April 18, 2013

Finest Hour 153, Winter 2011-12

Page 45

Lights of Perverted Science

The Gemini Agenda, a novel by Michael and Patrick McMenamin. Enigma, hardbound, 400 pages, $23.95, member price $19.15.

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By David Freeman

Professor Freeman teacahes History at California State University Fullerton.


Nineteen thirty-two: A string of horrifying murders is occurring across America. The body of each victim is discovered with both eyes surgically removed. Police can make nothing of it, but an unlikely source instigates a newspaper investigation. Winston Churchill, at home in Britain, receives a tip from an informant in Germany which he passes along to his friend, the American press baron William Randolph Hearst. Hearst assigns his ace photojournalist (Churchill’s fictional goddaughter) Mattie McGary to the case and events are set in motion that will lead to a ghastly revelation.

Such is the set-up for Michael and Patrick McMenamin’s third Winston Churchill Thriller. As in the previous books, The De Valera Deception and The Parsifal Pursuit, McGary is joined by her boyfriend Bourke Cockran, Jr. (fictional son and namesake of Churchill’s one-time mentor). Cockran is an American lawyer who has been unsuccessfully fighting against the phony science of Eugenics.

At one time, twenty-six of the United States had Eugenics laws that empowered courts to impose forced sterilization on those thought unsuitable for reproduction. The U.S. Army provided financial support to Eugenics researchers. All of this caught the attention of Germany’s increasingly powerful Nazi Party, just as Adolf Hitler was on the brink of taking office.

Sleuthing by McGary and Cockran determines that all of the murder victims are sets of twins. The intrepid couple find themselves attempting to understand an emerging and complex web of interaction between the U.S. government, international businessmen and the Nazis, which points to a shadowy facility in southern Germanyโ€”where lurks a young doctor named Josef Mengele, later known as the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz/Birkenau.

Churchill has his own reasons for visiting Bavaria. He is researching a biography of his ancestor John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, and wants to visit the battlefield of Blenheim, site of the Duke’s greatest triumph. The journey also provides an opportunity for the British statesman to increase his knowledge of contemporary events in Germany, because a mutual acquaintance has proposed a meeting between Churchill and Hitler.

Hitler famously misses his chance for a face-to-face encounter with his principal antagonist, but Churchill does not miss the opportunity to enjoy a taste of adventure by planning a daring raid on the secret Nazi research facility. Subsequently, Churchill gets to demonstrate his proficiency as a marksman while supporting a dramatic rescue operation that brings together all of the novel’s main characters, including Bobby Sullivan, an IRA assassin personally trained by Michael Collins.

Once more the McMenamins have successfully weaved together history and fantasy in a dramatic thriller, one which forces Americans to confront the ugly truth about their country’s involvement with Eugenics. Once more, though, Churchill is there to confound Hitler’s “perverted science” and “the grisly gang that works his wicked will.”

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