, that just shows that you did not pay attention at all. Exactly. I was, I was talking to somebody that they were talking about with all the social media, like Anne Frank would not have been able to, you know, page one in her journal,

you know, in this modern times, because she would have been hidden. Somebody on social media would say, hey, Anne, Anne Frank's hiding in the top of that house. I mean, it's just a different time. Yeah, I mean, this is not Nazi Germany. And, you know, imagine people literally coming to your house in the dead of night, pulling you out of bed for no reason, and taking you to the outside of town and shooting you dead for no rationale whatsoever. That's Nazi Germany. What we have going on in America right now is just societal leftism. It's in comparison. Yes. And it is an unfair comparison, and I feel like it's a disrespectful comparison to the millions of people that the Nazis brutally slaughtered.

It is a disrespectful comparison to their to their memories and to their families to say America today is like the Nazis. You're getting me so fired up. I completely agree with you. I completely agree with you. This is one of those things that really just chaps my hide when people bring that up. I just like, I could go on a 15 minute tangent about it. All right, bringing it back around here, Sharon, talking about your book, Taking Paris. One of the things I would love to hear you tell us more about is the role of Eisenhower in this war, because we know him as a president, but we don't know that much about him as a military general. Well, that's interesting. Yeah. He was the head of everything in Europe.

You know, he was a very diplomatic guy. What people don't know is he never commanded troops in the field ever. He was just somebody who had worked his way up to the general position because he was very good at bringing alliances together, building bridges. And that's what makes him so pivotal to the story because at a time when he really didn't want to liberate Paris, because we could have bypassed Paris. I mean, all of a sudden we have to give them fuel. We have to feed them. And it's not like we're not giving them an apple. We're feeding family three meals a day. That's a lot of stuff. He realized that the right thing to do, not the militarily right thing to do, but almost the romantic thing to do, and you don't think of generals as being romantic, but the romantic

thing to do was liberate Paris. If we hadn't done that, the Germans would have remained in Paris longer because we would have surrounded them and they probably would have destroyed the city given more time. Yeah. I like that. Out of spite, they would have destroyed the city. Yes. Out of spite. Yes. One of the things that I loved hearing you talk about was Charles de Gaulle's speech about there is one hope for us all. You know, I just re-listened to that in the original French, because I just, when I did the book, I kind of watched the YouTube of it, and I wasn't really paying attention. But I heard the audio, which is when you're not, you know, looking at an image of de Gaulle, you just hear his voice.

And it's such a powerful speech. And it's not very long at all. But he makes it very, very clear. I mean, he's kind of a crazy man. He doesn't have any authority. But he goes to England and he says, hey, I am France. I am here. And he basically rallies the French people slowly to the notion that he's not a crazy man, that he is actually going to come rescue France. And he was not polite about it. Him and Churchill did not like each other after a while. They had many arguments. And de Gaulle finally had to leave London because he needed to go someplace where he was a little bit more welcome. But I think without his perseverance, we don't have a modern Paris. We don't even have a

modern France because he continued that passion to the country after the war was over. I didn't know much about de Gaulle before writing the book. And he's kind of an odd duck because, you know, he's like tall. They compared his little head to the tip of an asparagus. They made fun of his broad hips. They said that he had a woman's hips, get a very big nose, chain smoked Gitan cigarettes. But at the same time, he had this indefatigable belief that what he was doing was right. And he refused to back down or be cowed in any way. You have to be just a little bit crazy to think that that's your destiny. And he was somebody who did believe in destiny. I love this quote that you included. The battle of France has begun in the nation, the empire, and the armies. There is no longer anything but one single hope,

the same for all. Behind the terribly heavy cloud of our blood and our tears. Here is the sunshine of our grandeur come out again. Isn't that beautiful? It's absolutely beautiful and applies absolutely to today as well. There's one hope. Yeah, I love it. I would love to hear more about your process for writing your killing series books and what it's like to collaborate on writing those. You know, I was a little scared at first. Because tell everybody who you write them with. I write them with Bill O'Reilly. And Bill and I, at one time, we had the same agent. And he connected us to do these books. And it was supposed to be a one-off, Killing Lincoln, a one-time book.

We're done. We walk away. And what happened was I was up in the mountains with my family, and my agent called and said, we've got a client that wants to meet with you. Need to be in New York in two days. This was at a time in 2009 when the economy had collapsed. The publishing industry had collapsed. The only books that were selling were not history books. They were cookbooks and celebrity tell-alls. And I was just basically looking for work. I wanted to keep writing. So I flew to New York. I go to the restaurant. Of course, you know, Bill O'Reilly, big, tall guy, very intimidating, sitting at the table. Her agent was there, but he never looked at the agent once. He kept studying me throughout the whole meal, like trying to see if I was, you know, legit. And at the end of the meal, I got the job. And so again, it was supposed to be

a one-off. So basically he said, start the book. And we didn't really have our process down yet. So my job was to research. So I researched, researched, researched, and I love it because I'm a nerd. So I can sit in my office all day long. I can research at length, way, way, way, way down the rabbit hole. And then I write up a rough version of it, send it to Bill. And this is long enough to go that I send it by fax. And that's how long we've been doing these books. And then Bill reads it.

Bill rewrites it in his voice. Then we get on the phone together and we combine what I wrote and what he wrote into one seamless document. And the cool thing about it is Bill has that radio and TV background. So when we get on the phone, we both have a copy of the manuscript in front of us and he reads it out loud, which I think is something that young writers should think about incorporating. Because if you read something out loud, which I think is something that young writers should think about incorporating. Because if you read something out loud, you can see where a sentence goes a little wonky. Or if it doesn't really roll off your tongue, it's going to read the same way. If it's not smooth, it's not going to work.

And so we do that. It's funny because after Killing Lincoln did well, we did Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, you know, then blah, blah, blah. Then we just finished the 11th book in the series. But Bill is famous for when he has this fair moment because he's a big workaholic. It might be 11 o'clock at night in New York and I'm in California and he'll call me and go, hey, can you work? It's like, all right, I can work. So I've gotten in the habit of taking my laptop with me if we're in the middle of a book it goes with me everywhere because

we have done these calls i've been i've been in the the parking lot of a track meet i've been you name it i've i have written this book in the most outlandish locations uh including african prison they're pretty close i'll tell you what, we were finishing up Killing the Rising Sun, and it was our last phone call of that book. And my wife and I were on Guam visiting my son, who's a Navy pilot. He was stationed there at the time. We were in our hotel room, and Bill was in New York. He didn't know that I was in Guam. And he called me and says, hey, let's work. It was 2 o'clock in the morning in Guam. We had to get up at 5 o'clock for a flight.

But I dragged a chair into the bathroom, closed the door, got the computer out. We spent three hours on the phone. We wrapped it up just as my wife is getting up at 5 a.m. to get ready for the flight home. And she's like, what the hell are you doing in the bathroom? I'm working. So that's kind of, that's our process. You just, you got to be flexible. There's a lot of back and forth and it's been a lot of fun.

How many more killing books are you going to write? Well, we were supposed to stop at one. Then we were supposed to start at three. And then, you know, they kept giving us money. People keep dying. People keep dying. people i mean 18 million people have read these books and it's incredible yeah it's crazy and it's like you know what i like about it is i'm the silent partner in this group so nobody recognizes me in the grocery

store or something like that right bill is all the publicity so like doing publicity right now for my own book like this yeah it's kind of a novelty it's like it's been so long since i've done it and it's fun but uh we just finished 11 and it comes out in may and we're talking about 12 so there's still a lot of dead people to write about a lot of dead people i get so many emails from uh readers say, you need to kill this guy. You need to kill that guy. Like, I don't make that decision. That's Bill's call, right?

That says a lot about you because a lot of people would not be interested in collaborating on 11 books with one person. You know, like I think about even trying to collaborate on one book with somebody, I would be like, I don't know. You know what I mean? Like, I would be like, I don't know. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I don't know. I've got to say, I've collaborated more in a ghostwriter capacity with, I can think of three very well-known people. And all three projects, halfway through, we just agreed to disagree and have walked away. Because once we got known as Bill's collaborator, a lot of people are like, oh, let's get that guy. And a lot of people aren't willing to do the work

that Bill is willing to do. Or they'll say, you know, fly out of here and we'll sit down in this room together for six days and we'll hammer out this book. It's like, that's not how it works. I genuinely enjoy working with Bill. We've got a good routine. We know each other's rhythms and it works pretty well. I can relate to the idea of going down the research rabbit hole because I do that for this podcast. You know, like today I'm prepping for an episode about why are the Iowa caucuses so much sooner than everybody else's like in presidential elections. And that leads you deep down into the rabbit hole of the 1968 presidential democratic primaries. And then like, and what was happening in 1968? Oh,

they killed Martin Luther King. Oh, they shot Robert Kennedy. Oh, and how did they end up with him as a nominee when they shouldn't have? And what were the police doing in Chicago? Like you, I bet you understand that where you're like where do i exit this ride no that's the thing is you don't you don't exit you don't you have to you keep going because you'll you'll hit a dead end then you take a left turn you go you keep going further down and then i'm sure you go through this at the end of the day you have all this data in your head yes and no one to talk to about it. Yes. You're like, you're trying to tell your spouse if you're like, did you know?

Oh yeah. My husband's like, no, I didn't know that, but thank you. Were you like that as a child, the person who wanted to acquire knowledge and then disseminate the knowledge? I'm going to preface saying that I was an otherwise normal child. I played Little League. I ran cross country. I played catch in the backyard with my dad.

I played football. It was all those things. And yet, my dad was an Air Force pilot. And one of the places we were stationed, we were almost right next to the base library. And I spent so much time in the base library that when my dad was transferred, the librarians gave me a going-away party. I read 333 books in one summer when I was seven years old. Oh, my goodness. So, a little bit of a nerd.

But, you know, I don't like the kind of knowledge where you go to a cocktail party and you say, here's all the stuff I know. I'm just curious. I just like to get stuff figured out. To me, the acquisition of knowledge is almost like brain fuel. It's almost like somebody who's running a marathon or on a bike marathon where you have to fuel your body to keep going. That is almost what it feels like in my brain. I got to learn this stuff because that is what makes life worthwhile for me.

I completely agree. And the thing that I struggle with is I want to always give an honest answer when people ask a question like, did you know this? And if I don't know it, I'm not going to try to BS my way through and say, yeah, I know that. And I don't want to be that guy. Right. But if I'm asked a question and if I'm curious enough, after I'm asked that question, I'll research it just to kind of add to this quiver of knowledge. That's right. It's almost like any collection that somebody has. What are you doing with your shot glasses from around the world? Nothing. They're sitting on your wall. What are you doing with all this information? I am enjoying having it. That's what are you doing with all this information i am enjoying having it that's what i'm doing with it i i once had a shot glass collection i literally did

my wife said that that thing is like why do you have all these shot glasses it's because they're memories she goes keep a couple you know i did not know you had a shot glass collection that just was the first idea i was admiring your research like with this book with taking paris yeah i spent six hours a day living in world war ii paris or in the in the desert sands during the during war. And you have to mentally and emotionally transport yourself to that place. Yes.

So when I come out of my office and I go into the house, my wife literally will say, please don't drive your car for about an hour because you're not here. You're still there. And it's a thing. You just, you go someplace else for six hours a day, then you have to come back to the real world

and it's not as interesting, maybe. You're like, there are dishes here that I'm supposed to take care of. You're on a mission. You're inside my house. Oh, this has been so fun chatting with you. I would love to hear what would you love for the reader to take away from your book? You know, when you read a really good book, it just kind of stays with you for a while. I want that. I want people to say, I just read a really good story. I want to tell my friends about it. I'm going to keep this book because maybe I'm going to reread it in a year or two.

But for the most part, I want them to get done and kind of have this subconscious belief that history is not boring. History is exciting and even more exciting than any great novel because these things are really happening. And even the most outlandish things, the things that people say could never happen, they happen in history. And I love finding those moments and bringing them to life. I totally relate to that. I call them brain tangle moments where you're like, what? And then you want to go to work and be like, did you know that that actually happened? Yes, right.

Exactly. Just like that. Well, this has been a really fun chatting with you. I really enjoyed your book. And I really think a lot of people will enjoy reading Taking Paris, even if you're not a military history buff. Even if you're not like, oh, let me read about the Panzer tanks or the Blitzkrieg. Just the incredible cinematic sweep of World War II history. I think people will enjoy it. It's just very tightly written.

history, I think people will enjoy it. It's just very tightly written and it really moves along. It's not a boring tome. So good job not writing a boring tome, Martin. I've done my job. The work here is done. I'm out. And that is where we will end it. End soon. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating

or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind-blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.