We are very excited to sit down and talk with Martin Roy Hill. Hill’s latest novel, The Last Saboteur, was recently released. We had the chance to review this exceptional thriller, and we had the opportunity to talk to Martin about his work and writing!
Thriller Magazine: You’ve lived the kind of life most thriller writers only research: military service, search and rescue, tactical medicine, investigative journalism, and national security analysis. Which part of that background most consistently gives your fiction its realism?
That’s hard to say. Each of my books and series takes a little from all my various experiences. Peter Brandt, the main character in my mystery series, is a former war correspondent and investigative journalist haunted by the things he’s seen. Peter is the one character who is most autobiographical. We both started as crime reporters and moved into investigative journalism. His ghosts are my ghosts.
On the other hand, my Linus Schag, NCIS, thrillers, my USCG DSF-Papa military sci-fi books, and my WWII spy thrillers Codename: Parsifal and The Last Saboteur all pull strongly from my service in three branches of the military reserves.
But in all my books I strive to create realistic plots with realistic characters and action. It’s as if there were someone looking over my shoulder saying, “Ah, come on now. You know it would never happen like that.” It also helps that nearly all my books were inspired by true events.
TM: You sold your first published piece at 19 and later spent more than 20 years as a writer and editor, with investigative work recognized by major journalism awards. What did journalism teach you about building suspense and earning a reader’s trust on the page?
Ernest Hemingway answered that question better than I could. He said his experience as a “newspaper man” taught him the discipline to write fast and to write short, using an economy of words to convey action and emotions.
Henry Miller said, “You have to write a million words before you find your voice as a writer.” Being a newspaper reporter and magazine writer, I wrote far more than a million words before my first piece of fiction was published. But Hemingway also warned that a writer should take the lessons learned from journalism and get out of it before it corrupted them.
Journalism also showed me how the world really works, not the prettified version of things you see in the movies and TV. I’ve covered crime, murders, disasters, air crashes, as well as famous political figures. Those are experiences most people—if they are lucky—will never have but have inspired much of my work.
TM: Your body of work spans NCIS thrillers, mystery series, Coast Guard thrillers, short fiction, sci-fi, and nonfiction. How do you decide whether an idea belongs in a long-running series, a standalone novel, or a nonfiction project?
I never set out to write a series. All my “series” started as one-offs. The problem with setting out to write a series is soon you start trying to cram every plot idea into that series. It’s like shoving a square peg into a round hole. My series grew because over the years a plot idea would come along and I recognized it was a natural fit for a Linus Schag or Peter Brandt book.
TM: The Last Saboteur centers on a Nazi plan to infiltrate the United States, impersonate a British agent, and strike at Oppenheimer through the Manhattan Project. What made that premise feel like the right next step in your evolution as a historical thriller novelist?
I’ve always been a WWII history buff. My father fought in that war and always had history books about the war that I would pick up and read. I am also a fan of WWII novels by writers like Jack Higgins, Alistair MacLean, and Alan Furst.
My first WWII thriller, Codename: Parsifal, featuring an American OSS team racing against Nazi and Russian commando teams to find the legendary and lost Spear of Destiny, was published in 2023 and was named Best Military Thriller by Best Thrillers Book Awards. I enjoyed researching and writing that book so much I decided to move my oeuvre, as it were, in that direction.
TM: On your website, you mention that the novel grew out of research into a declassified British intelligence report and the newspaper leak that exposed Los Alamos more than it should have. When history gives you a compelling “what if,” how do you balance fidelity to the facts with the demands of a gripping thriller?
As I mentioned earlier, most of my books were inspired by true news or historic events. In Codename: Parsifal and The Last Saboteur, as well as my current work-in-progress—another WWII spy thriller called FINALE—I try to stick to the historical timeline as much as I can. But history books usually only give us a broad view. They’ll say something like General George Patton moved his Seventh Army from here to there. What the history books don’t mention is the myriad of unknown personal stories that were never recorded during that move. That’s the area in which my books reside.